I had to pass along this great column from civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate at Forbes.com.
First, I have to do some self-pimpin’. I tweeted this 5 days ago:
Can we all agree re: Henry Louis Gates arrest, that the real issue is the b.s. crime of “disorderly conduct”?
And not that I was the first and only to think this, but it’s nice to see that the public debate has moved on from the race issue to the issue of police power. This story is a classic case of overreach for some people– they spend their time fighting over the weaker element (unlikely racial profiling) and ignore the more solid case of this being a symptom of a Police State.
Second, and a brief aside, can I commend Forbes for doing something few other MSM magazines do, namely linking to non-Forbes pages? I can? Okay, commended.
To the column.
Silverglate writes:
The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said–assuming, for argument’s sake, the officer’s version of events as fact–could by any stretch of both law and imagination constitute a ground for arrest for “disorderly conduct” (the charge leveled) or any other crime. Whether those same words could be censored on a college campus is a somewhat different–though related–question.
I’m sure Silverglate, who has done work with FIRE, knows how inapt that comparison is. College campuses have become festering hotbeds of censorship. Check FIRE’s site for plenty of stories. In any case, though, this is a well-made point. It’s been astounding to me to hear how many people, many who would say they “love freedom”, say that Gates was correctly arrested because you “can’t just say anything to a police officer.” Forgive me for thinking that if Gates had said equally venomous comments to a partial-birth abortion doctor or a gay minister that these same people would have screamed “FREEDOM OF SPEECH!” at any suggestion of punishing the speaker.
Later in the piece, Silverglate quips that disorderly conduct is the charge given “when a citizen gives lip to a cop.” Exactamundo. Words that would otherwise be shrugged off or ignored are now a criminizable offense if directed toward a man or woman in a uniform with a badge. By my lights, this is the opposite of what should be expected. These people are invested with the authority to detain, physically manhandle, Taser, and even kill, by the State. That awesome power should be accompanied by a legally-enforced meeknes– the idea being that since these people have the protection to act unto death, their force should only be used in the most dire of circumstances. The way it’s currently arranged, the police are like a nuclear-armed country that is allowed to fly off the handle more quickly than a dinky satellite state. The United States has to exercise more diplomatic restraint than Portugal, and justly so– when the US makes a mistake, it’s far worse than a Portugese misstep.
Continuing on, Silverglate writes:
As one of Crowley’s friends told The New York Times: “When he has the uniform on, Jim [Crowley] has an expectation of deference.
I’ve been asked before if I hate cops. I don’t. There are of course some assholes amongst the police forces of our nation, but does that make them unique? I’ve met asshole doctors, students, and tour guides. What I do hate, however, is the power given to policemen by the citizenry. And the above quote, a quote of astounding tone-deafness and entitlement, is one of the reasons why. I don’t think Crowley is especially mean or arrogant for thinking that way. I think most of us, if put into the position of near-total power for 8-12 hours a day, would begin to expect such treatment. Lord Acton wudn’t an idiot.
Later on is maybe my new favorite free-speech quote from a court decision:
Justice William O. Douglas wrote, in an opinion for the high court that reversed the conviction, that the “function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”
A-effin-men.
I’m not averse to discussing the problems of black citizens in this country. In fact, I think it’s a fascinating topic. But this story, while it might disparately affect black men and women, is one that shows a threat to us all. Let’s keep the spotlight on the nastier parts.
There is a serious problem in this country: Police are overly sensitive to insults from those they confront. And one can hardly blame the confronted citizen, especially if the citizen is doing nothing wrong when confronted by official power. This is, after all, a free country, and if “free” means anything meaningful, it means being left alone–especially in one’s own home–when one is not breaking the law.
I’m loathe to fisk many things these days, but this is bringing a rise out of me.
To start off, allow me to profess my love for trains. I love riding them, I love watching them scream by, thousands of tons of freight smoothly whisked across the countryside on top of steel tendrils seemingly too slight to bear such a great weight. When I go to Europe, I love riding from country to country on the rails. Hell, I love Atlas Shrugged. Trains and me, we are an item.
So when I say this, know there is no malice or locomotophobia behind it: trains are simply unfeasible for the vast majority of America.
Reason 1. Europe is far more compact than the United States. The continent is jammed together in a way that the United States, a nation that came of age in the time of interstate highways and commercial flights, will never be. If our land had spent centuries growing through small steps of growth, where the next major urban area was always two-days’ carriage ride from the last, there would be a dramatically different lay-out. As it is, we have vast areas of land between our major cities, distances that, combined with the minimal amount of traffic, make trains prohibitively expensive for their perceived benefits.
I’m feeling that some examples are in order. Let’s try and find an area in the US that is simply begging for the installation of a train. We’ll start with the top 10 largest cities, since they seem to have the largest potential customer base.
- New York City – possible destinations would be D.C., Philadelphia, and Boston. Considering that there is already a trainline that covers the D.C.-NYC-Boston corridor, I don’t see there being a place to install more trains. Also note that the average daily traffic is just under 9000 people, and considering there are tens of millions of people who live in this region, one would be allowed to wager that there isn’t a large market for transport by locomotive.
- California – this includes San Diego, LA, and San Francisco. There is currently a movement underway to build a high-speed train between the cities, and since the California government is swimming in money from their years of fiscal responsibility, the funding and implementation are sure to happen toot sweet. Note that the length of the proposed line, 800 miles, is longer than a train from Madrid to Paris. Like I said: America is an effin’ big country.
- Chicago – If someone can tell me where a train should go for this city, I’d love to hear. St. Louis? Detroit? Dallas? Keep in mind, any place you suggest has to have a cost structure that can make it compete with $69 fares from Southwest Airlines. If you think Americans are going to pick a method of transport that is 5 times longer and more expensive, please cancel your internet for a month and take the money you save to go buy The Armchair Economist. It will save us all a load of headaches and keystrokes.
- Texas – here we’re talking Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. To reiterate an earlier point, it’s a damn big place. Putting a train from Big D to H-Town isn’t going to result in a 45 minute commute. Even a high-speed direct rail will only cross the 260 miles in just under two hours. The flight between the two is 50 minutes to an hour. I know people in Dallas who make the flight to Houston every week for business, and they’re already resentful at the amount of time they spend away from their family. So if the selling point is “it takes twice as long to get home, but you also get to see Temple and Waco!”, I’m going to put my chips down on the “No Effin Way” square.
Reason 2. Trying to sell Americans on the “romance” of trains will be nigh-impossible for a populace that has grown used to the speed of commercial flight. Related to the above reason, but any plan to re-train America needs to account for modern tastes. Once you give people the ability to fly to Chicago from Miami in 2.5 hours, you have to have one hell of a product to persuade them to drop the transit time to 9-12 hours. Ways you can do it? Sell the luxury of train-travel, talk about the nice meals and leisurely pace. Explain that you never lose your luggage. Extol the joys of watching a pastoral scene fly past your window. Let the public weigh those benefits against flying, and you’ll see why airports are always more full than Union Station. When the options are “be in Atlanta at 5 pm and in Vegas by 10 pm” versus “train stations are quaint!”, we’ll see how “train-ready” this land is.
Reason 3. Stop trying to put people on trains and encourage more cars full of grain, fuel, and textiles. People are in a rush, lumber and building supplies not so much. There are few ways more fuel efficient to transport large quantities of goods than by rail. I would get behind a “banging 18-wheelers into railcars” motion. Think of it this way: the cost of building human-friendly cars, human-friendly stations, and human friendly schedules is high. Steel I-beams, however, won’t complain that the soup is cold, their seats are too hard, or that their neighbors are too noisy. You want more trains in this country, that’s the only way you’re going to see ‘em.
Most empty-headed analyses of Trains in America are done by someone who has recently returned from Europe, where they see local metro-trains bussing people about the town and clean passenger trains whisking people from city to city in 45 minutes. It’s nice. I love it. The empty-headed analyses also come from people, however, who haven’t spent much time on our own Federal Interstate Highway system. Drive, as I have, from Colorado to Michigan or from D.C. to Dallas, and the enormity of our nation becomes apparent. So even though it might be nice to sneer about the past “eight years of willful train-neglect”, any amount of time spent looking at a map or looking at a typical business-flyer’s schedule* will show you that it isn’t neglect that’s keeping trains from flourishing, it’s our damned geography.
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*I’ve also left out the fact that in the future nearly all business will be done by tele-commuting, which will obliterate the majority of weekday transportation needs. So we’ll spend billions of dollars and years of inconvenience to install a system that will, in all likelyhood, be obsolete within years of completion. Wait a minute, that sounds like a perfect government-run plan! Of course they’ll do it!
So in my day off I’m going to be heading north, to the land of the Tetons. Why would I be dropping into Wyoming? Some might think fireworks, some might think solitude, some might think I’m expanding out my chain of meth labs to the open spaces, but their wrong, WRONG I tell you. I have my eyes set on the Cheyenne Frontier Days.
Now, I have some clarifying to do: on the surface, there seems to be nothing at all attractive about a day wandering amongst men in cowboy, I’m sorry, “western” apparel, listening to some asinine twanging 80’s style power ballad about I-ROCs and Jesus. I loathe country music. It’s not a coincidence in my mind that the lap-steel and fiddle were the tormenting tools o’ choice at Abu Ghraib. It’s a kind of music that appeals to the huddling crowd of men and women who are skeered of the future and would rather reminisce about the days when, cough, *people* knew their place (if you know what I mean), and we could all sit around and gripe about the real problems in the world, like how grandpa had to sell the farm because he couldn’t afford to fix his tractor. Now we have this damned internet, a Muslim president (who’s not even a citizen! SHOW ME THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE BARRY!), and all the kids listen to rap and move to the cities. Play “Baptism at The County Fair” one more time, boys!
I apologize for the digression. Back to Frontier Days.
So there appears to be nothing of interest for me in old Wyome. Why then am I going? Several reasons, first being that I like the concept of cowboys. I can once again call this land “America” if we create a national program to breed a people that think things cost “two bits”, who like to drink from shot glasses that have been “cleaned” by a bartender’s spit, and refer to their firearms as “peacemakers” or “Ol’ Clementine.” This country doesn’t need a stimulus, it needs more horse-punching.
Secondly, shopping. You can’t call yourself a red-blooded man if looking at this poster ($12!) doesn’t make your wallet magically open and spit out $36 for a 3 pack. One for the office, one for your bathroom, and one to take to the tattoo artists to have directly transcribed onto your chest:
Swear to Jeebus, this is actually called "The Fancy Feather Dance." USA! USA! USA!
So I’m going to shop the hell out of Cheyenne. When you see a sunburned me stumbling down I-25, wearing nothing but my Frontier Days Bootie Shorts, slurping down cold PBR from my Frontier Days Koozie, don’t try to stop me: I’m a man in ecstasy (sold three tents down from the Midway).
Third, I’m praying, just this once, to Western Jesus that I can see an original American badass — a black cowboy. These guys not only had to do some of the hardest labor in our nation’s history, but they had to do it while watching their back in case Racist Bill decided he needed an extra share of the herd this year and why didn’t he just plug a few lead pieces into that brown person over there no one would notice. The stories are incredible. Take Bronco Sam. He decided he could break the largest longhorn in the herd, so he saddled up and proceeded to ride the frantic beast through the streets of Cheyenne. At one point the steer decided to take a detour through a plate glass window, through a convenience store, and out the other side, and Bronco Sam stuck on the beast the whole way. Then, player that he was, Sam came back into town after breaking the steer and dropped a few C-Bills for the shopowner’s troubles. Straight man, that Bronco Sam.
Just try it. Try what? Anything. Just try anything. You'll see.
Fourth: The Challenge Rodeo. The copy is misleading. I read:
The Challenge Rodeo pairs special-needs children with the PRCA rodeo contestants in a modified rodeo performance. Ticket holders for the rodeo on those days can come early and watch this very special side of professional rodeo. Sponsored by The Coca-Cola Foundation & CFD Buckle Club.
and assumed it would be rodeo stars hog-tying ADD-HD kids or a Catch A Greased Polio Kid contest. In actuality it’s a really cool chance for some kids who’ve been dealt tough hands in life to be rodeo stars for a day. Not nearly as entertaining for my diseased sense of humor, but absolutely much more worthwhile and rewarding. It’s times like this that I thank God that I’m not in charge of entertainment for any event. It would end in tears.
Finally, for those who don’t know, I’m actually American Indian. (My peeps’ site is right heeyah). Now I (thankfully) wasn’t raised in the tragically difficult circumstances of the reservation, but I would be lying if I didn’t feel some kind of warm feelings toward American Indian archivists and re-enactors. I imagine its the same for New Englanders with American Revolution buffs, Texans with Alamo historians, and plenty of other people with their ancestries, but my emotion runs to that deeper level beyond nostalgia. Not to gripe, but there’s something to be said for being part of the only people in US history to be “scientifically” quantified by our blood ratios. So allow me a moment of honesty to say that I’m actually going to be interested in the Indian Village at Frontier Days. And you’re damned right, I’m going to grab some of that authentic “Red Man ” cuisine.
In closing, check my Twitter page over the next 24 hours or so. Methinks they won’t have WiFi there, but I’m putting money on them having cell-coverage, so I can always text in tweets and observations. If you haven’t noticed, I spend roughly 200:1 time between Twitter and this page. It’s a moral failing, but it is what it is.
Presented with minimal comment on this July 3.
The idea of David Stern screaming “Chinese Bison Dele” will always make me giggle, I think.
Some Tips For The Kids About Technology from the 80’s and 90’s. Sorry, I Meant To Say “Ancient Times”.
This is awesome.
When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.
Concluding that he’s “relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can’t imagine having to use such basic equipment every day”, Mr. Campbell, amongst other mistakes:
- Takes 3 days to realize there’s another side to the tape (gasp!)
- Hacks his own “shuffle” by pressing down rewind for a random period of time.
- Assumes the “metal/normal” switch was referring to genres rather than cassette material.
There was a similar moment in my life a few years back when my youngest brother, who was about 8 at the time, was amazed by the analog car window, the one where you had to roll the crank by hand to lower or raise the window. He was utterly certain that it was a new invention for cars, an upgrade from the electric window. Technology! Actual physical exertion! Catch it!
Let me fill ya in, kids, with some other insights to pre-You technology:
- The GameBoy Original was small, is small, will always be small, no matter the dimensions or size comparison. When it came out, it blew every 12-20 year old boy’s mind. Here was a screen that you could hold, one that you could mash up close to your face when you sat on the school bus. Before that you were damned to your basement tv, the one your parents discarded when they finally bought their second color television of their life. So even though an original GameBoy roughly weighs 9,450 iPod touches, it’s still small, dammit, and don’t try to tell me otherwise.
- The Konami Code was more than just a snarky reference that got pasted on entrys into The Douchiest Shirts Ever Contest, it was a goddammed Excalibur/koan/security blanket. You ever try and beat Contra without the 30 lives? Im-effin-possible. Ehh, whatever, you kids probably don’t even know what Contra is, probably think it’s something between Sorry! and a Ouija board, two other things you probably don’t remember. Young people, with your vocoders and your smartphones STAY OFF MY BLOG! Rabblerabble just make sure to change my bedpan grumble keep my oxygen tank open please gruffgruffgruff warm milk please zzzzzzzzz.
I have this tattooed on my left ventricle. Gamer 4 Life, my ass: this is there for my future doctor-bot in case it freaks out during life-saving surgery.
- Blowing in holes is where you start. And I mean that in places besides the beaudoir, where blowing in holes happens after Your Attempt At Pleasure That Is Sure To End In Tears But You Already Knew That Would Happen Didn’t You. Nowadays when some computer freezes/crashes/gives you guff, you simply depress the power button for a reset, just wait for the boot-up screen. So when I tell you that whether it be your LaserDisc (translation: proto-CD’s the size of a New York Pizza), your Nintendo, your 3.5-in Floppy Drive, your Nintendo Game, your Game Genie, your Cassettes, giving a short, stiff, blast of air into the crevace in question will yield improved results about 85% of the time, you’re gonna think I’m either drunk or a fan of Pringle’s Lead Paint Chips line. The reality of the situation, however, was for a while there every one who used computers was fundamentally aware that they were still using a machine, something with moving parts that could collect dust and gum up. Air would clean out the place, give it a slight sheen or polish.
It’s an improvement, undoubtedly: face it, if you saw someone blowing on their iPod or Zune, you’d probably tell yourself “Wow, that’s what a Zune looks like”, but then you would say “Who the hell gives an iPod to a low-level primate?” Still, though, in the back of the mind of thousands of 4-bit gamers, there’s a small voice saying “Well it can’t hurt to give it a blow, right?”
- Beepers were never cool. The only people who had them, during that blissfully short time of use, were either arrogant assholes who wanted to flash it on their belt, or workaholics who needed the constant feeling of being needed so much so that they’d wander away from their kids’ soccer games in search of a pay-phone to call their secretary back to get an update on the negotiations of a rival attorney. Like I said, never cool.
-You were the rich kid if you could afford the Discman that was shockproof and if it could be dunked under a faucet. Everyone had Discmans, the question was: did you have the kick-ass Sony that could survive everything from A Suprise Bear Rape to A Post-Thanksgiving Stampede at Wal-Mart, or did you have any knock-off p.o.s. brand, like Coby or Jwin? One said “platinum” and one said “pork rinds”. I was a Coby man, dammit, I wanted to have to carry my cd player with in 0.7 degrees of perfectly flat at all times lest the batteries slip out of place or the disc skips back to the first track. It’s all part of the experience.
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On a side note, writing this reminded me of why I tell people my parents’ age that I feel as distant from them as I do from my 15-year-old brother. I’m 25. So fast, the way this world is moving, so terribly awesomely incredibly fast.
(all the footwork-n-reporting on this stuff done by ReadWriteWeb, which slings primo tech-news with the speed of a Waffle House short order chef slinging cigarette-and-onions hashbrowns. That’s a compliment. Really)
There is a problem in our dearest of nations, readers. Our finest corporations and businesses are under attack, beset on all sides by their employees sullying their employers’ reps with asinine superhero photos, requests for help becoming a mermaid, candid shots of filling up the car for a Sunday drive, girls’ night out pics, and level-toned reactions to changes in our social spheres:
Well, The City of Bozeman, MT is fed up with these damn shenanigans, and has figured out a sure-fire fire-proof proof-positive way to prevent any further embarrassment:
The city of Bozeman, Montana, however, is taking this to a new level by actually asking prospective employees to disclose not just that they have profiles on Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, and YouTube, but by also asking for the usernames and passwords for these profiles.
Bask in the tech–savvyness of Bozeman! Marvel at the Bozeman-ite Ear for Web 2.0! Surely we can agree that this policy is at once completely 100% legally sound and impervious to deceit!
If you think I'm "down with the Myspace", then you sirrah don't know John Morvotron Bozeman!
Now, to all you naysayers, we can answer your questions one at a time.
The writer in me abhors “links” posts. It’s lazy, leeching, and loose. The blog-reader in me, however, loves them so. So, half-apologies…
- A cold-eyed Jack Shafer has some good thoughts on the Western Hagiography of Twitter in Iran.
- On the other hand, this Twitter blowback is grade-A hilarity. My favorite:
- Conor Friedersdorf has a superbly-measured take on the unmeasuredness of talk radio and why it’s damaging to political discourse (whatever that is). I disregard anyone who automatically thinks 99.9% of radio listeners are mouth-breathing Larry The Cable Guys and frightened grandmas. They’re there, of course, but seriously intelligent people still (inexplicably in my mind) listen to Rush, Sean, and Mark Levin.
Michael Savage, though, just has morans for an audience. Idiocy recognizes its own, I suppose.
- Clay Shirky, who I could not write enough praise about in a thousand blogs, has some more 30,000 ft observations on the role of Twitter and social media vis-a-vis politics and authoritarian regimes. More on this later.
- Pettiness defined. That is one insecure Senator which is like WTF?, you command the power of the world’s most powerful economy and military, and one lowly general saying “Ma’am” will cheese you off? Your husband must be the King of the Henpecked.
- World-champion mountain biker busted with 400 lbs (!) of marijuana. I’d like to make a snarky point about how this just proves all cannabis-users are slackers and Cheeto-hounds, but I’m just tired of the ignorance at this point. (H/T: The Sporting Blog)
- A local point of interest, Radley Balko will be socializin’ and drankin’ with followers of his blog at Randolph’s at The Warwick. I’ll be there, in all my bitter anti-drug war glory. Srsly tho, it should be a fun time.
It’s not an Anti-Dustie effort, but it’s still really good.
I don’t agree with every part of Greenwald’s take, but it’s still a thought that needs thinking: every proposal for violence needs to wrestle with the fact that, almost assuredly, innocent people who’d otherwise be an ally will die. Sometimes that’s okay. I don’t think anyone would disagree with an attack on Nazi Germany, even though there were liberal-minded Germans in theater. And I don’t think anyone would condone a nuclear-attack on, say, Chicago, just to eliminate an evil slumlord.
There are miles of gray between those positions, of course, but there should be a record kept for all positions taken by a political pundit: every time one suggests violence against a people/nation, it should be remembered that they wanted innocent people put in the path of death. They should be locked into that position for a length of time, like 5 years. No backsies.
- I love that the NBA has, undoubtedly, a stranglehold on “athletic league that gets technology.” Where else do you get an All-Star like Chris Bosh inviting Rookie-of-the-Year and All-Star Kevin Durant to a game of NBA 2K9 on Xbox Live? This is so Young People Using Their Technology Boxes And Consternating Old People that it made me actually smile out loud.
- I love that the NBA has, undoubtedly, the most underrated personalities of an any US major sports league. This clip from Jimmy Kimmel just kills me:
Where else do you get a major player like Amare Stoudemire making a Grant-Hill-would-totally-do-Denzel joke (sorry to ruin it for those who read it before clicking on the video)? Also, I can’t be alone in detecting the closeness between teammates. Dahntay and Birdman have probably spent more of the past nine months with each other than with their significant others, so when the question is “What kind of fruit would your teammate be?” is offered, these guys nail it. The sense of humor and close-attention required to answer that question is guaranteed between NBA teammates. Maybe baseball or football has the same closeness, but no league has its stars so intertwined that there’s utter certainty that they’ll correctly give an answer, and furthermore, no league displays it so well for the intarwebz crowd.
- I love that no league besides the NBA has players, like Chris Bosh, who will respond to the snarky-plaintive tweet of a Canadian NBA blogger in such quick time…on Twitter. Srsly. Do you expect the same behavior from NFL players, NHL stars, or baseball coaches? My thoughts exactly.
/nba-fan-gushing.
Some more technology-and-politics in Iran stuff. First, a great short made awhile back:
Now, it has to be said: Twitter has rocked the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad like three the hard way. As Manzi put it:
There is a constant arms race between authoritarian governments and the engineering talent of the free world. The Iranian authorities seem to have been adept at mostly shutting down 20th-century technologies such as cell phones; to some extent, even late-20th-century technologies, such as Internet sites. Apparently, they hadn’t thought of Twitter. This has turned out to be an incredible weapon for the protesters. I guess Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can just consider it to be a big bouquet from all of his fans in Silicon Valley. It’s a good day to be part of the technology industry.
Whether it be updates from Iranians on the streets of Tehran, or sympathetic Westerners posting proxy addresses so Iranians can access the internet, it appears that Twitter has become essential to maintaining communication with/between the protestors. There’s also this burgeoning movement to crash Iranian government sites with some DDOSage. Godspeed to them on that, I suppose.
Next, if you have a few minutes, I highly recommend popping on over to Pic Fog and watching this live stream of Twitpic-ing for “iranelection”. WARNING: some graphic images of blood and violence. But don’t let that deter you: it’s a bizarre-o stream of photos that range from the inspiring to the angering. I challenge someone to look at the collection of images and remain neutral. My favorite?
A beautiful woman who proudly wears green while showing her face to photographers (note the young man behind her covering his face). She’s suffered for her stances. This kind of defiance is much more difficult to quash.
- Other technology: Mir Hussein Moussavi’s using Facebook to stay in touch with supporters, giving updates, and posting some more photos. The number of protestors and supporters is staggering:
It’s not all peaceful, however. Here, some Basiji thug fires upon the crowd. The Basiji, for those who don’t know, are the storm-troopers of the mullahs. They’re citizen enforcers of the extreme-Shia values of the Ayatollah.
It puts the courage of these protesters into perspective.
And now, some good analysis.
- Hitchens gets his Sneering Indignation on, refusing to call the vote-rigging an election. I’ll try to do the same.
- Joshua Tucker, who had some great analysis of Twitter and Web 2.0’s place in revolutions and political change, isn’t optimistic that the Iranians can effect real change. Bottom line? He thinks that the mullahs have learned their lessons from the failed repressions of former Soviet states.
However, over the past three days, it has become apparent that Tehran is not turning into Kiev. While there are numerous important differences between Iran and the post-communist colored-revolution countries (Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and possibly Kyrgyzstan)–with the most notable being that ultimate executive power in Iran lies with the Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is not popularly elected–it does seem to me that the Iranian authorities may have learned a number of specific lessons from their less fortunate post-communist counterparts.
I’d argue that the ham-handed tactics of the mullahs and Ahmadinejad’s thugs prove that they aren’t as competent as Tucker alleges, but his thoughts are worth reading.
- Michael Totten has a great post up with thoughts. He also includes a passage from Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs reflecting on when a populace learns to stand up to the government. Allow me to heartily blurb as well?
But this time everything turns out differently. The policeman shouts, but the man doesn’t run. He just stands there, looking at the policeman. It’s a cautious look, still tinged with fear, but at the same time tough and insolent. So that’s the way it is! The man on the edge of the crowd is looking insolently at uniformed authority. He doesn’t budge. He glances around and sees and sees the same look on other faces. Like his, their faces are watchful, still a bit fearful, but already firm and unrelenting. Nobody runs though the policeman has gone on shouting; at last he stops. There is a moment of silence.
We don’t know whether the policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd already realize what has happened. The man has stopped being afraid – and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution. Here it starts. Until now, whenever these two men approached each other, a third figure instantly intervened between them. That third figure was fear. Fear was the policeman’s ally and the man in the crowd’s foe. Fear interposed its rules and decided everything.
Now the two men find themselves alone, facing each other, and fear has disappeared into thin air. Until now their relationship was charged with emotion, a mixture of aggression, scorn, rage, terror. But now that fear has retreated, this perverse, hateful union has suddnely broken up; something has been extinguished. The two men have now grown mutually indifferent, useless to each other; they can now go their own ways.
Accordingly, the policeman turns around and begins to walk heavily back toward his post, while the man on the edge of the crowd stands there looking at his vanishing enemy.
I read that, and in my mind I see the black-eyed woman above.
As always, stay informed with Andrew Sullivan (who deserves some form of a Web Pulitzer for his work) and the National Iranian American Council’s liveblogging.
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And as a rant-aside: this piece in Politico about the “hunks of Washington” (Peter Orszag and Chuck Todd? Gawd.) is everything I hate about our nation’s capital. People half-a-world away are dying for freedom in one of the decade’s biggest stories, and the incestuous world of DC deems it fit to put out some caddy gossip about some bureaucratic power pimps. Washington is a festering, sucking, wound on our nation, and the sooner its made irrelevant, the better.
Don’t be the one American who just clicked on over to their Facebook Newsfeed. Know what is happening.
A voice against a state.
Photo from mousavi1388’s superb collection of in-the-midst action albums.
There are so many places on the web to stay in touch with the latest in Iran. I’m going to post stuff up here, not as an attempt to drive traffic, but in order to have a record of it for myself to reference in the future.
Start here. Note the Iranian youth shouting, in English: “We Want Freedom.”
Here’s some video from the streets of Iran, taken by Iranian citizens (since most foreign press is being detained/arrested/blocked from recording the turmoil).
For any of you who’ve read about revolutions against the Soviet Union, or seen any of the footage from the Prague Spring, tell me any of this doesn’t look historical. This is the kind of activity that will be analyzed and put in the annals of not only Iranian history, but history of the region.
Here’s more protests:
And another:
The ayatollahs are doing their best (worst?) to stifle communication amongst Iranians and with the rest of the world. They’ve shut down text messaging and YouTube. TV is jammed to block most outside channels. Apparently Twitter is still working at the moment, however.
These aren’t a bunch of malcontents who want more authoritarian power or greater Islamism, many of the people are very similar to the “standard” Westerner: they seek modernization, freedom, and honesty. Here are some facing off against the riot squads:
This will be a test of what everyone in the “technology is changing politics” camp” (I include myself with that) has been saying: technology is empowering more individuals to stand up to the authorities above them. Furthermore, the sentinel force of open-sourcers and hackers can always find ways to thwart government repression. At least that’s what I hope is happening. We’ll soon see, I suppose.
Full disclosure: I’ve made some wonderful Iranian friends over the past few years. To a man and woman they are earnest and warm individuals. It’s a tragedy that so many Americans group all of Iran together, when I’m utterly confident that the populace of Iran has far more in common with the American people than they have in differences. So when I say that Iranians deserve a modern and liberal government, one far different from the ayatollahs, I will freely admit that I’m biased. Proud of it.
But please, don’t pay attention unless you really feel like it. It’s not that important.
Go Ahead, Please Don't Pay Attention
(From the essential Tehran Bureau.)
The State Of Comedy is weak. To be fair: when people like Dane Cook, Jeff Dunham, and Larry The Cable Guy are practically running the stand-up circuit, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop is the best-selling comedy movie of 2009, this is not a bold statement. To draw a parallel, the professional world of comedy is currently in its Poison-Warrant-Skid Row stage of development: bloated and coasting by on soft material that is used to drive the idiotic masses to the ticket line. Again, this is not a mindblowing idea. Who knows if there’s a change on the way? Is there a Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Mort Sahl, Eddie Murphy, or Jerry Seinfeld in the future, to shake up how the entertainment industry produces and packages comedy? Would any of those guys become comedians now?
This is a lot of navel-gazing and philosophizing for reviewing a movie that has effeminate Asian mobsters, roofie-laced Jaeger shots, and Heather Graham breastfeeding. But The Hangover at once reminds you of how ossified bromantic comedies have become and also points towards a way out from the same old pablum.
This wouldn’t be a fair review if I didn’t say that I enjoyed Hangover. Ed Helms is solid, Bradley Cooper and Justin Bartha are yeomen, and the more I can see Ken Jeong, the better. The script was pleasantly different from the standard trip-to-Vegas fare, a proprietary blend of Memento, Three Men and a Baby, and most everything Vince Vaughan is in.
Zach Galifianakis is the trouble. To start off and to save space, I’ll explain thusly: I love, and have loved, Zach’s stand-up performances for years. I’m definitely on the Early Adopter Wagon for him, going back to “Late World With Zach” on VH1. I’ve seen The Comedians of Comedy at least 25 times. He’s as close as my generation will have to an Andy Kaufman or a Steve Martin. He has comedy bits that come within whiskers-length of the sublime. So, to review: CS Stieber == Big Time Zach Galifianakis Stand-up Fan.
And, I loved him in The Hangover. So where’s the trouble? Allow me to try to put my finger on it. Like when a hot girl makes other girls homely by simply walking into the room, when ZachG*, in all his quirky obtuseness, shows up on a mainstream filmreel, he makes the rest of the project appear Dane Cook-ish and Jeff Dunham-esque. For example, there are dozens of little moments throughout the movie where Zach is even clearly poking fun at his role and at the standard “guy’s comedy” format. He walks behind Phil (Bradley Cooper), shouting “Gosh darn!” and “Shoot!” as a clean alternative to Phil’s own profane ramblings. He intentionally hops into a scene where he’s supposed to be in another location, and they kept his “blooper” in the film. Clearly, Galifianakis is aware of what kind of movie he’s in and yet he can’t help being humorously subversive. All credit to the producers for allowing this truly different actor to be truly different.
Todd Phillips, the director, does a solid job as always. I don’t know if when he makes his movies he agonizes over every frame of film or if he’s on cruise control. I could see him trying his hardest to make The Funniest Thing Ever, but I could also see him just mailing in A Meh Effort. This movie fits right in with Old School, Starsky & Hutch, and Road Trip. I’m not sure what that says about Phillips, the fact that he makes above-average-but-not-spectacular fare seem effortless, but this is another piece of evidence pointing towards that unknown conclusion.
But Phillips ability to churn out seemingly standardized material just accentuates the strangeness of casting ZachG. Zach Galifianakis presents a unique position for an actor: he is going to be the breakaway star of The Hangover, and yet I am reasonably certain that he would never, ever, go to see The Hangover of his own volition. Movies with people being Tasered on the balls, girls having “nice racks”, and full screenshots of flabby octogenarian ass aren’t the fare of a guy who shoots a Kanye West video with Will Oldham. I wish all the success to Zach, but I hope I’m wrong when I say that his performance in this movie felt like they needed to import some High-Quality Quirk to the film, so they grabbed the best available. It felt less like the beginning of a revolution in comedy and more like a reminder of what Mainstream Humor is not.
I’m going to resist the easy image of this review being a hangover from The Hangover, because I don’t think it works. With a hangover, you sit and grumble you’re way through a morning or early afternoon, remembering the fun you had. The hangover sucks, but it won’t dissuade you from future partying. In the movie form, while the fun is still there, the morning afterwards you hope to never have a night like that again.
In other words, while I think The Hangover is genuinely funny at points, I think I’ll enjoy this movie more if I can know that Zach Galifianakis never again appears in anything like it.
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*Pronounced like the auteur director of “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and “We Are Marshall”.
Mr. Shoals has a point here at The Baseline.
I really hate the Lakers. Really, really, really hate them. While watching the game last night I explained to my roommate, originally from Southern California, why Los Angeles, as a city, is incapable of having good sports fans. It was a long and winding kvetch at the entire SoCal region, and I don’t think he agreed, for good reason: it was a shoddy argument based on emotions that are nearly tribalistic in their zeal. But in the cold light of day, I think there’s something still there: the city of Los Angeles is so consumed with trends and popularity and appearance that I don’t think there’s the ability to “Love My Losers” that I find appealing in followings for teams like the NY Mets, Purdue football, or anything Cleveland. Yes, in a metro area of 10+ million people there will undoubtedly be a few hundred thousand do-or-die fans, but that just means that the Lakers have a mid-market “true following” dressed in a mega-market body.
In any case, I often make the mistake of projecting fan bases onto a team’s behavior. I see a bunch of mercurial fans with no grounding, and I automatically think the team a wayward bunch that lacks a centralizing team ethic. But the way the Lakers played last night was impressive. My Laker-Hatred isn’t any less (personally, I don’t see how any Laker beside Kobe could proudly accept their 2009 championship ring. They were passengers on the trip at best, deadweight at worst), but I have to admit, they were on it last night. We witnessed, for 48 minutes, a team that took the tone of the leader. They seemed angry. They played aggressively. I doubt they can play this way every game of this series (they haven’t done it yet), but does that matter? If they have the ability to do it, to kill effectively, doesn’t that make them top dog?
Kobe’s clearly made the team aware that he’s not willing to lose another NBA Finals. The rest of the team may be flawed and unable to meet his demands every night, but that doesn’t mean they can’t win it or don’t deserve to win it all. Orlando will surely play better in future games (that shooting last night was near-outlier abyssmal), but I’m pretty certain that they can’t do what they did last series: weather a star’s outburst then slowly beat-up his peripheral teammates. As mentally soft as I view Lamar Odoms, he’s not a Big Z, Wally, or Mo Williams.
Kobe dragged the Lakers this far, and now I’m starting to detect that they’re finally learning to pick up their small part of the load.
This blog is already veering more towards the political/public policy focus than I initially intended. I’ll effort to move it other places. In the mean time…
Meet The Carrotmob.
I love this idea. The gist of it, for those of you too lazy to click on ANYTHING I link or embed in the pages (I know you’re out there), is this: using the best of the web’s “flash mob” stylings to help businesses become more environmentally clean/energy efficient. Basically, a group of people, probably organized online, agree to all spend some money at a specific business that promises to spend a chunk of that flash mob’s income to improve its environmental impact. The Carrotmob invades the agreed-upon biz, makes it rain on them (so to speak), and they improve the buildings insulation, install solar panels, buy wind-powered energy, what have you. As their About page says, Carrotmob works because:
Carrotmob can put rewards in place that will make environmental responsibility the most profitable choice. Companies will do what we want, not because of negative pressure, or morality, or a boycott, or a petition…there are enough sticks out there. We need a big juicy carrot. They will do what we say because they won’t be able to resist the profits.
There have already been several successful Carrotmob campaigns in places like San Francisco, New York City, and London. Now some guys are trying to start one up for my area, the Denver/Boulder metro region.
Now, I know most greenies will volunteer at something just because it has the word green in the name*, so I imagine they’ll be on board anyway. Here’s my pitch to the libertarian-types among you: The idea of Carrotmob is essential to any liberty-minded anti-government vision of the future. We can’t just expect people to embrace voluntary action because we say it works. They have to see that it works. Get involved now, show the world that free-market alternatives can improve the world, and I guarantee that we can use these same tools in the future for campaigns to do things like: reduce federal involvment in education, offer better free-market alternatives to government health care, or offer better support than government-subsidized welfare.
We simply cannot expect the world to embrace more liberty-styled policy if they suspect that we’re just a bunch of selfish jerks who want all poor people to expire. I don’t know about you, but I’m decidedly anti-government because I think The State’s efforts impede the success of everybody, not just my life. The Carrotmob is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate this.
So, even if you’re not crazy about the Green movement but you consider yourself more freedom-minded and libertarian, get involved. This is a weapon in the arsenal to slay Leviathan. If you’re a dedicated environmentalist who’s unsure that the free-market and no government regulation can really help clean the earth, get involved. You’ll see a new thrilling way to encourage positive behavior. And if you’re in the Denver-area, go here to see what you can do. It will be a group effort, and I’m looking forward to contributing my part.
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*I don’t consider myself “green” in the “anti-progress, stop raping Mother Gaia” sense of the term. I’m “green” in the “greener alternatives are waaaay more technologically cool, and we can make sure that things like electric-powered jet packs, nuclear lawnmowers, and lower-usage HD holograph decks will be on the way!” sense.
I can dream, can’t I?
