Month: December 2010

James Harkin views the world of Twitter diplomacy. On Iran he isn't impressed:

When you look at the figures you realise that only a very small number of Iranians were using [Twitter]. In 2009, according to a firm called Sysomos which analyses social media, there were 19,235 Twitter accounts in Iran – 0.03 per cent of the population. Researchers at al-Jazeera found only 60 Twitter accounts active in Tehran at the time of the demonstrations, which fell to six after the crackdown.There’s certainly a growing internet culture in Iran – in Blogistan, the media academics Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany estimate that there are about 70,000 active blogs in the country, including a vibrant gay blogosphere – but it’s far from being the preserve of liberal reformists….

It was more useful for the global media. ‘Twitter functioned mainly as a huge echo chamber of solidarity messages from global voices, that simply slowed the general speed of traffic,’ the authors of Blogistan conclude. On 16 June the authorities forbade journalists from covering the demonstrations without permission. Kicking their heels in their hotel rooms, most foreign correspondents began surfing through the blizzard of tweets and video clips to try and work out what was going on.

But it was all difficult to verify, and a good part was tweeted from outside the country: to add to the chaos, many overseas sympathisers had changed their location to make it look as if they were in Iran. The point – perhaps – was to confuse the Iranian authorities by opening the information gates, but the flood of unverifiable tweets may have confused the protesters too. Some of what was sent around on Twitter – the news, for example, that Mousavi had been arrested – simply wasn’t true, so the movement’s high-profile foreign supporters were often retweeting rumour and disinformation from the comfort of their desktops.

Cory Doctorow explains:

The experiment that we are presently conducting as a society is aimed at discovering what kind of information and transactions are really and truly “newspaper material” and not material that we stuffed into the margins of a newspaper because we needed it and newspapers were the only game in town. It may be that there’s nothing left when we’re done, that there’s a better way of delivering every word and every picture in the newspaper than to print it on broadsheet and fold it in eighths, in which case, newspapers may die, or they may end up being the territory of newspaper re-enactors, the equivalent of hobbyists who knap their own flint or re-enact the Battle of 1066. Or it may be that newspapers do have a small and important and moving clutch of information and stories and images that really, really are better on paper.

Maybe the audience for that will be too small and specialized to support a large business, and maybe the audience will club together and treat newspaper like a charity, the way that opera (another medium that lost a lot of its stories to more popular and hence cheaper successor media) functions today. Or maybe the cost of producing a paper will dip so low that we won’t particularly need a business to support it (Clay Shirky: “Will we still read the New York Times on paper in the future? Sure, if we print it out before reading it”). Or maybe there is a large and substantial and popular insoluble lump of newspaperstuff that no successor medium is better at hosting, a critical mass of popular material that sustains newspapers in a diminished but substantial niche, perhaps like vinyl records.

Don Taylor watches Obama:

The next big move is that of the President. Will he propose a budget to Congress that contains these hard choices, perhaps forcing continued discussion of these issues? The results of the Commission suggest there could be hope of the White House being able to work with the Senate on these issues. If they build momentum, it may become increasingly hard for the Republican controlled House to ignore things given how much Republicans have traditionally talked about deficits (they have mostly only talked, however).

A reader writes:

Have Avent and Steinglass never been to the Upper Midwest?  St Paul, Duluth, Madison, Milwaukee?  Corner pubs are everywhere. Get out of the boring Beltway and live a little.

Another writes:

Wisconsin has got to be the closest thing to the English utopia these two dudes describe.

Nearly every town in this state has more bars than churches. Breweries are in fact allowed to own pubs in Wisconsin. In Eau Claire, some of our most popular food joints are that bar around the corner.

I also think Steinglass is mistaken in thinking that this is due to national law; alcohol is typically regulated by states, and in some cases counties, in the United States.

Another:

In my home state of Wisconsin, the small town with 400 people, four churches, and four bars is almost a cliché.  I’m sure that the zoning laws in DC and thereabouts play the largest role in the demise of the corner bar there; older cities large and small have grown up with the corner bars as cornerstones.

Another:

I live in Wisconsin, and we take our kids to the bar and grills (what we call pubs) fairly often. Sometimes I take my daughter out to lunch at the local bar and grill and we sit at the bar with the daytime drinkers and eat our burgers. The local school has a fundraiser with bands at a local bar/grill attended by all the kids and parents.

Another:

In fact, in Wisconsin, if you are with your parent, you can have a beer as a ten year old!  It is a completely different culture.  I’m from neighboring Minnesota, which does very well in this category, but it does not hold a candle to Wisconsin. (This link takes you to a map of the U.S. showing cities that have more bars than grocery stores.  Wisconsin and the upper Midwest really stick out.)

Another:

You need to visit Milwaukee. We have corner bars, usually referred to as "taverns", on probably every fifth street corner in the city. This was written up in the Telegraph a decade ago:

The big brewers might have rolled out their barrels for the last time but the barmen haven't. There are a reputed 6,000 watering-holes in Milwaukee, one for every 100 residents. If James Bond style isn't your fancy there are sports bars, games bars, yuppie bars, Bavarian bars, pick-up bars, music bars and grumpy working-men's bars where no one says a word.

There are rules for drinking well in Milwaukee. The place is safe enough: its streets are wide and logically arranged, its atmosphere happy. But smart drinkers remember that it's also a big place with bars widespread on district street corners, each reflecting a micro-community. Be prepared to travel. Cabs are plentiful and five or six dollars will usually get you to the next oasis.

I invite you to come for a visit sometime and see!

Kevin Drum makes the case for the left's fiscal responsibility. Yes, compared with the Republicans, the evidence is impressive (which is why I favor an anti-debt crusade by Obama for the next two years):

At the federal level, center-left types fought an entire national election in 2000 based largely on the idea that times were good and the federal government should be accumulating surpluses. It was a pretty big deal, and as you'll recall, we center-lefties lost that election and George Bush proceeded to piss away the surplus and run up more debt than any president in history. On the spending side, center lefties recently passed a big healthcare overhaul that was largely funded by cuts in Medicare spending, and instead of applause for their fiscal sobriety they got hammered for it by Republicans during the 2010 midterms. In other words, on the federal level center-left types have proven over and over that they are willing to be pretty responsible on spending and budgetary issues despite getting clobbered for it. But the opposite isn't true of conservatives and taxes.

One need look no further than the national-level dogfight going on right now over the expiration of the deficit-busting tax cuts that originally got George Bush into the White House. No conservative who wants to win reelection even dares consider taking a responsible position on this.

But how are things at the state level? What happens when center-lefties try to restrain spending and build up surpluses during good times? They very quickly learn a harsh lesson: if you accumulate money in a rainy-day fund, conservatives will promptly demand that it be "returned to the taxpayers." That happened here in California as far back as 1978 and was a big reason for the passage of Proposition 13. And if you allow a temporary tax cut to expire, your career might be over. This happened here in California as recently as 2003, when Gray Davis got tossed out on his ear for allowing the car license fee to automatically revert to its old level when the state budget got out of balance.

Jonah Lehrer explores why we are more likely to trust people when we're holding a warm cup, and why cigarette addicts should blame the insula portion of their brains:

[The insula] detects the bodily changes associated with smoking – the escalated pulse, the slow inhalation, the slight nicotine rush – and combines those physical sensations with the idea of a cigarette. Over time, these bodily cues lead to the development of an addiction: When we crave a cigarette what we are actually craving is this sequence of fleshy feelings.

On a related note, Jon Hamilton spoke with Yale University brain scientist Ralph DiLeone on the connection between eating and addiction. DiLeone explains why the toughest habits to break can be those developed in childhood:

The motivation to take cocaine in the case of a drug addict is probably engaging similar circuits that the motivation to eat is in a hungry person. …That doesn't necessarily mean food is addictive the way cocaine is, DiLeone says, but he says there is growing evidence that eating a lot of certain foods early in life can alter your brain the way drugs do.

A new study explains:

Plucking out of line most of the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking men at the airport for heightened screening is no more effective at catching terrorists than randomly sampling everyone. It may even be less effective. … [I]t devotes heightened resources to innocent people — and then devotes those resources to them repeatedly even after they’ve been cleared as innocent the first time. The actual terrorists, meanwhile, may sneak through while Transportation Security Administration agents are focusing their limited attention on the wrong passengers.

Athens, Greece, 11.30 am

Stephen Bainbridge makes a strong case that they do. On admitting mistakes:

Let's assume arguendo that the ordinary universal Magisterium does evolve over time. Is Posner (and O'Neill) correct to think that this undermines the Church's authority? When all is said and done, after all, this is Posner's key claim.

I think the answer is no. Noonan gives three reasons to think this is so: (1) "Do parents lose or gain authority with their children when they admit to a mistake in guiding them?" (2) The American judicial system gains authority by admitting its mistakes. Indeed, contrary to Posner's apparent view as expressed by his reference to Supreme Court precedents, Noonan acknowledges that the Supreme Court makes mistakes and that its doctrines develop, but nevertheless fairly asks where "is the prestige of a judicial system higher than in the United States?" (3) No one loses respect for science, which is constantly changing its mind.

Noonan concludes: "Admitting error, the Church would not fare worse than parents, judges, or scientists, except perhaps among those who have conceived of the magisterium as a perfect machine perfectly enunciating moral truth in all ways at all times in all places."

Bainbridge also goes after Posner for asserting that the Catholic church is a corporation. 

Michael Lind defends big businesses:

It is true that 99 percent of American firms are defined as small businesses. But this is only because the federal government defines a small business as one with fewer than 500 employees. How many ordinary people think of a company with 499 employees as small?

According to Scott Shane, a leading expert on small business and entrepreneurship, medium-to-large businesses account for a disproportionate share of job creation in the U.S. Shane writes: "From 1992 through 2008, the 4 percent of small businesses that had 50 to 499 employees created 30 percent of all net jobs, whereas the 79 percent of small businesses with fewer than 10 employees created only 15 percent."