The NRA wants the government to ease up on gun silencer regulations. Goldblog is against the idea:
Silencers, in civilian life, have an important purpose — to help criminals commit violent crimes without drawing too much attention to themselves. A person defending his or her home from a violent criminal does not need a silencer. Quite the opposite — the sound of a racked shotgun (as Joe Biden will attest) is often enough to scare an intruder out of your house, without a shot being fired.
Jeffrey Goldberg has decided to quit blogging soon in favor of column-writing and more long-form writing for the magazine. The Dish mourns. But the reason Jeffrey was such a good blogger is that he was not very capable of editing himself – and so perhaps felt dragged into energy-draining spats more often than he wanted. He makes a distinction between the Atlantic.com and the Atlantic as a magazine. As the former has begun to undermine the integrity of the latter – can you imagine the magazine printing a paid-for essay by the head of Scientology? – I can see his point.
There was a time when the Atlantic.com was based around a group of bloggers. That began to end while I was there. And it’s pretty clear at this point that that moment is now formally over. It’s mainly verticals, sponsored content, and aggregation mills. But we still have Fallows, Madrigal and TNC.
Readers push back against my push-back:
Blegh. What about Republican gay-bashing couldn’t be described as part of their “war with the left”? How can we accept your Thatcherian position in the context of your uncompromising hate-fest for Bill Clinton?
The gay movement won in America because it eventually eschewed the kind of hate-politics that dominated the British left for ages. I have also had plenty of good things to say about Bill Clinton’s presidency, from welfare reform to fiscal balance. It remains a fact that he was substantively the most anti-gay president in US history. Preventing gay left propaganda in high schools in the 1980s is not the same as signing a bill that barred non-Americans with HIV from even entering the country, doubling the rate of gay discharges from the military, and signing the Defense of Marriage Act a decade later. Another quotes me:
A “fanatical devotee of the rule of law,” indeed. In that list of quotes on the Telegraph.co.uk was the line, “love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.” This from a woman whose government banned Gerry Adams‘ voice from being broadcast on radio and television and banned his travel to mainland Britain. Whatever you may think of Adams and irrespective of Sinn Féin’s abstention from Westminster, she denied the people of West Belfast their democratically elected voice. How does that chime with your support for Freedom of Speech?
Banning a terrorist from entering your country is not an attack on free speech. The other point is fair game. But it is also undeniably true that Thatcher’s breaking of the print unions was a boon for the media industry. I certainly don’t think this even begins to compare with the new era of p.c. censorship that has occurred since – in which even “insulting” remarks about religion were once banned in the UK. Another fact-checks me:
In your video where you respond to several dissents to your posthumous praise of Thatcher, you defend her decisions regarding Bobby Sands and other IRA hunger strikers at the Maze Prison in Belfast. You argue that her actions were understandable due to the IRA’s previous attempt on her life in 1980 when the IRA bombed a hotel where she and other MPs were staying during the Conservative Party’s annual conference in the UK.
Your history here, however, is exactly backwards.
Bobby Sands died in 1981 as a result of his hunger strike. The Brighton Hotel bombing occurred in 1984. Indeed, Patrick Magee, the IRA terrorist (or “Freedom Fighter,” take your pick) responsible for the attack later stated he did it, at least in part, due to Thatcher’s refusal to recognize Sands and the other Maze hunger strikers as political prisoners. So, if you want to find some justification for Thatcher’s actions toward the Maze hunger strikers in 1981, you need to look somewhere other than the 1984 Brighton Hotel Bombing, which, I agree, was an odious and cowardly act.
Also, to the extent you suggest human rights violations in Northern Ireland pre-dated Thatcher’s premiership and stopped once she assumed office, I believe you are incorrect about that, too. For that, you might look to the Stalker Inquiry, which closely examined these issues (or see Ken Loach’s film Hidden Agenda). For my $40 payment per year, I figure I am entitled to fact-check you every once in a while.
You are indeed, and I’m grateful. I got my chronology wrong in an extemporaneous video. But her closest parliamentary ally, Airey Neave, was murdered by the IRA in 1979, which no doubt affected her. Throughout the 1970s, the IRA bombed London and murdered civilians in pubs and department stores. But there was no torture under Thatcher, and the Stalker Inquiry was about shoot-to-kill policies – and its conclusion was that there was no official backing of the policy but unofficial tolerance of it. The year after the Brighton bombing, Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement that paved the way for the Good Friday accords. Another reader:
You were plain wrong and more than a bit flippant (did we have to have that little giggle about Bobby Sands’ death?) about the IRA’s interaction with Maggie. Your comment “allow the guy to die” indicates you do not remember (I prefer that to “never knew”) that 10 young men died in that spring and summer of 1981 so that Maggie could look macho and continue to treat them as “criminals” instead of the political prisoners they clearly were.
I’m a Northern Irish “cradle” Catholic brought up in the anti-British Republican Irish tradition but I have never had any truck with political violence. The Irish, like the Scots, the Welsh and a large section of the Northern English, had a clear sense that she felt that they clearly were “not one of us”, in her own words. Maggie eventually got it right with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement with the Republic of Ireland in 1985 which led eventually to the peace process under Tony Blair.
A few things. If you have no truck with political violence, then I do not understand how a cop-killer and embedded member of a terrorist organization, the IRA, is somehow a political prisoner, and allowed privileges other prisoners did not have. The hunger strike was an attempt to get themselves re-designated as POWs – and to bring publicity to their cause. Not giving in to their demands was not about being macho. It was about the rule of law.
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Syrian rebels observe the movement of Syrian government forces around Al-Kendi hospital in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on April 10, 2013. The United States is mulling ways to step up support for the Syrian opposition, a top US official said, as US Secretary of State John Kerry and G8 ministers were to meet rebel leaders. By Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images.
Whether or not companies can hold onto your data forever has become a pressing question for advocates of online privacy. One of those advocates is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, who tells Kate Connolly that being able to forget something is an essential part of being human:
Our brains reconstruct the past based on our present values. Take the diary you wrote 15 years ago, and you see how your values have changed. There is a cognitive dissonance between now and then. The brain reconstructs the memory and deletes certain things. It is how we construct ourselves as human beings, rather than flagellating ourselves about things we’ve done.
But digital memories will only remind us of the failures of our past, so that we have no ability to forget or reconstruct our past. Knowledge is based on forgetting.
His solution?
Mayer-Schönberger, who advises companies, governments and international organisations on the societal effects of the use of data, advocates an “expiration date” (a little like a supermarket use-by date) for all data so that it can be deleted once it has been used for its primary purpose. “Otherwise companies and governments will hold on to it for ever.”
Josh Keating explores the complications:
More media is moving online, and digital records will increasingly be the only ones available.
If a politicians made racist comments in a newsletter in the 1980s, the record has hung around for future journalists to discover. Should they be allowed to disappear just because they’re written on a blog?
Responding to the objection that Google’s backups will make full deletion impossible, Mayer-Schönberger says “But if you can be deleted from Google’s database, ie if you carry out a search on yourself and it no longer shows up, it might be in Google’s back-up, but if 99% of the population don’t have access to it you have effectively been deleted,” he said.
Under this scenario, Google would have access to information that 99 percent of the population didn’t. Right to be forgotten laws may aim to empower users, but it seems to me that they would leave the search engines with the power in the relationship.
Rise and shine with the Norwegian band Real Ones:
Real Ones – Separation Blues from André Chocron // Frokost Film on Vimeo.
New e-textbooks are making it harder for students to skip or skim reading assignments:
A startup named CourseSmart now offers an education package to schools that allows professors to, among other things, monitor what their students read in course textbooks as well as passages they highlight. … [P]rofessors attribute students’ low grades to the CourseSmart-provided proof that the student never, or rarely, opened their books. The engagement index shows not only what, but when, students are reading, so if they opt not to peruse the textbook until the day or night before a test, the professor will know.
Pierre Tristam worries about this “policing by data”:
Reading is one of the few truly private activities left us, depending entirely on the isolation created between book and reader, and the way the reader chooses to engage with that book: reading a page over five times, skipping five pages, underlining five lines, cursing at five others. … How you read a textbook is irrelevant. If you’re performing well in class, that’s all that should matter.
Update from a reader:
Speaking as a professor, I imagine you’d have to be pretty bad at your job to use that data to evaluate students. What I mean by that is that a professor has a lot of responsibilities besides teaching, and every minute spent grading is a minute not spent on something else that’s at least equally important. Why waste time looking at data that can only possibly give you a rough assessment of students, when you have other data (homework, exam, participation) that give you a much more direct assessment? I’d only do that if I didn’t have any other responsibilities – but I’d only not have those other responsibilities if I wasn’t a very good professor in the first place.
A big friggin’ laser:
Ackerman throws cold water:
The Navy won’t say just how many kilowatts of energy the LaWS’ beam is, but it’s probably under the 100 kilowatts generally considered militarily mature. The fact that LaWS can kill a surveillance drone and a fast-attack boat has more to do with the vulnerabilities of those systems than it its own prowess. It cannot stop an anti-ship missile, and its beam, about the circumference of a dime, will do little more than singe a fighter jet. And there remain significant challenges with cooling a shipboard high-energy laser, a necessary safety feature.
But [Adm. Jonathan] Greenert, [Rear Adm. Thomas] Eccles, and [Rear Adm. Matthew] Klunder are confident that the next wave of Navy lasers will be more powerful.
One advantage of the new weapon is that it’s cheap to fire:
Since it runs on electricity, it can fire as long as there is power at a cost of less than $1 dollar per shot.
John McWhorter doubts that replacing the term “illegal immigrant” with “undocumented immigrant” will “improve the public opinion of the people in question”:
The problem is that language dances much more lightly on thought than we often suppose, and in a battle between thought and language, thought has a way of winning out. Words’ meanings, even when crafted to bend away from opinion, drift back to where we didn’t want them to be, like a fly keeps landing on you after you swat it away. This has happened to previous attempts to expunge a term of its negative meaning.
Consider affirmative action, now so conventional we rarely stop to parse what the actual words comprising it mean. “Affirming” what? What kind of “action”? The term was a magnificently artful and gracious construction of the 1960s, giving a constructive, positive air to an always controversial policy.
McWhorter makes related points elsewhere:
Decrying the designation of the people as illegal is like trying to put out a housefire with an eyedropper: language’s record on seriously transforming thought is scanty indeed. Many will recall UC Berkeley’s George Lakoff suggesting back in the Bush era that we call taxes “membership fees.” Clever—but how many think the current impasse between Democrats and Republicans over tax hikes would be any less intransigent today if the President were engaging John Boehner in a debate over membership fees?
Ashley Fetters points out that the real-life history of Madison Avenue doesn’t bode well for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce if the show heads into the ’70s:
In real life, the relationship between the public and the advertising industry hit the skids in the 1970s. Public opinion turned negative toward consumer marketing, and a widespread crackdown on false and misleading ads ensued. …
[I]n 1969, Ralph Nader published his controversial Nader Report on the Federal Trade Commission, a project in which Nader and seven law-student volunteers exposed the general laziness of the FTC in protecting consumers from false advertisements and fraud. Their report condemned suggestive ads, deceptive or false claims in TV commercials and print ads, and the diversion of attention away from unappealing information (such as the unpleasant side effects of a drug, or the health risks of cigarettes). In order to ensure that consumer deception was exposed, disciplined, and fixed, Nader and his team of “Nader’s Raiders” called for “alert and extensive monitoring operations with pre-screening by expert engineers, doctors, and professionals.”
The Dish 