Zephyr Dear

During the summer I traveled to the Monostori Fortress near Komárom, Hungary to attend IslandCQ 2013 “Crisis! Re/Constructing Europe.” This text is for the IslandCQ 2013 publication. Rather than simply transcribing my presentation, I have created this text to cover some of things we talked about, and to expand upon them and take the topic further. This text is a remix and extension of three previous texts, two from my blog, and one co-written with Baruch Gottlieb.

Remixing and forking both software and text is an approach I have used for years, and indeed most of my texts contain fragments of other texts, some of which I have written myself, some co-written with others. I inherited this technique from the long history of radical art, from practitioners of cut-up, like Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, to Dada and The Situationists International, and into my own generation with the Neoist Network.

The Internet and free software, to me, were a natural extension of my already existing support of free communications and anti-copyright. When I encountered the Internet for the first time I immediately embraced it, its distributed architecture, its capacity for allowing free speech, and perhaps most significantly, its culture of sharing. The Internet embodied the social relations to match my political and artistic convictions.

However, when I encountered the Internet, though I didn’t know it, it was already dying. It was clear to me that there were challenges, to be sure, but I didn’t yet realize how bad the prognosis was. To me, my fight to save the Internet was against the cencorius desires of other users and the timidity of the small companies providing internet services. This was a fight that seemed winnable. However, what I didn’t know at the time, was that the real fight was against Capitalism, and as such, the inevitable end of the Internet was already evident.

A good example of my early participation is a text I posted on Usenet, it was republished on Wired Magazine’s HotWired site, which claimed to be the world’s first commercial web magazine. In it, I argue that sysadmins working for internet service providers should focus on keeping their servers running, and sanction users that are abusing system resources, but not interfere with content, because if they did so, if they assumed the role of online censor, they would jeopardise the spirit of the Net, and also jeopardise the viability of their own service.

In some way I was right, assuming the Net worked the way we thought it worked, worked the way that John Perry Barlow thought when he wrote “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” or the way John Gilmore thought when he wrote “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” or the way Richard Barbrook thought when he wrote “Within the Net, people are developing the most advanced form of collective labour: work-as-gift.”

Unfortunately, I wrote my article in September. The 790th day of September, 1993, to be exact. What would have been October 31st, 1995 on the pre-September calendar.

The Jargon File defines “The September that never ends” as “All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers’ capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups.”

Once the internet was available to the general public, outside of the research/education/NGO world that had inhabited it before September, the large numbers of users arriving on the untamed shores of early cyberspace “nearly overwhelmed the old-timers’ capacity to acculturate them.” The Jargon File mentions “netiquette,” a quaint term from the innocent times of net.culture, yet netiquette was not simply a way of fitting in, it wasn’t like table manners at an exclusive dinner party. The cultural context of that Internet that made acculturation necessary was its relative openness and lack of stratification.

Netiquette was required, because the network had relatively little constraints built into it, the constraints needed to be cultural for the system to work. There was much more to this culture than teaching new users how to not abuse resources or make a “general nuisance of themselves.” Netiquette was not so much about online manners, it was rather about how to share. Starting from the shared network resources, sharing was the core of the culture, which not only embraced free software and promoted free communications, but generally resented barriers to free exchange, including barriers required to protect property rights and any business models based on controlling information flow.

As dramatic as the influx of new users was to the “old-timers” net.culture, the influx of capital investment and it’s conflicting property interests quickly emerged as an existential threat to the basis of the culture. net.culture required a shared internet, where the network itself and most of the information on it was held in common. Capital required control, constraints and defined property in order to earn returns on investment. Lines in the sand were drawn, the primitive communism of the pre-September Internet was over. The Eternal September began, and along with it, the stratification of the Internet began.

Rather than embracing the free, open platforms where net.culture was born, like Usenet, email, IRC, etc, Capital embraced the Web. Not as the interlinked, hypermedia, world-wide-distributed publishing platform it was intended to be, but as a client-server private communications platform where users’ interactions were mediated by the platforms’ operators. The flowering of “Web 2.0″ was Capital’s re-engineering of the web into an internet accessible version of the online services they were building all along, such as the very platforms whose mass user bases were the influx that started the Eternal September. CompuServ and AOL most notable among them.

The Eternal September started when these Online Services allowed their users to access Internet services such as Usenet and email. Web 2.0 replaced Usenet and email with social platforms embedded in private, centralized web-based services that look and work very much like the old Online Services.

Scratch-off the Facebook logo, and you’ll find the CompuServ logo underneath.

The Internet is no longer an open free-for-all where old-timers acculturate new-comers into a community of co-operation and sharing. It is a stratified place where the culture of sharing and co-operation has been destroyed by the terms of service of online platforms and by copyright lobbies pushing for greater and greater restrictions and by governments that create legislation to protect the interests of property and “security” against the interests of sharing.

The culture of co-operation and sharing has been replaced by a culture of surveillance and control.

Much later that September, the 6,820th day of September, 1993, to be exact, I gave a talk with Jacob Appelbaum at the 6th annual Re:publica conference in Berlin. In part, I responded to the earlier presentation by Eben Moglen, the brilliant and tireless legal council of the Free Sofare Foundation and founder of the FreedomBox Foundation, who gave a characteristically excellent speech. However, in it was something that just couldn’t be right.

Moglen claimed that Facebook’s days as a dominant platform are numbered, because we will soon have decentralized social platforms, based on projects such as FreedomBox, users will operate collective social platforms based on their own hardware, retain control of their own data, etc. The trajectory that Moglen is using has centralized social media as the starting point and distributed social media as the place we are moving toward. But in actual fact, this transformation had already occured very long ago.

During the twilight of the CompuServ era, both personal and commercial users migrated en masse to the Internet. For instance, in a letter to their customers that is still available online the software company BASIS international, “The Big Little Software Company,” writes: “BASIS plans to move completely off CompuServe (CSi) and onto the Internet. This is a logical consequence of the many changes that have taken place in the online world over the past few years.”

In their letter, BASIS spells out a lot of these changes: “While our CSi presence has served the company well in the past, its pay-to-access structure is increasingly harder to justify with the Internet providing almost limitless content at a negligible incremental cost. People are moving away from CSi in significant numbers, making it a less effective platform from which to address our current and future customers. We believe that moving our existing support infrastructure from CSi to the Internet will give us better access to our customers and our customers better access to us.”

It goes on to explain how it will now use open platforms like email, Usenet and IRC instead of CompuServ’s proprietary and centralised applications. This letter was published around the same time HotWired reposted my Usenet article.

Contrary to Moglen’s trajectory of social media, the fact is that we already had distributed social media, we already abandoned the centrally controlled platforms such as CompuServ and AOL, and moved to the Internet, and despite this, our decentralized platforms have since been replaced, once again, with centralized social media. Why? Because Capitalism.

The Internet is a distributed social media platform. The classic internet platforms that existed before the commercialization of the web provided all the features of modern social media monopolies. Platforms like Usenet, email, IRC and finger allowed us to do everything we do now with Facebook and friends. We could post status updates, share pictures, send messages, etc. Yet, these platforms have been more or less abandoned. So the question we need to address is not so much how we can invent a distributed social platform, but how and why we started from a fully distributed social platform and replaced it with centralized social media monopolies.

The answer is quite simple. The early internet was not significantly capitalist funded. The change in application topology came along with commercialization, and this change is a consequence of the business models required by capitalist investors to capture profit. The business model of social media platforms is surveillance and behavioral control. The internet’s original protocols and architecture made surveillance and behavioral control more difficult. Once capital became the dominant source of financing it directed investment toward centralized platforms, which are better at providing such surveillance and control, the original platforms were starved of financing. The centralized platforms grew and the decentralized platforms submerged beneath the rising tides of the capitalist web.

This is nothing new. This was the same business model that capital devised for media in general, such as network television. The customer of network television is not the viewer, rather the viewer is the product, the “audience commodity.” The real customers are the advertisers and lobby groups wanting to control the audience.

Network Television didn’t provide the surveillance part, so advertisers needed to employ market research and ratings firms such as Nielson for that bit. This was a major advantage of social media. Richer data from better surveillance allowed for more effective behavioral control than ever before, using tracking, targeting, machine learning, behavioral retargeting, among many techniques made possible by the deep pool of data companies like Facebook and Google have available.

This is not a choice that capitalists made, this is the only way that profit-driven organizations can provide a public good like a communication platform. Capitalist investors must capture profit or lose their capital. If their platforms can not capture profit, they vanish. The obstacle to decentralized social media is not that it has not been invented, but the profit-motive itself. Thus to reverse this trajectory back towards decentralization, requires not so much technical initiative, but political struggle.

So long as we maintain the social choice to provision our communication systems according to the profit motive, we will only get communications platforms that allow for the capture of profit. Free, open systems, that neither surveil, nor control, nor exclude, will not be funded, as they do not provide the mechanisms required to capture profit. These platforms are financed for the purpose of watching people and pushing them to behave in ways that benefit the operators of the platform and their real customers, the advertisers, and the industrial and political lobbies. The platforms exists to shape society according to the interests of these advertisers and lobbies.

Platforms like Facebook are worth billions precisely because of their capacity for surveillance and control.

Like the struggle for other public goods, like education, child care, and health care, free communication platforms for the masses can only come from collective political struggle to achieve such platforms.

This is a political struggle, not a technical one.

NSA whistleblower William Binney warns that the agency collects so much useless information that it can't process it effectively. The Snowden leaks about the MUSCULAR surveillance program (tapping the fiber links connecting up the data-centers used by Internet giants like Google and Yahoo) corroborate Binney's view: in 2013, NSA analysts asked to be allowed to collect less data through MUSCULAR, because the "relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection."

"What they are doing is making themselves dysfunctional by taking all this data," Mr. Binney said at a privacy conference here. The agency is drowning in useless data, which harms its ability to conduct legitimate surveillance, claims Mr. Binney, who rose to the civilian equivalent of a general during more than 30 years at the NSA before retiring in 2001. Analysts are swamped with so much information that they can't do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse...

In a statement through his lawyer, Mr. Snowden says: "When your working process every morning starts with poking around a haystack of seven billion innocent lives, you're going to miss things." He adds: "We're blinding people with data we don't need."

NSA Struggles to Make Sense of Flood of Surveillance Data [Julia Angwin/WSJ]

(via /.)

(Image: Battersea Riverside Sign, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from wetwebwork's photostream)

U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley has ruled that one of the NSA’s mass metadata collection programs is lawful. On p.25 of the ruling itself, there’s a nice Appalling Vista moment:

Regarding the statutory arguments, there is another level of absurdity in this case. The ACLU would never have learned about the section 215 order authorizing collection of telephony metadata related to its telephone numbers but for the unauthorized disclosures by Edward Snowden. Congress did not intend that targets of section 215 orders would ever learn of them. And the statutory scheme also makes clear that Congress intended to preclude suits by targets even if they discovered section 215 orders implicating them. It cannot possibly be that lawbreaking conduct by a government contractor that reveals state secrets—including the means and methods of intelligence gathering—could frustrate Congress’s intent. To hold otherwise would spawn mischief: recipients of orders would be subject to section 215’s secrecy protocol confining challenges to the FISC, while targets could sue in any federal district court. A target’s awareness of section 215 orders does not alter the Congressional calculus. The ACLU’s statutory claim must therefore be dismissed.

Of course this specific claim, this particular ruling, and this one case are all located in a much broader legal and political crisis. But the logic is striking all the same. “To hold otherwise would spawn mischief”, indeed.

Here’s a piece by me from earlier this year on the power of metadata.

In his letters and also in Lost Tales/Unfinished Tales/Etc., Tolkien connects the crown of Numenor historically with the crown of Egypt. This was inspired by Plato’s idea that Egypt, etc. were founded as colonies of Atlantis. (This is likely why the Numenorean language has semitic roots). Tolkien explicitly made Numenor his version of Atlantis, and it’s no coincidence that the kingdom of Gondor roughly corresponds geographically with a Mediterranean/North African colony. Given the thousands of years involved, Gondor had to have been multiracial by the time of Lord of the Rings, but Aragorn, being of a direct line of Numenoreans and all but explicitly stated to be the ancestor of Egyptian royalty, would be what we would call Middle Eastern.

What’s fun is if we go further back, even the Numenoreans are multiracial in origin, comprising at least three distinct races of human (the Edain), none of whom were intended to directly correlate with or represent Anglo-Saxons or other groups of people historically associated with Northern Europe. Their adventures took place on a continent that sank and has no geographic analogue in the real world (in fact, they all originated somewhere “far East” just a few centuries prior). And, like I said before, they are collectively meant to be the ancestors of what would become essentially Egyptians and, possibly, all Middle Easterners. It’s actually one of the very few times where we can connect an ethnic group in the real world to one of Tolkien’s fictional groups of people. In general, the different races of people are kind of random, and rarely stand-ins for or ancestors of historical groups of people. Their physical and cultural descriptions rarely correspond with any real-world geography and racial groups.

Tolkien had some racist issues to be sure (his depiction of what might be black people is, at best, dismissive), but it’s a lot more complicated that what’s often assumed. To associate him with Wagner-esque Aryan wankery is way off the mark, when he openly derided that philosophy more than once (including when he told off some Nazis). The fact of the matter is, the cultures and races in the books rarely line up with anything in the real world. And when they sort of do, it’s not what people often think. What he called “Easterlings,” for example, would have corresponded with Slavic people, if anything, not East Asian people (who would be on a different continent, if you tried to make the maps line up with the real world). In any case, it’s dangerous to make those assumptions, as we’re talking about tens of thousands of years of human migration in between “when” Tolkien’s history occurred and “when” real human history started. Also, the geography and even continents are pretty different. Looking at the maps and trying to point out what each race/culture is “supposed to be” isn’t going to bear much fruit.

Sorry that this is such a long reply, but I feel like it’s important to point out that putting a bunch of white people in the starring roles of these adaptations says more about the people adapting them than Tolkien. With some creativity we can make these stories much more inclusive than they normally seem to be (and I intend to use this to include more genders and people of color in my adaptation of the Silmarillion).

Was Tolkien racist about some things? Absolutely, but he also deliberately left a LOT to the imagination, because he knew better than to spell it out. At the end of the day, it’s mythology, and that’s open to interpretation.

"Hey stranger, I demand you have sex with me" - entitled

"Hey stranger, I demand you become the kind of person I prefer to have sex with" - entitled like WHOOOOAA

Abolitionist Biram Dah Abeid has faced police harassment, arrest, apostasy charges, torture, and death threats for fighting to end slavery in Mauritania:

The legal framework in Mauritania is very fluid. This fluidity contributes to the maintaining of slavery. There are two types of laws in Mauritania. You have the “slave code,” which legitimizes and codifies slavery, and which gives the law a sacred aspect. These are books that were written in the Muslim Middle Ages in the Maghreb area between the ninth and 16th century. These laws authorize the owning of black people. They decree that the black race is inferior. They allow for the selling of black people, the castration of black people, the rape of black women. These codes also state that women are legal minors for their whole lives and are not equal to men. …

Mauritania also has a modern law that it has codified, specifically a law against slavery. But these are not laws that are meant to be applied. The traditional law that decrees racial inequality and slavery and the inequality of women is considered superior and sacred. When there is a contradiction between the two, the traditional law trumps modern law each time. The judges are trained using these slave codes and the antiquated law. They’re brought up within this framework and believe that it comes from God. Other laws, modern laws and international conventions are considered in Mauritania to be from people who are non-Muslims and nonbelievers.

Back in the 80s, Ronald Reagan paid a lot of rhetorical attention to the story of an anonymous "welfare queen" who drove a Cadillac and lived high on the taxpayer's dime. I'd long assumed that Reagan's queen was a fictional construct, but the truth is much, much more fascinating.

At Slate, Josh Levin has a long read on the life and times of "Linda Taylor" (in quotes because that's only one of her many, many aliases), the real woman who served as the basis for Reagan's story. Taylor really did drive a Cadillac and perpetrate a decent amount of welfare fraud. But her story isn't really representative of the typical sort of welfare fraud — let alone the typical welfare recipient, in general. In fact, Taylor was the sort of person that gets armchair diagnosed as a sociopath. She spent most of her life grifting somebody and was possibly involved in the deaths of multiple people.

When I set out in search of Linda Taylor, I hoped to find the real story of the woman who played such an outsize role in American politics—who she was, where she came from, and what her life was like before and after she became the national symbol of unearned prosperity. What I found was a woman who destroyed lives, someone far more depraved than even Ronald Reagan could have imagined. In the 1970s alone, Taylor was investigated for homicide, kidnapping, and baby trafficking. The detective who tried desperately to put her away believes she’s responsible for one of Chicago’s most legendary crimes, one that remains unsolved to this day. Welfare fraud was likely the least of the welfare queen’s offenses.

For those who knew her decades ago, Linda Taylor was a terrifying figure. On multiple occasions, I had potential sources tell me they didn’t think I was really a journalist. Maybe I was a cop. Maybe I was trying to kill them. As Lamar Jones tells me about his brief marriage to the welfare queen, he keeps asking how I’ve found him, and why I want to know all of these personal details. If I’m in cahoots with Linda, as he suspects I might be, he assures me that I won’t be able to find him again. He’s just going to disappear.

Those who crossed paths with Linda Taylor believe she’s capable of absolutely anything. They also hope she’s dead.

Time has its "Person of the Year." Amazon has its books of the year. Pretty Much Amazing has its mixtapes of the year. Buzzfeed has its insane-stories-from-Florida of the year. And Wonkblog, of course, has its graphs of the year. For 2013, we asked some of the year's most interesting, important and influential thinkers to name their favorite graph of the year — and why they chose it. Here's Jonathan Franzen's.

What's interesting is the source of the graphic-- the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a weapons industry association-- and the reason that the NSSF put it together: to fend off criticism of lead ammunition, which is fatally ingested by a lot of raptors and waterbirds and is threatening to drive the California Condor back into extinction in the wild. Alternatives to lead exist, but, owing to low production of them, they're currently somewhat more expensive.

What's striking about the pie chart is how big a slice of it consists of predation by free-roaming cats. A large new peer-reviewed study published in 2013 estimates the number of North American birds killed by cats at well over one billion per year. Bells on collars don't help. Neutering feral cats doesn't work. Keeping cats indoors helps.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of the novels The Corrections and Freedom . His most recent book is The Kraus Project , an annotated translation of essays by Karl Kraus.

See all the graphs of 2013 here, including entries from Bill McKibben, Emily Oster, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

"Elements of feminism have been taken into account, and have been absolutely incorporated into political and institutional life. Drawing on a vocabulary that includes words like 'empowerment' and 'choice', these elements are then converted into a much more individualistic discourse, and they are deployed in this' new guise, particularly in media and popular culture, but also by agencies of the state, as a kind of substitute for feminism. These new and seemingly 'modern' ideas about women and especially young women are then disseminated more aggressively, so as to ensure that a new women's movement will not re-emerge. 'Feminism', is instrumentalised, it is brought forward and claimed by Western governments, as a signal to the rest of the world that this is a key part of what freedom now means. Freedom is revitalised and brought upto-date with this faux-feminism. The boundaries between the West and the rest can, as a result, be more specifically coded in terms of gender, and the granting of sexual freedoms." - Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 2009

Criminologist Christian Bolden questions stereotypes about gangs: "Participants explained that gang initiations are not always required, and people often depart from gangs with no dire consequences."

mater-tenebrarum:

The gay agenda

Time has its "Person of the Year." Amazon has its books of the year. Pretty Much Amazing has its mixtapes of the year. Buzzfeed has its insane-stories-from-Florida of the year. And Wonkblog, of course, has its graphs of the year. For 2013, we asked some of the year's most interesting, important and influential thinkers to name their favorite graph of the year — and why they chose it. First up? Ta-Nehisi Coates.

My nomination is Patrick Sharkey's look at neighborhood poverty levels for blacks and whites. This is from his deeply troubling book, Stuck In Place. There is some sense — and the president has affirmed this — that racism is no longer a real threat to mobility, that it is now class. This is wrong. And Sharkey's chart is just one reason why. Basically it shows that huge swaths of black people live in neighborhoods with poverty levels that virtually no whites ever experience. And this finding has been consistent across post-Civil Rights history.

If you look at the chart, in the first generation, 62 percent of black people but only 4 percent of white people lived in neighborhoods where 20 percent or more of the people were poor. The numbers aren't much different in the second generation. And in both generations, only a third of black people live in neighborhoods with under 30 percent neighborhood poverty. Only 1 percent of all white Americans lived that way.

The chart basically mirrors something that most black people know intuitively. I was not raised poor. I had two parents. I never worried about food, clothing or shelter. The same could not be said of most of my friends. I was directly exposed to levels of violence that most white people of the same income as my parents rarely experience. I made out okay. A lot of black people did not.

So this idea that we can just change the subject and pretend that middle-class blacks and whites are, somehow, the same is erroneous. They aren't. Black people — regardless of class — live around way more poverty than even poor white people. Incidentally, this is also the reason one should be very skeptical when people say things like "controlling for income" or "controlling for class." For black people, class is racism. We should not be shocked by this. We've had some 350 years worth of policy with that exact goal. America is working as intended.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at the Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

See all the graphs of 2013 here, including entries from Jonathan Franzen, Bill McKibben, and Emily Oster.

what nobody seems to have noticed is that Dogecoin and Bitcoin exist on a continuum with WoW "gold" and Amazon gift cards

— Giles Goat Boy (@gilesgoatboy) December 24, 2013

it's not so much that BTC is more libertarian than gold or dollars. it's that it's much, much less corporate than Visa and gift cards

— Giles Goat Boy (@gilesgoatboy) December 24, 2013

governments lost control of the financial systems a good long while ago anyway.

— Giles Goat Boy (@gilesgoatboy) December 24, 2013

Is there a site yet where you can make your own cryptocurrency by entering a name, a cap and an optional logo?

— Phil Hagelberg (@technomancy) December 22, 2013

Brief summary I just wrote of the Rob Ford saga ...

But nothing compares to Mayor Rob Ford, the morbidly obese man-child of Toronto who smoked crack, lied about smoking crack, had his goons try to pay for a video of him smoking crack and eventually conceded he probably smoked crack when he was so wasted on booze that he doesn’t even remember. Along the way there were moments to brag about his prowess at cunnilingus, body check a member of the City Council, party with hookers, snort coke, lose his cellphone at a local crack house and presumably complicate his relationships with members of the local criminal underworld and gang community, which seem to have been extensive.

I never really got round to writing a proper Christmas sermon this year, but given that it’s been kind of topical recently, I thought I might have a go at explaining one of the phenomena of online political debate which is as persistent as it is puzzling – that is to say, why does everything end up turning into a flamewar about Israel?

Consider, reader, a person who is a bit of a nut. His very favourite thing in the world is to have arguments on the internet about the politics and government systems countries he will never visit. There are two issues in the world which he regards as massive injustices which cry out to heaven for redress – the Russian occupation of Chechnya, and the military junta in Burma/Myanmar. He also, broadly, supports the cause of the Palestinians, but this really isn’t much of an issue for him; he’s much better informed and much more concerned about Chechnya and Burma.

So why, when the NSA takes a snoop over this fellow’s online output, does he seem to spend all of his time arguing about Israel and Palestine?

Basically it is for the same reason that this guy plays a lot of poker even though his favourite card game is bezique – because you can always get a game. If you don’t speak Russian or Burmese, then you can condemn the actions of the government of both countries, but it is going to be a short conversation, because very few people are going to argue the other side. If you have an opinion about the government of Yemen, you can excoriate them in the strongest possible terms and still be at the betting shop by the time it opens, but if you get into an argument about Israel/Palestine, you can say goodbye to the morning.

Furthermore, not only can you always “get a game” in the Israel/Palestine conflict, it’s a team sport. There any many injustices and abuses in this horrible old world, but not many of them will provide you with a social life. The political argument over the Middle East, however, will give you an entire set of friends, activities, topics of conversation – nearly all the services which an American college fraternity provides for its members. So you can see why this issue is particularly salient with college students. In my hazy memory of how things went in the 90s, the Israeli side had the better food while the BDS side had the better bands, and both sides were pretty welcoming to freeloaders. Things might have changed but I doubt they have.

So this is my answer to the vexed question of why it is that the State of Israel finds itself singled out for disproportionate criticism compared to all the other unjust governments in the world. The online supporters of the State of Israel don’t understand why their conflict attracts so much attention because they can’t understand, because the reason is, basically, them. There are loads and loads of governments which carry out human rights abuses in the world, but there are really rather few governments who make apologetics for crimes against humanity clearly, in English and conveniently online. Neither are there many organisations in the world who fire rockets at nurseries, but who have a large, well-educated and English-speaking community across the world who are prepared to repeat their propaganda material. The Israel-Palestine conflict is the English Premier League of human rights debates – it might not be the best one, it might be legitimately criticised as predictable and dominated by big money, but it’s the one which has captured the imagination of the world, and if you want to see the best players in action, week in and week out, nowhere else comes close.

So having developed a theory about why these flamewars are so bloody ubiquitous, can we develop a theory about why they are generally so bloody nasty? I think I can, but first I need to do a digression, covering the ground of a post I thought about writing this year but didn’t. It’s about this news story, reporting that Goldman Sachs has started an initiative to reduce the workload on junior bankers in order to give them a better work life balance and “keep the best recruits”.

The post was going to be entitled “The Pain Is The Purpose”, and it was going to note that there’s decent reason to believe that this idea – of sparing baby bankers the pointless makework and exhaustion – could be very counterproductive. Not because of any of these well thought out but ultimately spurious rationalisations for why the work is actually necessary, but because if you take a more anthropological or sociological perspective, it’s pretty clear why investment banks make the most junior bankers work silly hours and destroy their social lives.

It’s a hazing ritual, pure and simple. Of the sort that you see in tribal societies across the world, in military organisations more or less everywhere (and despite all attempts by officers to stamp them out) and of course canonically, in those silly American student drinking societies. The purpose of all of these rituals is create loyalty to the institution, to break down external ties to anything outside the institution and to render the new recruit more likely to stick to the particular values of the institution, even when they conflict with more normal instinctive or learned rules. I would advise any readers in the academic profession who might be even thinking of feeling smug at this point, by the way, to consider the condition of graduate students and adjunct teachers, and to ponder why it is that people eight years post-diploma, with no hope of a tenure-track job, remain in many cases reluctant to “leave the academy” or even to form labour unions.

The reason why hazing rituals work is that they exploit cognitive dissonance, the phenomenon first identified by Nietszche in the great aphorism “My memory says I did that – my pride says I could not have done that – eventually, memory yields”. Putting people in nasty situations that don’t really make any sense is a great way to start the rationalisation mechanism working, and that is one of the most powerful muscles in the brain, capable of thoroughly rewiring vivid factual memories, let alone such comparatively flimsy structures as people’s sense of the right and wrong way to behave.

And to return from Digressionland, the participants in the Israel/Palestine debate basically end up, possibly accidentally, hazing each other and each committing their respective opponents further to the task. I doubt that anyone has a conscious plan to raise the temperature of the debate to such a disproportionate level, but the great thing about self-organising systems is that there doesn’t have to be a single controlling intelligence with a master plan. This is how the system replicates and perpetuates itself, and the purpose of a system, as Anthony Stafford Beer said, is what it does.

And so that’s my general theory of the biggest game in town. The problem has very little to do with deep-seated racism and surprisingly little to do with professional public relations. It’s just a self-sustaining system, produced by a congeries of poor decisions about interpersonal behaviour, which have the predictable resulting of replicating themselves by causing similar poor decisions about interpersonal behaviour. As in the popular theory about the origins of the First World War, we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

So, merry Christmas all. The endless and pointless argument I’ve described here is the biggest game in town, but it is by no means the only one – as we all live a greater and greater part of our social life online (what? Really? Oh), we’re going to come across more and more of these strange self-sustaining abstract life-forms. The best you can do is spot them, spot the small groups of people who are always trying to get a game of some sort going, and try not to get involved in one yourself.

Happy Christmas, Yuul, Kwanzaa, Eid, Diwali, Festivus or whatever solcistial feast of whatever degree of obvious made-up-ness you choose to celebrate and see you in the New Year. And remember that when you ask yourself “why is it that my opponents are such horrible, bitter, twisted, unpleasant people?”, that the answer might be “look what they have to deal with!”

Sometimes when rescuing an exception in Ruby, it’s useful to handle the error scenario by raising another, different exception. As an example, we may want to add domain-specific failure information before passing the error on to client code.

begin
  # ...
rescue KeyError
  raise MyLib::Error, "Bad key: #{key}. Valid keys are: #{valid_keys}"
end

The trouble with this technique is that it throws away all the information held by the original exception. This makes debugging harder, as there’s no stack trace to follow back to the root cause of the failure.

In Exceptional Ruby I demonstrated how to write nested exceptions in Ruby. A nested exception carries an optional field pointing back to an “original” exception. Here’s the example from the book:

class MyError < StandardError
  attr_reader :original
  def initialize(msg, original=$!)
    super(msg)
    @original = original;
  end
end

begin
  begin
    raise "Error A"
  rescue => error
    raise MyError, "Error B"
  end
rescue => error
  puts "Current failure: #{error.inspect}"
  puts "Original failure:  #{error.original.inspect}"
end
# >> Current failure: #<MyError: Error B>
# >> Original failure:  #<RuntimeError: Error A>

The implementation of MyError uses a slightly sneaky trick. The initializer uses $! as the default value for original. $!, aka $ERROR_INFO, is a special Ruby variable which always points to the current exception if an exception is presently being raised. If no exception is being raised, it is nil.

def initialize(msg, original=$!)
  super(msg)
  @original = original;
end

This is why, in the example above, we’re able to raise MyError in the usual way, without explicitly initializing it with an original error. By defaulting to $!, the MyError initializer automatically picks up original from the environment.

Until today, a user-defined nested exception class such as this one was the only way to capture and retain information about an original exception that triggered a secondary exception. But today Ruby 2.1 dropped. One of the new features is a new method #cause on the base Exception class. #cause is automatically filled-in by raise (or fail), based on the value of $! just like our MyError implementation.

Let’s try it out:

begin
  begin
    raise "Error A"
  rescue => error
    raise "Error B"
  end
rescue => error
  puts "Current failure: #{error.inspect}"
  puts "Original failure:  #{error.cause.inspect}"
end
# >> Current failure: #<RuntimeError: Error B>
# >> Original failure:  #<RuntimeError: Error A>

This is just like our first example, except there’s no need for a special exception class, and we’ve changed .original to .cause.

Unlike MyError, there is no way to explicitly set Exception#cause. It is always implicitly filled in based on the environment it is raised in.

I’m pretty thrilled that this feature has finally made it into Ruby. Hand-rolled nested exception classes are useful for debugging, but they don’t do us any good when trying to debug errors raised in 3rd-party code that doesn’t use them. With the advent of Exception#cause, debugging Ruby exceptions just got a lot easier.

Everyone, write in with your Dissmas lists, everyone!!!!!!

Allen Pike:

The behaviours that make us human are not professional. Honesty, frankness, humour, emotionality, embracing the moment, speaking up for what you believe, affection, sincerity. Quoting extremely offensive trolls. These are all things that will make some people love you and others hate you. When you get more attention, these aspects of your personality fuel the inevitable backlash. As your audience grows, the chance of any given action triggering criticism asymptotically approaches 100%.

Years ago, I sat with my then-boss Ron Sider during a Christian talk-radio debate on gun control with white evangelical activist Larry Pratt.

Pratt is the founder of Gun Owners of America, which he bills as the conservative alternative to the NRA. As Miranda Blue documents, Pratt is also a rabid conspiracy theorist with ties to white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, and he urges white people to own guns for fear of a coming “race war.”

Some highlights/lowlights from Blue’s report:

Like he did after the Sandy Hook shooting, Pratt has consistently pushed back against calls for gun law reform tied to the death of Trayvon Martin.

He accused advocates of “trying to use the race card to move against guns” and claimed that Attorney General Eric Holder’s consideration of a civil rights charge against George Zimmerman was an effort to “intimidate” white people into staying defenseless against “black mobs”…and to bring about communism.

Last month, Pratt alleged that Martin’s own family was responsible his death: “Probably what killed [Trayvon Martin] was the broken family that he was forced to deal with.”

… Pratt was kicked out of Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential campaign when it came out that he had ties with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and anti-Semites. (Yes, Pat Buchanan perceived him as too racist). Just this year, Pratt was scheduled to spend the Fourth of July at an event hosted by a Holocaust-denying rock band.

And then there was this conversation that Pratt had with fringe talk show host Stan Solomon (who Pratt frequently joins as a guest), in which Pratt agreed that Solomon wasn’t “stretching” when he predicted that Obama’s second term would bring about a race war pitting “Christian, heterosexual white haves” against “black, Muslim and/or atheist…black have-nots.”

So obviously, that debate nearly 20 years ago was seen as controversial for Christian family radio.

Because of Ron Sider. He’s a pacifist, urges rich people to give money to feed the hungry, and he once voted for McGovern.

It was quite a bold move, then, for this radio station to ask a fine, upstanding pillar of the white evangelical community like Larry Pratt to agree to debate such a dangerous, fringe character.

I rarely follow the schedule I set out for myself. I’m usually in the right place at the wrong time. I like to think this makes me harder to kill. If anyone tried to assassinate me by following my schedule, they’ll never find me in the right place, at the right time.

"It’s simple really: I am always right. Accept that and we’ll get along fine."

"I'm a good judge" … said by government employee and judge Gisele Pollack who, it seems, sentenced people to jail because of their drug use…while she, herself, was high on drugs.

But, in her defense, "she’s had some severe personal tragedy in her life".

And that's why, it seems, she's being allowed to check herself into rehab instead of being thrown in jail.

…because not a single poor person or non government employee who gets caught using drugs ever "had some severe personal tragedy in her life".

I'm reminded of something I read earlier today:

techdirt.com

We've discussed the whole "high court/low court" concept here a few times before — in that those who are powerful play by one set of rules, while the rest of us have to play by a very different set of rules.

…

The end result seems clear. If you're super high up in the political chain, you get the high court. Reveal classified info to filmmakers? No worries. Not only will you not be prosecuted or even lose your job, the inspectors will scrub your name from the report and, according to the article, the person in charge of the investigation will "slow roll" the eventual release of the report until you switch jobs.

But if you're just a worker bee and you leaked the unclassified draft report that names Panetta and Vickers? Well, you get the low court. A new investigation, including aggressive pursuit by the government, and interrogations of staffers to try to find out who leaked the report.

Twenty years ago I was a libertarian. I thought the system could be reformed. I thought that some parts of it "worked"… whatever that means. I thought that the goals were noble, even if not often achieved.

The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the fact that their man Barrack hasn't granted clemency to any one of the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed). The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies. Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the government stole a bunch of people's houses and gave them to Pfizer, because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what the Constitution means by "public use".

What neither side seems to realize is that the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected. Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class hierarchy, and the very idea that we are equal before the law is a laughable nonsequitr.

Jamal the $5 weed slinger, Shaneekwa the hair braider, and Loudmouth Bob in the 7-11 parking lot are at the bottom of the hierarchy. They can, literally, be killed with impunity … as long as the dash cam isn't running. And, hell, half the time they can be killed even if the dash cam is running. This isn't hyperbole, mother-fucker. This is literal. Question me and I'll throw 400 cites and 20 youtube clips at you.

Next up from Shaneekwa and Loudmouth Bob are us regular peons. We can have our balls squeezed at the airport, our rectums explored at the roadside, our cars searched because the cops got permission from a dog (I owe some Reason intern a drink for that one), our telephones tapped (because terrorism!), our bank accounts investigated (because FinCEN! and no expectation of privacy!). We don't own the house we live in, not if someone of a higher social class wants it. We don't own our own financial lives, because the education accreditation / student loan industry / legal triumvirate have declared that we can never escape – even through bankruptcy – our $200,000 debt that a bunch of adults convinced a can't-tell-his-ass-from-a-hole-in-the-ground 18 year old that (a) he was smart enough to make his own decisions, and (b) college is a time to explore your interests and broaden yourself). And if there's a "national security emergency" (defined as two idiots with a pressure cooker), then the constitution is suspended, martial law is declared, and people are hauled out of their homes.

Next up from the regular peons are the unionized, disciplined-voting-blocks. Not-much-brighter-than-a-box-of-crayolas teachers who work 180 days a year and get automatic raises. Firefighters who disproportionately retire on disability the very day they sub in for their bosses and get a paper cut.

A step up from the teachers and firefighters are the cops: all the same advantages of nobility of the previous group, but a few more in addition: the de facto power to murder someone as long as not too many cameras are rolling. The de facto power to confiscate cameras in case the murder wasn't well planned. A right to keep and bear arms that far exceeds that of the serf class: 50 state concealed carry for life, not just just for actual cops, but even for retired cops.

At the same level of privilege as cops, but slightly off to one side is different class of nobility: the judiciary and the prosecutors. Judges and prosecutors can't execute citizens in an alley, a parking lot, or their own homes ("he had a knife! …and I don't care what the lying video says."), but they can sentence people to decades in jail for things that any clear-minded reading of the Constitution and the 9th and 10th amendments make clear are not with in the purview of the government. They have effectively infinite resources. They orchestrate perp walks. They selectively leak information to shame defendants. They buy testimony from other defendants by promising them immunity. By exercising their discretion they make sure that the bad people are prosecuted while the good people (i.e. members of their own clan) are not.

Above the cops, the prosecutors, and the judiciary we have the true ruling class: the cabal of (most) politicians and (some) CEOs, conspiring both against their own competitors and the public at large. If the public is burdened with a $100 million debt to pay off a money losing stadium, that's a small price to pay if a politician gets reelected (and gets to hobnob with entertainers and sports heroes via free tickets and backstage passes). If new entrants into a market are hindered and the populace ends up overpaying for coffins, or Tesla cars, or wine that can't be mail ordered, then that's a small price to pay if a connected CEO can keep his firm profitable without doing any work to help the customer. If the Google founders want to agitate for Green laws that make Joe Sixpack's daily commute more expensive at the same time that they buy discount avgas for their private flying fuck palaces, then isn't that their right? They donated to Obama's campaign after all!

I could keep myself up all night and into tomorrow by listing different groups of royalty and the ways they scam the system.

…except "scam the system" is a misnomer. I am not listing defects in a perfectable system. I am describing the system.

It is corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. From Ted Kennedy who killed a woman and yet is toasted as a "lion of liberalism", to George Bush who did his share of party drugs (and my share, and your share, and your share…) while young yet let other youngsters rot in jail for the exact same excesses instead of waving his royal wand of pardoning, to thousand of well-paid NSA employees who put the Stasi to shame in their ruthless destruction of our rights, to the Silicon Valley CEOs who buy vacation houses with the money they make forging and selling chains to Fort Meade, to every single bastard at RSA who had a hand in taking the thirty pieces of silver, to the three star generals who routinely screw subordinates and get away with it (even as sergeants are given dishonorable discharges for the same thing), to the MIT cops and Massachusetts prosecutor who drove Aaron Swartz to suicide, to every drug court judge who sends 22 year olds to jail for pot…while high on Quaalude and vodka because she's got some fucking personal tragedy and no one understands her pain, to every cop who's anally raped a citizen under color of law, to every other cop who's intentionally triggered a "drug" dog because the guy looked guilty, to every politician who goes on moral crusades while barebacking prostitutes and money laundering the payments, to every teacher who retired at age 60 on 80% salary, to every cop who has 50 state concealed carry even while the serfs are disarmed, to every politician, judge, or editorial-writer who has ever used the phrase "first amendment zone" non-ironically: this is how the system is designed to work.

The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

Merry Christmas.

Burn the Fucking System to the Ground © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

On an idle whim over the weekend, I picked up Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and sure as a curious teenager is drawn to the opportunity to wander around someone else’s thoughts in a Pensieve, I found myself reading all the way through the series. I’ll have some more extended thoughts on certain elements of the series, particularly cross-species relations, after we return from the holidays. But given the time of year, I wanted to linger on one aspect of J.K. Rowling’s series: the importance of Christmas.

The wizarding world of which Harry Potter learns that he is a member on his eleventh birthday is a notably secular place. There are wizards who seem to serve in officiant capacities at important occasions like weddings and funerals, but what we hear of those proceedings suggests a humanist focus rather than a divine one. We never hear a wizard articulate any sort of theological framework, or even profess a belief in a higher power, unless it’s Voldemort’s certainty in his own ability to transcend the limitations associated with human mortality. The Deathly Hallows quest does rely on the idea that Death exists in some form, but what we know of the belief system around the Hallows suggests that the focus of the quest is less on venerating Death than human capacity itself. And while there’s a broadly recognized category of Mysteries in the Harry Potter novels, from the arch and the veil in the Department of Mysteries, to the Kings Cross waystation where Harry and Dumbledore meet after Voldemort kills Harry in Deathly Hallows, these mysteries seem less sacred and more an extension of what we know to be both marvelous and possible in the wizarding world.

Despite the Harry Potter series’ general detachment from religious worship, two Muggle Christian holidays do seem to have made it onto at least the Hogwarts’ calendar. Christmas and Easter are the two scheduled breaks in the British wizarding school calendar. Easter is observed only as a spring break at the school, and there’s no evidence to suggest that it has greater significance outside of the school walls. But Christmas, though it’s celebrated as a secular holiday rather than a religious one, has enormous significance in both the structure of the Harry Potter novels, and the emotional life of Harry himself.

Harry’s birthday and the days leading up to it are the set-piece that begin every Harry Potter novel. It’s a choice that makes sense given that Voldemort’s attack on Harry’s family coincides with his first birthday, and that beginning the novels in the middle of the summer allow Rowling to set up Harry’s emotional state prior to his return to Hogwarts each year. And every year, Christmas provides an opportunity for Rowling to reaffirm some of the series’ themes.

Harry’s first Christmas at Hogwarts is also his first with real presents. The fact that he has gifts at all comes as something as a surprise to Harry, who is used to being deliberately excluded, and is prepared to watch his friends in Gryffindor unwrap their gifts and share their enjoyment. His aunt and uncle send him a fifty-pence piece, which is, as it turns out, the most generous material gift they’ll give him at any point in the series. But in his first significant step towards joining the Weasley family, Mrs. Weasley doesn’t forget the orphan who’s become friends with her son during their first term. She sends him a sweater, one of the first pieces of clothing Harry’s ever had that was intended for him, rather than passed along to him as a hand-me-down. And Mrs. Weasley sends Harry, who’s used to being deprived of food, treats as well. It’s one of the first times in Harry’s life that an adult has shown care not just for his basic well-being, but for his pleasure and enjoyment.

Christmas during Harry’s first year at Hogwarts is also the celebration during which Harry receives his father’s invisibility cloak. The gift appears to be from an anonymous donor, though of course we later learn that it’s from Dumbledore in the guise of a rather-less-portly Santa Claus. In the short term, the cloak is what enables Harry to find the Mirror of Erised, which gives him the gift of seeing his family, though the images also serve as a warning to Harry not to yearn after a past which is not recoverable to him. And throughout the rest of the series, the cloak will save Harry from trouble and even from mortal threats. In a small way, it’s an extension of the parental protection his parents were unable to provide him in life.

Beyond gift-giving, the celebration of Christmas in the Great Hall at Hogwarts also reaffirms Harry’s sense that the school is his first true home. Christmas dinner gives Harry an opportunity to see his teachers in a relaxed state–and in hilarious hats, thanks to the riches that lie inside wizard crackers. At table with them, and with increasing numbers of his friends as the years wear on, Harry gets the opportunity to be around adults who don’t see him as a problem or a potential embarrassment. These dinners in particular affirm that the Hogwarts teachers are, in fact, Harry’s first surrogate family.

This is not to say that all of Harry’s Christmases are easy, even if they mark his increasing intimacy with the people around him, and his growing ability to expect that there are people who love him and want to be generous to him (this will remain a weak spot of Harry’s when Dobby stops his letters and on other occasions when he believes he’s been forgotten). Christmas marks the occasion of Harry’s misadventures in dating during the Yule Ball during his fourth year, an event that teaches both him and Ron lessons about the importance of considering other people’s feelings.

And in Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, Harry spends his first Christmas outside of Hogwarts with the Weasley family. This should be a purely happy occasion–it’s Harry’s first opportunity to spend Christmas, or any holiday, really, not just in a family setting, but with a family that loves him without reservation. But because Mr. Weasley has been attacked by Nagini in the Department of Mysteries, Harry proceeds to a rather different level of intimacy with the Weasleys. Instead of merely celebrating with them, Harry spends Christmas helping to support the family who’s been so good to him, and cheering up Mr. Weasley while he convalesces in St. Mungo’s.

One of those visits has another effect: Harry chances upon Neville Longbottom and his grandmother, who are visiting Neville’s parents, who have been tortured into insanity. It’s a touching and very sad glimpse of devotion, and of love given without any expectation that it can really be reciprocated in an equal way. Harry won’t learn the full extent of his connection with Neville for some time, but his fellow student’s conduct gives Harry a lesson in fortitude, kindness, and sacrifice that lingers with him for the remaining novels.

Finally, in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, when Harry and Hermione arrive in Godric’s Hollow after a series of discouragements and weighed down by the burden of a Horcrux, they’re surprised to discover that it’s Christmas Eve. But it’s hard to imagine that Harry could have truly come home to the town where he was born and where his parents died to save him on any other day.

In the previous six novels, Christmas has bound Harry up tightly to his substitute families and reaffirmed his love for the places that have become home, and not merely sources of life-extending house-room, to him. In Deathly Hallows, Harry leaves these alternate homes knowing full well he may never return to him. And in finding the courage to walk away from these places of safety and emotional support, Harry also finds the strength to confront the great void in his life, his parents’ graves and ruined home. If Christmas is, for J.K. Rowling, an opportunity to celebrate families both biological and chosen, Deathly Hallows recognizes that mourning is a kind of celebration.

The Harry Potter novels may not acknowledge that Christmas is a Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, and even the cultural elevation of the holiday may not be enough to satisfy the critics of the novels who have condemned them as anti-Christian. But over seven novels, as Rowling builds up to Harry’s own sacrifice for the people he loves, Christmas is a regular reminder of the joy of arriving into a family, even at a belated date, and the pain of seeing a family torn apart. Even without ever mentioning Jesus’ name, that’s about as sharp a distillation of the power of the holiday, an occasion marked by both joy and grief, as I can possibly imagine.

The post Harry Potter And The Spirit Of Christmas appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Image: Reuters

There seems to be a new talking point from government officials since a federal judge ruled NSA surveillance is likely unconstitutional last week: if Edward Snowden thinks he's a whistleblower, he should come back and stand trial.

National Security Advisor Susan Rice said on 60 Minutes Sunday, “We believe he should come back, he should be sent back, and he should have his day in court.” Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell made similar statements this weekend, as did Rep. Mike Rogers (while also making outright false claims about Snowden at the same time). Even NSA reform advocate Sen. Mark Udall said, "He ought to stand on his own two feet. He ought to make his case. Come home, make the case that somehow there was a higher purpose here.”

These statements belie a fundamental misunderstanding about how Espionage Act prosecutions work.

If Edward Snowden comes back to the US to face trial, it is likely he will not be able to tell a jury why he did what he did, and what happened because of his actions. Contrary to common sense, there is no public interest exception to the Espionage Act. Prosecutors in recent cases have convinced courts that the intent of the leaker, the value of leaks to the public, and the lack of harm caused by the leaks are irrelevant—and are therefore inadmissible in court.

This is why rarely, if ever, whistleblowers go to trial when they’re charged under the Espionage Act, and why the law—a relic from World War I—is so pernicious. John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who was the first to go on-the-record with the media about waterboarding, pled guilty in his Espionage Act case last year partially because a judge ruled he couldn’t tell the jury about his lack of intent to harm the United States.

In the ongoing leak trial of former State Department official Stephen Kim, the judge recently ruled that the prosecution “need not show that the information he allegedly leaked could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially.” (emphasis added)

The same scenario just played out in the Chelsea Manning trial this summer. Manning's defense wanted to argue she intended to inform the public, that the military was afflicted with a deep and unnecessary addiction to overclassification, and that the government’s own internal assessments showed he caused no real damage to U.S. interests. All this information was ruled inadmissible until sentencing. Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in jail—longer than most actual spies under the Espionage Act.

If the same holds true in Snowden’s case, the administration will be able to exclude almost all knowledge beneficial to his case from a jury until he’s already been found guilty of felonies that will have him facing decades, if not life, in jail.

This would mean Snowden could not be able to tell the jury that his intent was to inform the American public about the government’s secret interpretations of laws used to justify spying on millions of citizens without their knowledge, as opposed to selling secrets to hostile countries for their advantage.

If the prosecution had their way, Snowden would also not be able to explain to a jury that his leaks sparked more than two dozen bills in Congress, and half a dozen lawsuits, all designed to rein in unconstitutional surveillance. He wouldn’t be allowed to explain how his leaks caught an official lying to Congress, that they’ve led to a White House review panel recommending forty-six reforms for US intelligence agencies, or that they've led to an unprecedented review of government secrecy. He wouldn't be able to talk about the sea change in the public's perception of privacy since his leaks, or the fact that a majority of the public considers him a whistleblower.

He might not even be able to bring up the fact that a US judge ruled that surveillance he exposed was ruled to likely be unconstitutional.

The jury would also not be able to hear how there’s been no demonstrable harm to the United States since much of this information has been published. And if the prosecution was able to prove there was some harm to the US, Snowden wouldn’t be able to explain that the enormous public benefits of these disclosures far outweighed any perceived harm.

Every American should be outraged that leakers and whistleblowers are being prosecuted under an espionage statute without ever having to show they meant to harm the U.S. or that any harm actually occurred. Given there are two dozen bills calling for the reform of the NSA in the wake of Snowden's revelations, there should also be reform of the Espionage Act, so it cannot be used by the government as a sword to protect itself from accountability.

A growing body of evidence, dating back to the late 1960s, suggests that we can lessen the emotional blow of negative memories (and even get rid of them altogether) months and years after those memories originally formed. The key is that memories seem to be vulnerable to manipulation and erasure as you're recalling them, not just at the time of creation. The newest research — and some of the most convincing to date — used electroconvulsive therapy to effectively remove the details of traumatizing stories from the minds of healthy volunteers. Virginia Hughes has a story about the newest study at her blog:

Schiller’s experiments have also bolstered the reconsolidation hypothesis. She has shown, for example, that if people recall a fearful memory and then go through ‘extinction learning’ — meaning that they’re shown the fearful stimulus over and over again without any pain — they can erase the emotional sting of the memory. Other groups have shown something similar by giving people propranolol, a beta-blocker, immediately after recalling a memory.

The new study adds ECT to the list. There are still a lot of questions. For example, it’s not clear how ECT is disrupting reconsolidation. Or if it’s doing it at all: The effect could be partly or wholly due to anesthesia, though the researchers say this is unlikely. Most importantly, no one knows whether the procedure would work with old, real memories, as opposed to those artificially created in the lab.

I got a 10-percent discount this weekend due to, “what’s been in the news lately,” as the nice lady working the cash register at Target put it. She meant this:

In a statement to potentially affected customers, Target confirms that the “unauthorized access to Target payment card data” at its retail locations (Target.com purchases were apparently not impacted by the attack) lasted from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, effectively encompassing the heart of the store’s holiday shopping business and affecting around 40 million Target shoppers, according to the retailer. …

The breach didn’t just get at basic things like customer names and addresses — nope, Target says the data thieves rode off into the virtual sunset with info that included customer name, credit or debit card number, and the card’s expiration date and CVV (that three-digit security code on the back of your card).

Kevin Drum is not pleased with Target. “The most infuriating thing” about this massive carelessness with customers’ data, he says, is that the technology to prevent such data theft already exists and is being used in most other countries. Kevin cites this, from Chris O’Brien of the Los Angeles Times:

Over the last decade, most countries have moved toward using credit cards that carry information on embeddable microchips rather than magnetic strips. The additional encryption on so-called smart cards has made the kind of brazen data thefts suffered by Target almost impossible to pull off in most other countries.

Because the U.S. is one of the few places yet to widely deploy such technology, the nation has increasingly become the focus of hackers seeking to steal such information. The stolen data can easily be turned into phony credit cards that are sold on black markets around the world.

The rejection of this technology by U.S. companies doesn’t just make American consumers more vulnerable, it makes out data more enticing — a big, inviting, um, target for thieves.

Kevin’s right that this is infuriating. But I think he’s wrong about why American companies haven’t implemented this technology. He writes:

There’s really no excuse for this. The technology to avoid this kind of hacking is available, and it’s been in real-world use for many years. Every bank and every merchant in American knows how to implement it. But it would cost a bit of money, so they don’t.

Yes, American banks and merchants are bean-counting money-grubbers, but so are the banks and merchants in all those other countries. And the bean-counting money-grubbers there have decided that implementing this security technology is a good investment and a money-saving expense.

Money isn’t the reason that we don’t use this technology in America. We don’t use this technology in America because of Nicolae Carpathia.

If you’re fortunate enough not to be familiar with the World’s Worst Books, Nicolae Carpathia is the name of the fictional Antichrist character in the Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. That series of books has sold something like 70 million copies over the past decade — one of the most phenomenal publishing successes since Hal Lindsey’s similarly themed The Late Great Planet Earth, which was the best-selling book of the 1970s.

The “Bible prophecy” mythology of these books isn’t an irrelevant fringe belief. This stuff influences American culture, American politics, and the American economy. It’s everywhere.

That mythology is why tens of millions of Americans aren’t happy about an initial agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Peace with Iran, to these “Bible prophecy” believers, means Armageddon is less likely. And they view that as a bad thing.

“Bible prophecy” mythology is also why thieves were able to steal consumer data from 40 million Target customers this fall. That theft was easily preventable with the smart-card encryption used in most other countries, but we can’t use that technology here in America because the phrase “embeddable microchips” sends tens of millions of Americans off the deep end. It’s the Mark of the Beast!

That’s also why, for example, you have to carry a piece of paper showing proof of insurance in the glove compartment of your car. Your status as an insured driver could easily be kept up-to-date with a smart-card driver’s license, but we can’t have those here in America because of Nicolae Carpathia.

So if you’re one of the 40 million Americans who has shopped at Target since Thanksgiving, then thieves may have your debit card number, expiration date and CVV — which is to say they may have access to your bank account. Yes, that’s infuriating. And, yes, you should be angry with Target for not handling your data responsibly.

But you should also be angry with folks like Tim LaHaye, John Hagee, Hal Lindsey and all the other “Bible prophecy scholars” whose foolish, anti-biblical heresies made this theft possible. To me, that’s “the most infuriating thing” about this story.

Randall Munroe turns to the question of Reading Every Book: “At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?”

Munroe tackles this question, as usual, with plenty of amusing math.

Elsewhere, I’ve seen it said that the last people who might have read everything were probably Thomas Jefferson (d. 1826) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (d. 1832). Whether that’s true of either I don’t know, but Jefferson certainly tried. Jefferson’s problem was that Virginia did not have a library that held every English book, so to read them all, he had to buy them all. That was expensive. It took more money than Jefferson had, so the acquisition of his vast personal library put him deep into debt.

That debt was part of the reason, or the excuse, Jefferson gave for never being able to afford the emancipation of his slaves — something he always said he wanted to do, yet somehow never quite got around to doing.

We know their names. The image here is a page from Jefferson’s 1820 “Farm Book,” listing the enslaved persons he and the law said he “owned” in that year. That image is too small for the names to be legible, but they’re all there on the page in the archives of the University of Virginia — the real names of real people who were bought and sold, and whose children were bought and sold, and who died without ever tasting freedom because Jefferson’s book-buying habit meant he could not “afford” to keep his promise to them.

Jefferson tried to break that habit, to settle his accounts and to pay the greater debt he owed to all the enslaved people whose labor he had stolen. In 1814, he sold his library — more than 6,000 books — to the government for about $24,000. But then, instead of the Jubilee he had considered, he started buying more books, got deeper into debt, and never liberated his slaves, who were sold at auction after his death in 1826.

As Randall Munroe’s math shows, it’s no longer possible to do what Jefferson tried to do. There are just way too many books to read them all. But the Library of Congress still tries to collect them all, and to catalog every one.

Open any book you own and flip through the first few pages and you will find that book’s Library of Congress number. When you see that number, remember where the Library of Congress came from. It came from a broken promise to real people — the people whose names are listed in Jefferson’s handwriting on that page above. We know their names.

I’m just back from seeing The Desolation of Smaug with the family and I’m really not sure what to think. I enjoyed lots of things about it, but still left feeling very dissatisfied. I liked the Tolkien material very much; and I liked the comic barrels-and-dragons action-adventure lots, too. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what they’re doing in the same film.

The entrance to Laketown

As usual, and contrary to popular belief, Jackson is a sensitive interpreter of Tolkien. Of the “new” material added to the film that wasn’t in the book of The Hobbit, some substantial chunks, including the prologue of Gandalf’s meeting with Thorin in Bree, were taken straight from Tolkien’s writings — either the LotR Appendices or the Silmarillion. Other sections, such as Gandalf’s investigations in Dol Goldur, were at least based on Tolkien’s background writings, though elaborated rather freely.

On the other hand — and much to my surprise given that this was a two-hour-forty-minute adaptation of the middle third of a 400-page book — quite a lot of material from the book was cut out. We lost all the business with the dwarves being introduced in small groups to Beorn. We lost the crossing of the river in Mirkwood, and Bombur’s falling in, and everyone else having to drag his fat butt around. We lost Bilbo’s taunting of the spiders, in favour of more action sequences. We lost the dwarf party’s attempts to join the elven feasts off the Mirkwood path. Actually, we lost a whole lot of Mirkwood, so that what’s always felt to me like the central part of the book seemed like it was over almost as soon as it started.

Isn’t that strange? When you have eight hours to adapt a 400-page book, you’d usually want to use most of the material from that book. I can only assume the discarded material was considered a bad fit for the kind of adventure-movie Jackson wanted to make, that it would have resulted in too much of a kids’-book film. I think that’s sad. I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Orlando Bloom:

I’m sure Tolkien might have probably turned in his grave, but it was in keeping with the vision that Pete had for Legolas and stuff which, you know, was very important.

It would be one thing if Jackson had a specific vision for characters in his own story. But it seems to me that when he’s adapting someone else’s he has some degree of responsibility to adhere to the author’s vision — not only of individual characters, but of what kind of story it is. Whereas this Hobbit movie is rather like an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in which Lizzy Bennett turns out to be government agent and Caroline Bingley is spying for Napoleon’s army, and they end up resolving their differences in a ninja battle.

The ruins of Dale

That said, just as the Tolkien parts of the film were good, so were the action-adventure parts. You just have to make yourself forget that they’re supposed to be part of The Hobbit. If you wanted to see an action sequence of heroes evading and killing their pursuers while riding down a river in barrels that inexplicably ignore the laws of gravity and buoyancy, then I doubt you will ever see that done better than in The Desolation of Smaug. I am quite certain that people who want to see an extended sequence of dwarfs trying unsuccessfully to entomb a giant dragon in molten gold will find that desire fully satisfied by the latter parts of Desolation; and really, it could hardly have been done better, always assuming it was the kind of thing you wanted to see done in the first place.

I hope I’m not being too snarky here. I am quite serious that these sequences were done superbly. Had I been going to watch a generic D&D-setting fantasy adventure, I would have been captivated by them, and I’m sure a lot of people enjoyed it enormously on that basis. Bizarrely, the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, who has a history of completely missing the point of Tolkien, claimed in his Desolation review that:

For the first time, I “got” the JRR Tolkien/Peter Jackson experience. I tuned into the frequency. I tasted the fusion cuisine.

Unfortunately, it turns out on reading the rest of the review that he didn’t get any such thing. He just got Jackson’s phantasy phun phest, and once more completely missed the actual Tolkien.

And maybe we shouldn’t blame him too harshly for that. Because the problem with smashing Tolkien’s charming book together with these sound-and-fury sequences is that all the noise necessarily drives out the thoughtfulness, the insight, and indeed the charm that made us love the book in the first place. These aspects of Tolkien’s writing are not dispensable luxuries; they are crucial. They are what give weight and substance to the adventure. The reason the dangerous quest to Erebor is worth undertaking is because there is a more pastoral and introspective world to return to at the end. Poor Martin Freeman does his best to preserve some of that — and to be fair, he does a fine job, as he did in the first film; but his deftly understated and believable Bilbo is fighting against every other element in the films and can’t possibly win. He’s like that one guy in a big argument who’s quietly making a good and important and persuasive point, but who no-one hears because they’re all too busy shouting at each other. Indeed Bilbo is almost lost in the last third of the film.

That’s a lot of gold.

It’s a shame, because Freeman is by some distance the most convincing actor in Desolation. Richard Armitage’s Thorin is much too human to convince as the dwarven king: while I always see Viggo Mortensen’s portrayal now when I think of Aragorn, I will never see Armitage’s when I think of Thorin. And he sounds so very like Sean Bean’s Boromir. Luke Evans’s Bard is too generic to leave any impression in the memory. More disturbingly, five movies as Gandalf may be one too many for Ian McKellan: he’s still good, but no longer utterly convincing as he was in the LotR films. It’s as though he’s lost interest in the character and is now going through the motions and recycling mannerisms.

If all of this sounds relentlessly negative, that’s unfair. There’s lots to love in Desolation, and I laughed out loud several times — not laughing at jokes, but for sheer joy. There’s a fine Tolkien adaptation in there, and a fine action-adventure. But the combination of the two isn’t just less than the sum of the parts, it’s less than either of them.

The reason I care about this is because Tolkien matters. And it’s clear that Jackson gets this. In the LotR films, even in their more preposterous moments, that comes through. The  battle of Pelennor Fields isn’t just about whether orcs will break into Minas Tirith, it’s about desperate courage even when all hope is lost. Aragon and Arwen’s romance isn’t just about whether they’ll end up together, it’s about the fleeting nature of all mortal joy and the inevitability of the Long Defeat. Whereas The Desolation of Smaug is just about riding barrels down rivers and pouring molten gold on dragons. In the end, that stuff’s not important. And any Tolkien adaptation has to matter.

I’ll watch it again, for the sheer fun of it — probably many times. But I’ll never love it like I do the LotR films. It’s not art. It’s not even trying to be.

[See also: Some thoughts on The Hobbit, part 1: An Unexpected Journey]