Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Just a few quick soundbites from Monday’s SXSW keynote, where communitymeister Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia interviewed communitymeister Craig Newmark of Craigslist:

Jimmy: “The biggest conflict we see at Wikipedia is not between left and right, but between good guys and jerks.”

Craig: “Yes! The biggest, most vicious conflict we see on Craigslist is not political. It’s in the pet forums.”

Craig: “Crooks are early adopters of technology. As more and more technophobes start coming online, the vast majority of them are good people. So, more and more, good people outnumber the bad guys.”

Craig: “When you talk about the wisdom of crowds–you must also be worried about mob rule. You have to be careful.”

More juicy outtakes (Hillary Clinton fetishes?) at Will Pate, Frank Gruber, and a very close transcription from Auscillate. Me, I should be packing!

Avast, ye scurvy dogs formerly known as Google!

Steve Rubel, Dave Winer, and Dan Gillmor have the real story about Google’s new”AutoLinks“–which turn out to be the same idea as Microsoft’s idea for “Smart Tags”–and were apparently dreamed up by the same person who made up Smart Tags to start with.

The piratical plan behind both AutoLinks and Smart Tags
is to use
near-monopoly power to shanghai web traffic away from smaller players, and into sites you control. Example:  Gary Price went shopping for books at the Barnes and Noble website–and discovered that
every book’s ISBN number had been Autolinked to a sales page over at Amazon. 

Maybe they could just Smart Tag or AutoLink “Don’t be evil” to a page more fitted to their new business model. Arrrrr!

You know, back when I was working for Howard Dean, I never imagined I’d see Kos or Atrios outing somebody for alleged gay-ness or other non-standard sexual behavior.

I don’t like Jeff Gannon‘s politics. I didn’t like his sloppy, partisan reporting.

Comparing his sins to the no-holds-barred dirt-campaign against him, Jeff Gannon sounds like Walter Cronkite plus Mother Teresa.

Newsweek is floating an ugly Rumsfeld trial balloon. Should we now imitate Reagan’s secret use of death squads in El Salvador?

If we follow the El Salvador model, US special forces would train Iraqi “militia”, then turn them loose against insurgents and Sunni civilians suspected of harboring them.

One obvious problem with this model is that it’s hard to rein in a “militia” once you create them–as witness the Janjaweed militia in the Sudan Darfur conflict.

Worse, the Newsweek trial balloon hints that one of the main features of the Salvador model would be assassinating insurgent leaders. Just how would our hypothetical death squads tell the difference between a “terrorist” leader and a political opponent of the current regime? Political assassination is not a legitimate tool of government policy–I don’t want my own country to start using it.

Please join me in sending email to President Bush to oppose US use of the Salvador option.

Isn’t that cute? The pension fund Einstein used, which still has a
monopoly on many faculty pensions, doesn’t want to hear any bad news
about Sinclair broadcasting.

TIAA-CREF now has a boilerplate “Sinclair letter”–I got two identical
copies, with two different signatures, in response to my efforts last
week to get them to divest. The letters “explain” that they can’t tell
me if they got rid of SBGI or not, and that none of their funds drop
stocks for “political” reasons.*

On their website, they’ve posted a different justification for holding
onto Sinclair despite customer protests: that they don’t care about
“short-term
fluctuations”
in share price. The bone-headed management and PR skills of Sinclair’s
ongoing management? TIAA-CREF doesn’t seemed to have noticed
those.

 I’m guessing that somebody high in TIAA-CREF really likes Sinclair for
reasons not clear to me.

My guess is that if you take time to contact them, you will soon have
your very own copy of the letter to read.

Department of Homeland Security has asked the Justice Department last week
to review what legal steps would be needed to cancel or delay the November presidential election in case of terrorist attack.

So says a Newsweek story, cited this morning by Dave Winer, and now confirmed by Bush administration officials to Reuters, CNN, and more.

During the War of 1812, the British Army burned Washington and sacked
the White House. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln
campaigned for re-election and won. We managed to re-elect Franklin D
Roosevelt during World War II. No Federal elections have been delayed by any previous war.

During the 1950s in NH, my grammar school held weekly drills where we
crawled under our wooden desks
for protection against a Soviet atom bomb. Several big buildings
downtown had “bomb shelter” signs. One windowless room in the
basement of my house was kept stocked up with canned goods. Notice all
this was happening in New Hampshire–I can only imagine the
level of anxiety some place like Manhattan.

And yet, with the prospect of an attack that could level cities across
the nation, no plans were made to scrap the Constitution in response.

Brian Roehrkasse, from Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, says the Bush team is concerned that terrorists might influence US elections as did the train
bombings in Madrid, three days before the Spanish general
election. The ensuing Spanish election then threw out a pro-Bush government and installed an anti-Bush government.

Well, that’s a pretty naked revelation of
the Bush team’s motivation, and I’ll be surprised if Brian Roehrkasse
is still an official spokesman tomorrow.

Our Constitution makes no provision for an “emergency” that would let a
US President postpone Presidential elections. Can you guess why the
Constitution doesn’t allow for this? For extra credit, list three
“emergencies” that could have been cited by President Richard Nixon as
reasons to cancel the 1972 election.

Please blog this and please join me in shooting down this very
dangerous trial balloon from the Bush administration. I’m happy to say
that the conservatives over at FreeRepublic.com (most of them) don’t
like this idea one bit better than I do.

This is a story I plan to follow, and if you want to join me, here’s the latest word online from Google News and from Feedster.

In the ongoing tragedy of Sudan–being ably blogged by James Moore and Joanna Cippolla Moore–a new act is about to begin.

Summer rains are expected to flood many refugee camps, while making it hard for aid and food trucks to get
through.

According to the UN’s World Food Program project,

Anyway, we can help the UN’s World Food Program save lives in Sudan by making a credit-card donation online. 
There’s something about that image of clothes turning into dirty rags
that really got me, so I was grateful for the opportunity.

Screaming accusations. Whining self-defense. Finger-pointing instead of problem-solving.

I’m not talking about three two-year-olds sharing one cookie–I’m talking about public policy “debate” in many blogs, news
media, and even bookstores.

For echo-chamber number one, Why I Hate the Democrats. Meanwhile, in the opposite echo-chamber,  449 Stupid Things Republicans Have Said. 
As if filling our minds with anger, contempt, and conceit were a
good preparation for solving serious problems…

I went to the bookstore today, but not for any of those books. I got a copy of The Pentagon’s New Map by Thomas P. M. Barnett, the first hard-cover book I’d bought in a while.

The author has a weblog that my Berkman friend Critt Jarvis had pinged me to make Feedster Feed of the Day. Here’s just one of the blog quotes I really liked:

[Reflecting on a right-wing-radio interview] There
are no Republican-only answers for the questions posed in this Global
War on Terrorism. A real grand strategy appeals to both sides of the
political spectrum, or it’s no grand strategy at all.

…you have to remember who you are at the end of the day. He’s David
Gold and I’m Tom Barnett. He’s got a conservative talk radio show and I
have a vision of a future worth creating not just for America, but for
the world.

There will always be that temptation to view the enemy as
fundamentally inhuman, or something so alien we simply cannot recognize
its motivations and desires. But I didn’t want to write that book, or
sell that fear, or divide this nation or this world into those who are
“us” and those who must forever remain “them”….
The battle for hearts and minds isn’t merely going on in Iraq, but all
over this world.

It’s late and I’m sleepy, so I’ll stop now, but here’s what I said when I made him Feed of the Day:

Date: May 20, 2004
Feed:  “Thomas P. M.
Barnett : : Weblog”  (
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/index.rdf for
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/ )
Citation: Book-in-the-news The
Pentagon’s New Map featured in multi-dimensional smartperson blog by
its author war-college prof Thomas P. M. Barnett. Hard to say what
gives more pleasure–his non-toxic, optimistic global vision or his
first-person blogging of media frenzy to die for.

Seth Finkelstein has a funny response to time-wasters in the DMCRA* hearings:

It would great if everyone could just take a loyalty oath at the start
and thus get beyond the endless querying about whether they believe in some sort of heretical radicalism… “I pledge allegiance to copyright, and to the intellectual property system
for which it stands, one compensation, responsible, with property and profit for all.”

Meanwhile, in the Iraq sector of blogworld, one of Josh Marshall’s readers complains that “the fact that you’ve .. neglected to give even one line to this guy [Nick Berg] who was brutally slain for being one of us just sickens me.”

Josh replies:

I could write a post saying that I thought Berg’s execution was horrifying and awful and that I couldn’t get to sleep last night because the ugliness of the images wouldn’t leave my mind. But what would that tell you? That al Qaida is awful and that I think they’re awful too? Perhaps I simply have nothing to add….

Now put Josh and Seth together, and you get not JSoesthh but a subtle way to solve the problem of mistrust when people who live in different echo chambers try to talk with each other.

I, a known Democrat, would raise my right hand and begin:

I do not despise America or love Osama. I do not have a maniacal hatred of rich people, churchgoers, or George W. Bush. I do think that ripping people’s heads off or putting them through a plastic shredder is worse than the worst allegations from Abu Ghraib.

Then you, an admitted Republican, would raise your right hand and respond:

I do not despise the Bill of Rights or love the idea of a police state. I do not have a maniacal hatred of foreigners, dark-skinned people, or homosexuals. I do think we should make sure that what happened in Abu Ghraib never happens in any other prison the US is running.

Then, we can talk.

Today the full text of the secret March 9 report on Abu Ghraib prison, written by Army Major
General Antonio Taguba, is online at NBC, The Smoking Gun, and a bunch
of other places.  I saw bits of it yesterday, in Joi Ito’s weblog.

This quote from the report really sticks with me–“intentional abuse of detainees by military police
personnel” included:

Prison conditions were so chaotic that a 15-year old could be (allegedly) raped by a fellow detainee?
Prison conditions were so chaotic that this was the way guards responded to such an (alleged) event?
Officers gave this much power to soldiers who couldn’t spell a six-letter word like “rapist”?

In response to persistent reports of abuse at the prison. General Taguba’s report was requested on January 19, 2004.
It was delivered to military authorities on March 9, 2004.
As of May 4, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed he still didn’t know what was in the report.
Now that it’s on the Internet, I hope he’ll read it.