Month: February 2011

A reader writes:

Malcolm Gladwell is certainly right that Twitter and Facebook are weak networks; one could never talk unwilling peripheral Facebook friends into going to Tahrir Square and facing heavily armed Mubarak thugs.  But what if you don't need to convince your audience?  What if your audience has been sitting around – for years – lamenting the regime and wishing that people would get organized and put an end to all the nonsense? 

In that case you wouldn't need a strong network for revolution, you would simply be giving the people what they want, in much the same way that a successful consumer products company doesn't build a strong relationship with a buyer of shampoo – meeting the consumer's needs (whether shampoo, or revolution) is plenty, even where close relationships don't exist.

Gladwell's observation explains well why Twitter or Facebook cannot spark revolution in a stable, developed nation like the US or Canada.  If the masses are not aligned with the objectives of the revolutionaries, no network, weak or strong, is going to get the job done. But if the masses have been privately, separately dreaming of throwing off the yolk of repression for years, simply publicizing that a million of us are meeting in the square at 7 PM is certainly enough to do the trick.

Another writes:

The obvious truth is, while Facebook networks are no doubt larger than old-fashioned networks, surely every large Facebook network is a compilation of all close friends that would also have been networked in the old world, plus a bunch of peripheral others.  Which makes one wonder how the Woolworth's protesters, to use Gladwell's example, were “better off” without Facebook: surely they would have personally contacted the same close individuals either way, but having a tool like Facebook would have opened them to a much larger pool of willing participants than simply talking to their smaller, if stronger, personal network.  That is obvious, isn't it?

Glenn reacts to being targeted by a firm that sought to retaliate against him for supporting Wikileaks:

The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it's being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is.  These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely.

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power.  I've written many times about this issue — the full-scale merger between public and private spheres –  because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics.  Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized.  There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. 

Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former.

Salon's Editor-In-Chief has background.

Nome, Alaska, 12 pm

Felix Salmon attests that the the stock market has become a less reliable proxy for the economy as a whole. Ira Stoll counters. Stoll says there are less companies in the exchange but these companies are much larger. Felix shores up his argument:

Stoll is making my point for me — that the U.S. stock market is increasingly made up of enormous and dominant companies and features ever fewer of the smaller, fast-growing companies which really drive the economy. When public companies are acquired or delisted or go bankrupt, there’s not nearly enough in the IPO pipeline to replace them. The result is a market of dinosaurs.

A still shot from an amazing promo:

For the first time, extraordinary aerial footage of one of the world's last uncontacted tribes has been released. Survival's new film, narrated by Gillian Anderson, has launched our campaign to help protect the earth's most vulnerable peoples.

Watch here.

That's how Bruce Bartlett characterizes the approach being taken by the GOP House:

One of the biggest problems we have in dealing with the budget is the gross level of budgetary ignorance on the part of the public that I detailed last week. But an even bigger problem is that Republicans in Congress appear to be just as ignorant about the actual impact of the grandiose spending cuts they repeatedly claim they are going to enact immediately. In coming weeks, everyone is going to get a very fast and very rough education on the real effects of slashing government spending.

In coming weeks we could see a dramatic turnaround in public opinion on government spending. Up until now, it has all been theoretical; Republicans could easily pander to the Tea Party crowd with big promises of shrinking government without anyone in that crowd believing that it will affect them in any way. But the fact is that millions of Americans benefit from government programs without realizing it.

Says Instapundit:

What I’d say is that for the time being at least, across-the-board cuts are better than cutting with a “scalpel.” First , scalpels aren’t good for cutting very much at a time. Second, wielded by incompetents, scalpels don’t cut any more precisely. Now, how competent do you think our political class is?

If they cut with a “scalpel,” it’ll mostly be used to carve out exceptions for favored constituencies. I’d rather see an honest axe than a dishonest scalpel.

An "honest axe" wouldn't exclude Medicare, Social Security, and the Pentagon from cuts.

Graeme Wood reports from post-Mubarak Egypt:

There have been two groups of protesters in the square: the radicals, and the tourists. The radicals shed blood and risked everything to get rid of Mubarak, and the tourists supported them but didn't show up until the danger had passed. During the heady early days of the protests, none of the radicals indicated that they would be satisfied with anything less than democracy and the most severe justice for Mubarak and his people.

Already, we've witnessed the gratifying spectacle of ex-Mubarak ministers' being denied permission to leave the country and, presumably, flee to luxurious exile. Early in the protests, Amr Bargisi warned in The Wall Street Journal that the protesters would commence a reign of terror if they won. "The next step," he said the protesters promised, "will be to knock on the doors of suburban villas and ask the owners: Where did you get the money to afford these?"

Where, then, are the Arab Jacobins, and should we fear them? The presence of elites out there, shoveling garbage with the common man, must be met with some ambivalence, I suppose: some among them are, for the moment, supporters of the revolution, and others could potentially be its victims. So far, the protesters have shown little appetite for gore and have cleared no space for a guillotine in Tahrir Square. Perhaps it is the military's role to stifle and suppress the most eager of these protesters and to allow the villa owners, many of whom have military connections, to prepare themselves for justice. The radical wing of protesters has shown little flexibility about anything so far, and eventually it will demand, in a word, satisfaction.

Ezra Klein provides one:

When House Republicans talk about cutting spending and the Obama administration talks about freezing spending, neither group is talking about the vast expanse of the government’s commitments. They’re looking at a small corner of the budget, the 12.3 percent known as non-defense discretionary spending. The stuff that’s not Medicare, not Medicaid, not Social Security or the military. It’s the odds-and-ends, so to speak.

Avent sighs:

The situation is thoroughly depressing. Washington seems to have finally gotten itself in the mood to cut deficits. Unfortunately, the cuts that result are likely to be unhelpful, or possibly counterproductive, as leaders slash useful programmes to the bone because they're too scared to talk about reining in health care spending, or cutting wasteful defence programmes, or raising taxes.

It's hard to imagine something worse than a bruising political battle that threatens to shut down the government or throw it into default. But a bruising political battle that threatens to shut down the government or throw it into default without doing a thing about the long-run budget problem would probably do it.

Jason Kottke digs out early page designs for Gawker and Gizmodo.