Discourse.net

It's Warm Here! It's Cool Here!

The weather today was almost perfect. A tiny bit more humid than I’d like, but clear and not too warm. It felt like a perfect late spring day in New England. Only it’s December and they are having snow storms up there.

It’s exam season, but the students on campus seemed really relaxed. I walked around the lake (yes, we have a little lake) and saw undergraduates lolling about, a group singing along with a guitarist, others strolling hand-in-hand or skating, it was idyllic. Even in the law school courtyard, the people taking study breaks…sometimes quite long study breaks…looked fairly happy (ok, it’s early in exam season). It could be that yesterday’s free massage service, (complete with special chair, massage therapist and assistant) for stressed students (3-7pm, long wait times due to popularity) organized by the law school student government had some positive effects.

Given the perfect weather, it was no surprise to read that South Beach—a twenty minute drive away, albeit one I hardly ever make unless I have out of town visitors—is “in” again: Journeys: South Beach: From Hot to Cold, Back to Hot Again.

FOR the past few years, the word has gone out among the fashionable set: South Beach is so over. The litany of complaints piled up as this high-profile strip of Miami Beach seemingly fell victim to its own success. The place was too crowded. The traffic impossible. The hotel service inept. Ocean Drive now a fraternity-house nightmare of sports bars, fuzzy navels and hot body contests—a “South Street Seaport for tourists,” in the words of Brett Sokol, a columnist for New Times, a Miami weekly.

And thus the hip crowd moved on in search of the new South Beach. But what were the alternatives? Rio? It’s where the beautiful people are flocking, to be sure, but not for a weekend getaway. St. Bart’s? No direct flights and prohibitively expensive once you get there. Jamaica? You’re chained to your resort because of local crime and the lack of good restaurants. Puerto Rico? Fine for one visit to the Water Club, but that’s it. The much-touted Fort Lauderdale? You’ve got to be kidding.

So, like swallows to Capistrano, the hipsters are returning to South Beach. And greeting them are signs that South Beach’s glory days are indeed far from over, that the “new South Beach” may, in fact, be South Beach itself.

Course what they don’t know is that we too are in for a cold spell—they say it could get down to the mid-fourties tomorrow night! Which is actually good because if I don’t run the heater at least once a year it gets real smelly.

Who Supports George Bush? Not Disabled Veterans

Part of the mystery of current politics is why other than (1) rich people getting tax cuts, (2) people for whom even small shifts in anti-abortion policies are everything, (3) those for whom larger shifts in subsidies to mainstream religion are worthwhile, and (4) corporate welfare recipients, there’s anyone left who supports Bush.

As Matthew Yglesias notes there’s something real mysterious about the current apparent political stasis in the face of Bush’s abandonment of most traditional Republican policies.

But I’m beginning to doubt the stasis thesis. Could it be that the national polls are wrong and there’s a giant subterranean shift going on? Consider the latest Miami Herald poll — high headline numbers for Bush but low ‘would vote for’ numbers. Plus, when viewed up close, traditionally GOP groups now contain elements quite hostile to Bush. See for example this striking Letter from an Army vet posted at, of all places, Salon.com.

Note to self: do not become hopeful. This leads to pain.

Meaningless Personality Quizzes, Part 4

I’m only for meaningless online personality quizzes, and only if they are funny or have a legal slant.

I don’t intend to take part in the blog-fest of situating oneself on what seems to me to be an arbitrary and misleading (and falsely two-dimensional) left-right diagonal axis. I think it’s pretty much meaningless, because the questions on that quiz are both too limited and too Procrustean (making one’s answers too arbitrary). I’m staying out of this because people seem to think it has meaning. And it’s not funny.

Here’s a suitably meaningless quiz that’s both legal and funny, spotted by the Invisible Adjunct: Which Founding Father Are You?

Have to say that while the carpal tunnel bit is spot on, I’d dispute the rest of it….

M$ To Demand Royalties on Pre-Formatted Media

Spotted via Dan Gillmore (“As a colleague said when he sent this link out in an e-mail, he had to double check the date of this posting to make sure it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.”): Digital Photography Review reports on Microsoft’s FAT charges:

Microsoft will soon be charging manufacturers of flash memory card devices and those which use them $0.25 per unit or up to $250,000 to use the FAT filesystem. For those who are unaware the FAT file system was developed by Microsoft back in 1976 and has become the standard file system for all digital still cameras. Microsoft owns patents to the FAT File System but for many years hasn’t even hinted that it may one day decide to charge for it. These new licenses appear to come into effect immediately and specifically make mention of ‘compact flash memory cards’ and ‘portable digital still cameras’.

Patents, unlike copyrights, are only for a limited time. Even so, there’s something unsavory about creating a de facto industry standard, never once suggesting you might charge for the use of it, sitting back and watching everyone adopt it, then sending out bills. I don’t know any patent law, but there ought to be some sort of equitable limit on this for not just sleeping on your rights, but actively allowing the world to think a standard is in the public domain.

Orcinus Takes On the Modern Brownshirts

David Neiwert (aka Orcinus), has some very interesting and disturbing things to say about the sad and vicious state of political discourse. Start with his The Political and the Personal, then read his summary of the many reactions. The purpose of this essay isn’t to agree or disagree, so much as muse aloud in his wake.

I don’t personally have a formed view as to the psychology of either the modern brownshirts or of their fellow travelers. As Sinclair Lewis brilliantly explored in his vastly under-appreciated novel It Can’t Happen Here, many of the people who go along with brownshirts do so out of simple opportunism. Which is why the Republican party’s actions that seek to entrench their political victories economically by taxing Democratic-voting districts and transferring money to Republican-voting ones is for me as least as worrying and cynical as anything they say. Similarly, the strategy of imposing today’s costs on tomorrow’s citizens (huge deficits that are not spent on investments likely to repay their costs) presents a serious problem; were there to be a serious economic repercussion — like OPEC going off the dollar, or world markets choosing to hold more Euros and sending back a chunk of the dollar overhang, then we’d see the true cost of this fecklessness.

I am not quite as persuaded as Orcinus that today’s political rhetoric is that much worse than what I recall from the early 70s—or even that much more respectable than invective was then. Seems to me that I remember Nixon, Agnew, and a bunch of other politicians and commentators were fairly vicious towards Vietnam War protestors. And some people acted out then too. It was bad then, it’s bad now, but what seems worse today isn’t the rhetoric so much as what it covers up or distracts from.

One thing that is different today is that structural features of the media tend to favor the brownshirts’ fellow travelers (few of the brownshirts themselves are rich enough to own media — they are the guests). I do think that the impact of what is sometimes called the Mighty Wurlitzer - the vast echo-chamber of the right-wing propaganda machine - remains under appreciated. (The appropriation of the term Might Wurlitzer for this is somewhat unfortunate, as it originally denoted a CIA-funded plot to hire journalists and salt their work. There is absolutely no evidence that I’m aware of suggesting that the modern equivalent of the five-minute hate campaign is funded or directed by a government agency.) Whether the modern, private, propaganda machine is self-organized, or more centrally funded and directed, is less important than the legal regime that protects and enables it and which it in turn reinforces: media concentration, abandonment of requirements that holders of valuable monopolies on public airwaves make an attempt at balance, and a reality (with many causes) in which Clinton was savaged even worse than he deserved, and candidates like Bush and Schwarzenegger can say blatantly false things and only the blogs seem to care.

If radio and TV networks and cable were really after ratings, wouldn’t they direct slightly more than half of their political programming to the majority who voted for Gore (not to mention the Naderites)? Is the Republican demographic so much more valuable — or more willing to watch TV and listen to AM radio? — than the Democratic one?

Another worrying difference is the openness with which government power is deployed to stifle dissent. The Nixon folk did much of their worst in secret. We have no idea what the current lot are up to in secret—it’s not pleasant to think—but what is being done in the open is quite bad enough, from coralling protestors in Newspeaked ‘Free Speech Zones’ where no one can see them, to the Constitution-free zone in Guantánamo, to the rights-free zone in the Navy Brig, all these are done right there for all to see. There is no shame, just triumphalism in the exercise of power.

There’s a lot of ruin in a nation, and we can surely weather all this. But it would be easier if it would stop already. Or at least by next November.