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Saturday, July 02, 2005As I was saying...The other day in his MSNBC column, Instantman pointed out an interesting Austin Bay comparison. He says the fight against the terrorists in Iraq should be undertaken like efforts against the Ku Klux Klan in America. Says Glenn: One difference is that America's media and political leaders mostly supported the battle against the Klan.Er, depends on when and where you're talking about. At least that's the impression from an excellent book I've been leafing through, Freakonomics. Freakonomics is a book by economist Steven Levitt and report Stephen Dubner that uses economists' methods to decipher aspects of real life that mainstream economists usually eschew. One of the things they looked at was the decline of the clan. The two point to a fellow named Stetson (last name forgotten), related to the founder of Stetson hats, who helped turn the Klan from fierce and frightful terrors into the punchline for a bad joke. Stetson infiltrated the Klan, located a sympathetic producer for the Superman radio show and arranged for terminology from the Klan's "sacred rites" to show up amid the obnoxious banter of the villains. While this didn't kill the Klan, it was harder to put on your hood and go burn crosses if your kids were running around in white headresses yelling the password for the night at each other when you got ready to leave. The key in Iraq is, and always has been, not military superiority, not superior political cunning or anything else of the sort. The key to shutting down Al-Qaeda is to slap a great big "L" for loser on everything they're associated with. The TurkeyBlog frequently worries about the Islamists' unhealthy preference for male company. Unfortunately, political correctness keeps us from doing what we ought to really win this war. Speculations that when two Islamists are standing together, that isn't an AK-47 putting a bulge in the robe, etc, are exactly the sort of things we need to be offering. No offense to the homosexuals by the way. But repressed homosexuals stoning potential partners to hide their secret shame... that's worthy of scorn. Much else is, as well. Put up posters of Mullah Omar throwing chasing girls out of his kindergarten class because they learnt spelling better. Show Osama stomping about because Mom always like his older brother better. In other words, make the kinds of freaks who die in ecstasy because they took a couple thousand infidels with them out to be what they are: lunatic freaks who should inspire scorn, not respectful fear. (PS there's an excellent South Park featuring Osama rushing past a made-up Cartman to seduce a camel that should be aired nightly for the benefit of those who can't remember which side they ought be on.) 
posted by gbarto at 10:50 PM Thursday, June 30, 2005Grokster thoughts:Plainly illegal: Hey kids! Tired of working at McDonald's to pay for your car? Buy Acme locksmithing tools and you'll never want for a car again! Questionable: Hey kids! Impress your friends and awe your enemies! Buy Acme locksmithing tools and you'll be able to lock and unlock any car on the block! And if your parents won't lend you the car, you'll still have wheels. Questionable but better: Hey kids! Tired of working at McDonald's to pay for your car? Pay for your car by helping others with theirs. Acme locksmithing tools will let you help out friends and neighbors and pick up nice tips for a valuable service. And you can borrow the car Saturday night before you ask dad. In the first case, the product is being hawked as a tool for law breaking. In the second, the product is offered for probably illegal but less damning purposes. In the third, a legitimate product is offered, but with a wink at a technically illegal but time honored practice - borrowing the car without asking. The Grokster ruling, as I understand it, pretty much said that if the product was widely used for illegal practices, the producer was liable regardless of intended use. But Thomas and a few others said that if Grokster ran an ad closer to the third, instead of the first, the case could have been different. I'm not clear on how far the Grokster ads go, but contemplating the implications of Grokster alongside the locksmithing analogy (don't remember where I came across it, probably Volokh). I wonder: If you crack up your car and the people inside, can you sue Pontiac? After all, the "Get in your Pontiac and drive" campaign, while featuring an asterisk about a professional driver on a closed track, pretty much implies that the thing you do with your Pontiac is let 'er rip. What about the coy ads (don't remember the make) about how fast a certain luxury car can go, not that you should, but isn't it nice to know that you can? Both these marketing campaigns suggest that it's natural to want to say the hell with speed limits and have some fun. This attitude toward speeding (how many letters to the editor blame the crash on the guy who was only going 70 when everyone knows you go 90 through that stretch...) encourages lawlessness and dangerous driving conditions that impact life, property and expenditures for public services (cleanup crews, fire trucks, ambulances, etc). What's the difference between saying, "Download all the free music you want and stick it to the record companies* - * Just kidding, only download legal stuff" and "Drive as fast you need to to feel wild, crazy and free* - * If you're a professional driver on a closed track"? And based on the loosest reading of Grokster, is GM liable for speeding deaths because they make a product with which most of its customers speed? P.S. Don't tell any plaintiff's lawyers about this post; I'm not sure they wouldn't try it.
posted by gbarto at 6:25 PM The Life and Trials of Oprah Winfrey Let me see if I have this straight. Hermès is a terrible racist organization because Oprah Winfrey couldn't shop after hours? What planet is this woman living on? It's plain to see that she hasn't heard the words, "Attention Target shoppers, we will be closing in five minutes" in a while. All the headlines are wailing about racism. Racism in France? I thought that France was the land of liberal goodness and light. Actually, I've lived there and know better. If you catch the right Frenchman on the right day, you can hear things that would make the most backwoods Southerner uncomfortable. But... This case has nothing to do with French or other racism. It has to do with celebrity narcissism. If you or I had been at that door, do you seriously think the Frenchie in the window would have said, "Entrez, entrez"? Where does Oprah get off thinking all doors should open to her? Unfortunately, this isn't just narcissism. It's blatant insensitivity to others. Oprah sells herself as an everywoman, but she seems to see retail salespeople as service machines, not people. Looking in the window at Hermès, Oprah identified with her element, the wealthy shoppers. Her thoughts were not with salespeople who were obviously busy either getting the store shut down or getting something ready for later. Her only thought was, "Why do the other rich people get to shop and I don't?" We are asked to evaluate what the French clerks were thinking. But let's evaluate what Oprah wasn't thinking. She wasn't thinking at all about a mother being late to pick up her kid at the sitter's. She was totally indifferent to the young man who missed his bus and was an hour late for a date with his sweetheart. Nope. It's all about Oprah. Were Oprah truer to her supposed down to earth roots, she would know at least one retail salesperson who hates getting home an hour late every night because a customer needed one last thing at the last minute. She would realize that people don't work retail for the thrill of selling to Oprah, but to earn a living to pay the rent. And she would understand how profoundly discourteous it is to assume that because a bigshot tv host makes more money, others having nothing better to do with their lives than to hang around for the chance to serve her, even if it's after their posted work hours. I realize that sometimes people can't make it to the store in time. I have equal sympathies for the retail clerk from store A who wants to go home and the clerk from store B who has to run in at the last minute because she just got off work and she needs diapers. But when a multimillionaire celebrity throws a hissy fit because she's been asked to wait twelve hours to buy a thousand dollar watch, I feel sorry for the poor clerks who have to deal with that class of person. Should I stumble into sufficient disposable income, I hope to one day shop at places like Hermès. But I'll go when they're open out of respect for those who are there to earn their living, not flaunt their wealth and privilege.
posted by gbarto at 4:44 PM Wednesday, June 29, 2005Thought for the dayThe reason you watch tv because it ends. If I wanted to watch a stupid story that goes on and on, I have my own life. - Jerry Seinfeld
posted by gbarto at 10:42 PM Tuesday, June 28, 2005The Oh So Sophisticated Don DeBrandtThe Anthology at the End of the Universe is a book of essays exploring different aspects of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One of the essays is Don DeBrandt's "That about wraps it up for Oolon Colluphid," which purports to show the existence of God and something resembling divine purpose in the universe Adams offers. DeBrandt's essay isn't half bad. The half-baked reasoning seems loopily apropos for deciphering a world of Vogon poets, Bugblatter Beasts and the like. But there's a very earthly tic that reduces what could be a good essay to an interesting period piece. Take a gander at the following: ...if you're looking for mindless entertainment and a few cheap laughs, go download some presidential quotes... [though this is a good way to describe the reading of "Bushisms"] (12)The essay is ridiculous, not to say ingenious, and pulls things out of The Guide that I hadn't noticed on my roughly dozen readings. But the throwaway lines, all unnecessary to the flow of the piece, distract. A few days ago, the San Francisco Chronicle's Datebook section had a write-up of a revival of Gershwin. The piece lamented that the updating consisted mostly of lame references to Cheney and Iraq: Each show was telescoped into a one-hour running time with a narrated summary, which struggled to bring things up to date through a few unfunny references to WMD and vice-presidential undisclosed locations.When even the Chron notices that simply jabbing the Republicans isn't the same as humor, it leaves the impression that the liberal memes of the last few years have worn out their welcome. One wonders if the obviously intelligent likes of DeBrandt will, Kant-style, awaken from their dogmatic slumbers, dumping the mindless jabs, or whether the tics associated with Bush Derangement Syndrome will keep an entire generation of otherwise intelligent liberals from reaching their potential. * * * By the way, in the same volume Vox Day has an excellent piece on the economic and policy implications of the subtext of the Hitchhiker series, noting that Adams seems libertarian more than liberal given his jokes about high taxes, unpleasant civil servants and eminent domain (the article includes a reference to the New London case when it was at the state level!).
posted by gbarto at 11:30 PM Monday, June 27, 2005Set IGuns don't kill people. People do. Grokster doesn't steal copryighted material. People do. Set II The gun industry is responsible if people use its products to kill people. Grokster is responsible if people use its products to steal copyrighted material.
posted by gbarto at 3:56 PM The toughest case, today, I think, was Gonzalez. File sharing, reporters and our perennial favorite, separation of church and state, are nice, but the rubber meets the road in Gonzalez. Here we have a cut and dried case of how we rely on social institutions to protect us in an ostensive civilization but, oops, three kids turned up dead and the cops seem to have been less than on the ball about using the tools given them to prevent it. In essence, a screwed up dad grabbed his kids in a violation of a restraining order. He claimed to have them at an amusement park in Denver. Instead of checking out the story - or even calling the Denver cops to do so - local law enforcement sat on its hands. Their mother says it's not the first time the cops had acted like it was an awful lot of trouble to enforce the restraining order. The Supreme Court ruled, and rightly, that the mother couldn't sue the city. I've had 911 hang up on me when I was reporting an accident. I've heard of cops showing up an hour after a call that a homicide was in progress. And you really want to reach out and make them accountable, especially when it's plain that they're not doing their job up to par. But that doesn't mean that you can bankrupt every municipality where something goes wrong. And to let suits like this stand is to invite a world where torn between lawsuits for excessive force from criminals and inexcessive force from victims, the logical thing to do is to become a mall security guard and small towns can just do without having police forces because they can't maintain them. However... the Gonzalez case does invite political remedy. The mother in Gonzalez did not have property in the form of a restraining order taken from her because the cops were allegedly shiftless. Rather, the citizens of her town and of Colorado were defrauded of taxes paid to provide security to the community. Taxpayers, much as we'd like to, can't sue our officials for wasting our money. But we can vote them out. Gonzalez should find herself a picture of the police chief, print up some fliers with his picture next to her kids, and invite her fellow citizens to question what their taxes are going for. And the state of Colorado could make state funding of local police departments contingent upon taking seriously the domestic violence measures it passes. This political action would have the effect of encouraging the prevention of similar future tragedies with its strong incentives for politicians to give "not my problem" cops a boot in the rear. The judicial remedy, contrariwise, with its capacity to bankrupt any city over one mistake, would in the long run lead to the multiplication of such tragedies as localities and law enforcement joined the many sectors of society that invest more in avoiding lawsuits than doing their jobs.
posted by gbarto at 3:35 PM I've got mixed sentiments on the reporter ruling. The Times has railed against Bushitler for the last five years. Now they think they live in a free country? The Supremes' ruling is a bad one, but couldn't have happened to better people. As a blogger, I'd like to be able to claim the same privileges here at my little press. I doubt the Times would file on our behalf if we were in the same situation, but I'd like to think we're bigger people here than the folks at SnobCentral. The tough thing here is that the Times always wants to stand up to the evil government this or that, but they don't want consequences. I'm free to not pay my taxes to protest the war in Nicaragua, Iraq, Germany, wherever, too. But that freedom includes the freedom to rot in jail as a prisoner of conscience if I do. I think I'd order the reporters jailed until they agreed to kick Joe Wilson in the crotch real hard for making such a fuss. I'm not sure it's justice, but it's good enough for me.
posted by gbarto at 3:26 PM You get the feeling AOL just doesn't get it. The new Supreme Court decisions are out and what are they highlighting? The 10 Commandments decision! You would think the Grokster case would be of more interest to their audience, but maybe not. Had the Supremes issued a truly earth-shattering ruling - 10 Commandments absolutely forbidden, or, maybe, required - one could understand the headlining. But the tinker at the margins decision is arguably of less moment than whether the producers of goods and services that may be used for unauthorized copying are liable for their customers' behavior. This is particularly ugly in that what we've got is an entertainment industry's efforts to boost profits by lawsuit since they're not selling their product at a price the market will bear. The other day, I was in Borders. They had a Jim Croce CD for $4. They had a selection of Bach keyboard works for $4. And they had some new CDs for $18-$22. They had DVDs for a couple old movies for $6 or $7. And the DVDs for new releases were in the $22-$35 range. What Croce, Bach and the old movies have in common is that the entertainment conglomerates don't have to pay anybody any rights or royalties. Comes the question, how much are they paying out for the rights? Does it compare to what they charge? Most entertainers say no. And given the way the market works, all Hollywood has to do is stop using the most expensive stars till their prices come down if they're really being bankrupted by the royalties and other such costs. The Supreme Court, of course, was not ruling on whether the movie and recording industry are filled with jerks who want to rip off their customers. That's self-evident. They were ruling on private property in the form of copyrighted material and how far one must go to protect Hollywood from illiberal pricing. It is true that big entertainment's wares shouldn't be stolen, which illegal downloading partially accomplishes. But it isn't true that Hollywood is losing billions. Were the copying technologies not there, most of us would find something else to do. My very first download on napster was a classical work. The publisher still held the copyright, of course. But the disc had been out of print for five years and three queries to the publisher (via Tower) about backstock copies were given the raspberry. Protecting artists' rights, etc my patootie. More like using copyright privileges to limit consumer choice to the most profitable options. Lately, there have been a few old television shows I've wanted on DVD. They don't make 'em. And you can download them. Is the entertainment industry looking at what's being downloaded to better understand what their customers want? Nah, they're just suing to make sure that if I want a new movie to watch, my choices will be The Aviator or National Monument at $25 each, without my desire to watch something decent distracting from their big promotional campaign. At least until the day when everybody involved is no longer eligible for royalties. Then it'll show up in the bargain bin. I know this is a goofy rant. And I know that it runs squarely against some of my more treasured notions about how sacrosanct property rights are. But let's face it, with enjoyment of the capitalist system's profit potential comes the responsibility to sustain that system. The entertainment conglomerates are not responding to the markets. They're not responding to customers. Hated and vilified by entertainers and audiences alike, they're suing left and right in order to claim profits on sales they never would have had when they could be doing themselves a world of good by meeting consumers halfway with better file-sharing, pricing more appropriate to what you actually get in a download, etc. If you make it easier to buy a clean copy from the entertainment company's servers at a reasonable price than to hunt around for a potentially corrupted or potentially incomplete but free copy, a lot of consumers are going to pull out the plastic for the pleasure of knowing they've got the complete, authorized version and there isn't going to be a hassle. But when your choices are to wait three weeks for Borders to tell you that you can't get what you're looking for, even for $20, but it's sitting there waiting to be downloaded for free - unless you'd rather pay top dollar for MGM's new release that you don't want but they've got fifty copies of... If we were smart, we'd take a real break from Hollywood. Skip the illegal downloads, so the entertainment industry had no cause to gripe. But skip the movies, too. Don't buy any DVDs for six months. Don't go to the movies for six months. Don't even download the latest movies for six months. I know the sixties and seventies weren't the greatest, but go on Grokster and see just how long you can get by before you feel the absolute need to purchase Hollywood's more recent offerings. When they start doing their surveys, fill in any questionairre you get. Tell 'em you'll pay $10 for a CD and $15 for a DVD and that their special feature interview with the 2nd hairdresser to the third man on the left in frame 6 doesn't justify calling it a special edition and charging $25 for "extra content." Ending the extended ramble, the Supreme Court ruling is wrong because the file sharing companies aren't doing anything wrong... We are. Not a few of us. A lot of us. The entertainment industry is wrong and stupid in its practices and deserves to lose money. But that doesn't give us a license to steal. The Supremes ruling should have set at odds the two parties truly at odds: the entertainment industry and the entertainment consumer. It should have forced the entertainment industry to have to go after the little guy with DSL and too much free time. Because our technology will be impeded, our freedom to disseminate materials will be overregulated and the whole problem of content ownership will go unresolved until the entertainment industry is forced to move from wailing in court to asking itself what happened to make it come to view its market as its enemy.
posted by gbarto at 2:31 PM |
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