Month: January 2011

by Patrick Appel

The history of hip-hop through beat box:

(Hat tip: Like Cool)

by Conor Friedersdorf

Over at Whiskey Party, there's a post up detailing an industry backlash against whiskey bloggers:

According to Forbes (ironically a whisky blogger himself for online retailer The Whisky Exchange), whisky bloggers are social misfits harboring grudges and hurling insults from the bowels of their parents’ basement.  Yet they are also “shameless bootlickers” happy to write a good review in exchange for free samples and a chance to climb their  way into the industry.   They are disproportionately powerful techno-geeks capable of warping the Google rankings for their own nefarious purposes.  Yet they are also insignificant know-nothings, and a flash-in-the-pan best ignored by our betters.

They are self-styled digital emperors, unfairly breaking the industry’s tidy monopoly on criticism & marketing, in which, “only a few years ago there were only a few people to keep happy: a long-established coterie compromising a handful of 5-star hotel managers and a few highly-qualified specialist journos.”

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? If the whiskey world is anything like the journalism world, the blogs are here to stay. The balance of the post explains how technology is changing the spirits industry.

by Zoe Pollock

Rob Horning explains the new Facebook ad system which they're calling “Sponsored Stories”:

You, in the course of innocently and eagerly “sharing” updates about the wonderful products and services in your life, craft a magical “story” for your “friends,” and advertisers would like to help your “story” reach more of your “friends” by co-opting it and featuring it more prominently on others’ home pages. (Sorry for the Carles level of scare quotes, but social media’s aggressive transvaluation of the language of intimacy seems to necessitate them.)

Horning sees the potential for the ultimate marketing technology loop:

Facebook already filters potential content from your friends, using algorithms to generate what it thinks you should see. The existence of these algorithms invites efforts to game them, to figure out what will get your update noticed and disseminated the most. Sponsored Stories supplements the algorithms, giving users a chance to jump the line, to craft their updates more like marketing, so they will receive wider play. This then feeds the loop, making personal disclosures seem ever more like marketing, implying that they should be mined even more thoroughly for their advertising potential.

by Patrick Appel

Inspired by this post, a reader writes:

My sister once lost several dozen pounds after writing a large check to the David Duke campaign and giving the check to my brother with instructions to mail it if she didn't lose the weight by a set date. It worked.

South Park Slope, Brooklyn, 11 am

by Chris Bodenner (as in, my backyard)

More views of the latest NYC snowstorm after the jump:

East Village, 12 pm

Staten Island, 11.29 am

Park Slope, 11.30 am

Upper West Side, 7.33 am

by Conor Friedersdorf

I see Ezra Klein's point when he writes this:

A decent future includes China's GDP passing ours. They have many, many more people than we do. It's bad for both us and them if the country stays poor. A world in which China becomes rich enough to buy from us and educated enough to invent things that improve our lives is a better world than one in which they merely become competitive enough to take low-wage jobs from us — and that's to say nothing of the welfare of the Chinese themselves…

In the best global economy we can imagine, the countries with the largest GDP are the countries with the most people. That's not America. And that's okay. We want America to have the most innovative and dynamic economy in the world, and we want living in America to be better than living anywhere else. But we don't want everywhere else to remain poor. We can't want that.

Still, I think he's fallen prey to ahistorical, pollyanna-ish thinking. In 1939, the USSR had more people in it than the United States. In the decades that followed, was it a good thing or a bad thing that the USA retained the biggest economy? By Ezra's logic, it was a bad thing. I'm not suggesting the post-war USSR and contemporary China are analogous – just that the geopolitical features of a country are factors to consider when deciding whether to hope for its economic might to surpass our own.

If China has a peaceful rise to world's biggest economy and doesn't export its creepy brand of authoritarianism elsewhere as a consequence of its supremacy, then sure, I'm with Ezra. But we won't know for a long time if that's what is going to happen – and if China being the biggest dog means that it'll subsume Korea, Tawain and Japan three or four decades from now, I can't help but think that the world would be better off if the United States (or hey, India) ended up on top.

Ezra continues:

…perhaps it's better to think of it in terms of Britain rather than China. Was the economic rise of the United States, in the end, bad for Britain? Or France? I don't think so. We've invented a host of products, medicines and technologies that have made their lives immeasurably better, not to mention measurably longer. We're a huge and important trading partner for all of those countries. They're no longer even arguably No. 1, it's true. But they're better off for it.

Perhaps it is better to think of it that way – or perhaps it's better to ask if the rise of Germany in the end proved bad for Britain or France or Poland, or if the rise of the United States proved beneficial to Mexico (maybe!) or Columbia… or if the rise of the USSR proved beneficial to its neighbors. Don't get me wrong. We should trade with China, maintain good relations, and create incentives for a peaceful rise, insofar as it's within our control.

But even perfect geopolitical gamesmanship on our part is no guarantee of a huge rising power's future intentions, as all of world history demonstrates. It isn't callous to be wary of China's rise – it is prudent, and perfectly consistent with earnestly wanting always improving lives for the Chinese people.

by Chris Bodenner

Disturbing news out of Uganda:

On Wednesday afternoon, [gay rights advocate David] Kato was beaten to death with a hammer in his rough and tumble neighborhood. Police officials were quick to chalk up the motive to robbery, but the small and increasingly besieged gay community in Uganda suspects otherwise. “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S Evangelicals in 2009,” said Val Kalende, the chairperson of one of Uganda’s gay rights groups, in a statement.

Joe My God has more on that connection:

The inspiration for Uganda's gay death penalty bill, and surely, Kato's murder, arises from the work of American evangelists, chief among them the repulsive anti-gay activist Scott Lively, whose infamous book The Pink Swastika blames the rise of the Nazi Party and the Holocaust on gay men. One year ago, the New York Times profiled Lively's hand in Uganda's burgeoning pogrom against homosexuals, which began after Lively hosted a three-day meeting attended by thousands of Ugandan police, teachers, and politicians. … Also complicit in this murder is Peter LaBarbera, who for years has worked to publicize and praise Scott Lively's evil agenda. Then there's Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council, who last year paid lobbyists $25,000 to convince members of Congress to block a planned resolution denouncing Uganda's gay death penalty bill.

Burroway highlights a more direct connection:

[Kato] was one of the plaintiffs (or applicants) in the successful lawsuit seeking a named by the tabloid under a headline tagged “Hang Them!” His photo appeared on the tabloid’s front cover. …

The following is a press release from Sexual Minorities Uganda: … David has been receiving death threats since his face was put on the front page of Rolling Stone Magazine, which called for his death and the death of all homosexuals. David’s death comes directly after the Supreme Court of Uganda ruled that people must stop inciting violence against homosexuals and must respect the right to privacy and human dignity.

GayUganda is in shock.

by Conor Friedersdorf

I'm more puzzled than anything by this Barbara Ehrenreich op-ed:

Why are Americans such wusses? Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans' jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. 

Is someone taking away the 401(k)s of Americans? Would street protests somehow salvage the jobs of those who've lost them in the recession? For that matter, have street protests done anything to improve the lives of the Greeks engaged in them?

Here is Michael Lewis describing the economic situation in Greece:

In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d returned from the I.M.F.’s first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”

I invite you to read the rest. It's as good as everything Lewis writes, and sufficient to show why it is lazy, amateurish journalism to act as though our countries are in analogous situations right now – as if the fact that Greeks are protesting in the streets and Americans aren't shows that our people are wusses (or anything else).

The piece proceeds to bash Glenn Beck and the commenters at his Web magazine. I can't disagree there, but again, you're drawing sweeping conclusions about America as a whole from a fever swamp Web comments section?

And then we come to the main argument:

During the depression of 1892 to 1896, unemployed workers marched to Washington by the thousands in what was then the largest mass protest this country had seen. In 1932, even more jobless people — 25,000 — staged what was, at that time, the largest march on Washington, demanding public works jobs and a hike in the inheritance tax. From the '60s to the '80s, Americans marched again and again — peacefully, nonviolently and by the hundreds of thousands — for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, economic justice and against wars. In fact, this has been a major focus of Piven's scholarly work over the years — the American tradition of protest and resistance to economic injustice — and it's a big enough subject to keep hundreds of academics busy for life.

There are all kinds of explanations for how Americans lost their grass-roots political mojo: iPods have been invoked, along with computer games and anti-depressants. And of course much of the credit goes to the so-called populist right of the Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck persuasion, which argues that the real enemy of the down-and-out is not the boss or the bank but the "liberal elite" represented by people like Piven.

But at least part of the explanation is guns themselves — or, more specifically, the recent and uniquely American addiction to high-powered personal weaponry. Although ropes and bombs are also mentioned, most of the people threatening Piven on Beck's website referred lovingly to their guns, often by caliber and number of available rounds. As Joan Burbick, author of the 2006 book, "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy," has observed, "The act of buying a gun can mimic political action. It makes people feel as if they are engaging in politics of political protest."

Where to begin?

– The subset of Glenn Beck Web commenters who issue threats is perhaps the shoddiest data set in the history of bullshit extrapolation. Really, this is embarassing.

– Decades later, it's easy to romanticize protests where American laborers took to the streets in times of economic turmoil. But as I well know from reading up on Depression-era labor strikes in California alone, those events were often driven by the desperation of people without anything resembling the safety net Americans enjoy today, and they often turned violent, sometimes due to rabble rousing protestors, other times because of overzealous riot police. Street protests themselves signal a failure of politics and policy, not a triumph.

– Say what you will about Glenn Beck, but it's odd to criticize him for lessening the grass-roots mojo of Americans: he's the guy who filled the national mall with his fans, a huge backer of Tea Party rallies all over the United States, and the inspiration for the Jon Stewart counter-rally for that matter. What a weird moment to write a long piece about how Americans aren't taking to the streets anymore.

– Given the membership of the NRA and the profile of Tea Party demonstrators, it sure seems to me like gun owners are more likely to engage in politics in addition to buying guns, not less likely because they feel as if they've already said their piece by arming up.

In conclusion, Ehrenreich writes:

…there is one thing you can accomplish with guns and coarse threats about using them: You can make people think twice before disagreeing with you. When a congresswoman can be shot in a parking lot and a professor who falls short of Glenn Beck's standards of political correctness can be, however anonymously, targeted for execution, we have moved well beyond democracy — to a tyranny of the heavily armed.

What nonsense. An American street protestor today, whether on the right or left, is significantly safer from physical violence than the Civil Rights era protestors or the kids at Kent State or the San Francisco dockworkers or Salinas lettuce strikers of the Great Depression. Then there's the invocation of the 1890s.

Here's a description of that protest:

Although Coxey’s Army was only one of more than forty different armies of the unemployed that headed for Washington, D.C., in 1894 to seek relief from their plight, it was by far the best known. Its leader was the colorful Jacob S. Coxey, a wealthy Populist who owned a sand quarry, bred horses, and wore hand-tailored suits. The publicity that preceded the arrival of the “armies” apparently frightened authorities. Fifteen hundred soldiers were stationed in Washington to meet the army; thousands more were available in Baltimore, Annapolis, and Philadelphia in anticipation of further trouble. But the army that arrived on May 1, 1894, numbered only 500. When Coxey tried to speak at the U.S. Capitol, police arrested him for walking on the grass.

Ah, the good old days before Glenn Beck and his coterie of armed Internet commenters scared us into submission.

by Patrick Appel

Larison's view of Lebanon's new PM:

 [W]e should observe that a lawful, basically peaceful change in government in Lebanon that benefits a political coalition Westerners dislike is not the end of the world, nor is it even necessarily that bad for Lebanon. No one has “lost” Lebanon, because Americans never possessed Lebanon. It is not ours to lose. 

(Photo: Supporters the outgoing Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri gather at his father Rafiq Hariri's Mausoleum in downtown Beirut during a peaceful protest on January 26, 2011. Lebanon's new Hezbollah-backed premier-designate was readying for talks on forming a government as rivals called for daily sit-ins against the mounting power of the Shiite militant party. By Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images)

by Conor Friedersdorf

In a prior post, I wrote:

I’d suggest that folks who use this silly knife and bazooka analogy reflect on the politicians who are elected in the United States. Check out our presidents and senators. You won’t find a lot of people who take the bazooka approach to public discourse. Angry, self-righteous bile spewing isn’t actually effective.

A writer at Balloon Juice replies:

What would you call the Willie Horton ads, what would you call the Swiftboat ads, what would you call the “Daisy” ads? I get that in each case, the presidential candidate didn’t get tough with anybody, Mr. Gittes, his ad men did, but that’s a meaningless distinction, especially since young Conor is arguing against the political value of Keith Olbermann here.

Here's a short clip that includes the Willie Horton and Revolving Door ads. Its critics object that it subtly played on the racism and racial anxiety of Americans – its tone isn't self-righteous or bile-filled, however contemptible it is.

The Daisy Ad is here. Again, you don't see a candidate persuading voters by being angry and vitriolic. What you have is someone playing on the fears that his opponent is going to start a nuclear war. That's why, instead of Lyndon Johnson facing the camera and shouting at the top of his lungs, "THAT NO GOOD LUNATIC BARRY GOLDWATER IS GONNA GET US ALL KILLED," we see a little blond girl plucking petals from a flower.

Now watch the Swift Boat Captains For Truth ad. Do the veterans get angry? Do they shout and bloviate? In fact, they act as if they are hurt – as if they are pained by John Kerry's betrayal, and speaking out more in sorrow than anger.

I did not claim that lies don't work in political advertising, or that it is always ineffective to play on the fears and prejudices of voters. What I said is that angry, self-righteous bile spewing isn't effective – that is why you don't see politicians engage in it very often. When a politician knows he will be associated with an ad, it looks like this: