An unpatriotic thought
If it weren’t for those trouble-makers in 1776, my fireworks and barbecue would be three days earlier.
Unprophetable art
If we the infidels of the United States were actually groaning under the heel of an Islamist dictatorship, a government that dealt out harsh punishments to those it perceived as enemies of the faith, it would make sense for us, as a protest, to organize an Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Defy the regime! Fill the jails! Fight the power!
If America swarmed with jihadists who, in spite of the best efforts of the police, could execute some random sample of those who offended their religion, then an Everybody Draw Mohammed day would do nothing to stop them from killing again; it would just give them a broader selection of targets to choose from. The proper response to such a terrorist campaign would not be more drawings, but more criminal indictments against the terrorists.
Here in the real America, about five years ago, we already had a controversy over cartoons depicting Mohammed, and despite much hand-wringing from American newspaper editors (including, to their great discredit, the editors of the Boston Phoenix) along the lines of “OMG we’re afraid to publish these”, those who did publish the pictures did not suffer terrorist retaliation; the publishers were college newspapers at the University of Illinois and Dartmouth, not exactly hard targets. Here in the real America, within the past six months, we have seen one would-be terrorist set his underwear on fire and one who didn’t know how to construct a car bomb that actually exploded. I would be a lot more frightened of al-Qaeda if their Department of Exploding Human Resources could recruit some higher-quality terrorists.
If your Muse inspires you to draw a picture of the founder of Islam, your right to do so is fully protected by the First Amendment, and anyone who retaliates against your art with threats of violence should be prosecuted. But this campaign to épater les imams is not a bold strike against the forces of intolerance. At best, it’s wanking; at worst, it’s a rallying point for bigotry.
If you as a civilian are inspired to put your life on the line to defend the United States Constitution against terrorism, please consider, instead, volunteering to be an escort at an abortion clinic.
You have nothing to loose but your bowels
It appears that in honor of May Day, a major aqueduct of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has gone on strike.
Art for the country’s sake
In some parallel universe with slightly better taste than our own, this is the cover art for the May 2010 issue of Fortune, and this is the design for United States paper money.
Through brightest day, through blackest night, if evil escapes your sight it’s your own damn fault
Back during the reign of George the Younger, when public opinion on the war in Iraq began to sour, defenders of the administration would insist that really, we could coerce Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan and Iran) into becoming a peaceful and harmonious and pro-American democracy, if we only tried harder, and shame on those dirty hippies for sapping America’s mighty will. Matthew Yglesias lampooned this attitude by calling it the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics.
We lefties, members of the reality-based community, enlightened souls full of respect and compassion for other cultures, would never fall for this kind of sloppy thinking, right?
Comrades, I give you environmentally conscious movie director James Cameron, commenting on Brazil’s controversial Belo Monte dam project:
I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation. This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar – I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder.
Like Orwell’s “Big Brother” and “Newspeak”, Yglesias’s “Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics” will probably outlast this decade’s political passions, because it describes a fallacy more deeply embedded in our culture than any one party’s platform. Unfortunately.
In the meantime, I encourage Americans who regard the Lakota Sioux as human beings who aspire to prosper with their community, rather than as hopeless children of a dead-end society, to donate to the Native American College Fund.
via [redacted]’s LJ
Republican etiquette
In Japan, I am told, if someone asks you to do something, it is considered very rude to embarrass them by saying “no”. Instead, you say “that would be very hard”, or “let me think about that”, or some other euphemism for “I will accede to your request when hell freezes over”.1
In the Republican Party, when the Democrats propose a bill, it is considered very rude to embarrass your party by saying “actually I think the country was doing just fine the way it was before Obama was elected, so I will vote against any bill you care to present on this issue”. Instead…
1 Finnish culture, I am told, has the opposite quirk: if you respond to a question with “yes, but…” the Finnish listener often fails to parse the part of the sentence that begins wtih “but”. Finnish-Japanese business negotiations must be a real adventure.
via Yglesias
Annals of interethnic harmony
My younger brother once remarked to me that the most racially integrated institutions in Chicago were its street gangs. Over in the Holy Land, Jewish and Arab crooks used to do a brisk business with one another in stolen cars, although I don’t know if this is still going on.
Along the same lines, I was pleased to learn from this NYT article that when Frank Ma, “the last of the Asian Godfathers”, wanted to order a hit as a favor to a fellow Chinese gangster, he turned the job over to a team of four men, three Vietnamese and one Japanese.
Confederate necromancy
I hear that some politicians south of the Mason-Dixon line have proclaimed April to be “Confederate History Month”. The most eloquent commentary I have read on this subject comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:
The Lost Cause is necromancy—it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn’t about “honoring” the past—it’s about an inability to cope with the present.
As a bonus, for the benefit of those who are too sophisticated to believe that the Civil War was primarily a war over slavery, Coates provides choice excerpts from various states’ declarations of secession. Read, as they say, the rest.
Why your e-book really isn't worth fifteen dollars
Recently, there was a dust-up between Amazon, an information technology colossus that happens to sell books, and Macmillan, one of the six conglomerates behind just about every book published in the United States. Amazon wanted to price all of its Kindle e-books at $9.99 or less; Macmillan, not wanting e-books to undercut its sales of paper books, wanted a deal where they set the retail price and guaranteed Amazon a fixed proportion of the take. As negotiations bogged down, Amazon, no doubt wanting to Send A Message, decided to remove all Macmillan books from its catalog—not just the e-books, but the paper editions as well. At which point authors and fans whose books had been delisted Sent Their Own Message, along the lines of, Amazon, You Suck. So Amazon caved, and now Macmillan is free to offer $14.99 e-books to the masses.
Some people may wonder: why on earth should anyone pay fifteen bucks for a stack of bits that cost nigh-unto-zero to reproduce? In response to this argument, Tobias Buckell walked his readers through what it costs to publish a book, pointing out that even before you consider the cost of paper and ink and shipping, the editors and artists and proofreaders have to get paid. According to Scott Westerfeld, the cost of printing a book is between three and ten percent of list price.
I’m not going to argue with Real Authors (especially authors whose books I like) about the economics of the publishing industry, but I beg to point out that in the free market, prices are set by supply and demand. As a representative of the “demand” side, I think something is seriously amiss here.
I can’t stand to read long documents on an LCD screen, so if I’m ever going to take the e-book plunge, either laptop screens need to improve significantly, or I’m going to get an E-Ink-based reader. The Amazon Kindle and the B&N Nook both retail for $259.00. According to the Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2008, that’s double what the average American spends on reading in a year. In exchange for that $259.00, I would have free access to a whole pile of out-of-copyright and freely licensed documents in e-book form, but since I’m not reading those works now, I don’t consider that access to be worth anything to me. What about all those e-books that I can buy?
I checked out Charles Stross’s titles on both Amazon and B&N. When a Stross title is available as a mass-market paperback, the paperback almost always lists for $7.99 (B&N currently is having a “everyone gets the member rate” sale, so they are actually offering them at $7.19) and the Kindle or Nook edition almost always costs $6.39. Buckell’s Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin are available for $7.99 in either mass-market paperback or Kindle form. The books in Westerfeld’s Uglies tetrology are either $8.99 or $9.99 in paperback, depending on the title; the discount on the e-book version ranges from $1.00 to $5.77 (the latter is for the Kindle version of Extras, the most recent book in the series; I assume that’s a promotional rate).
Let’s generously assume, based on the numbers in this survey, that the e-book versions of the titles I would want to buy will sell for, on average, a $2.00 discount off their paperback prices. At that rate, I’d have to buy 130 e-books before I recoup the cost of the reader itself. And who knows how many times e-book pricing and technology are going to change before I buy another 130 books?
Wait a minute. Did I say it cost $259.00 for an e-book reader? But of course, I want to be able to share my books with my wife, and sometimes we both might want to read different books at the same time. So our household would need to get two readers, the cost of which might be recovered after buying 259 books.
And on top of that, the value to me of an e-book is less than that of a paper book, because with the Digital Rights Management built into the technology, I can’t loan my e-book to a friend (unless I bought it from B&N and the title has “LendMe™” enabled as a special feature), sell it to a used book store, or donate it to a library.
Obviously there are a few people out there who find enough other value in e-books to make them worth the money. (Best-sellers seem to have very steeply discounted e-book editions, so if you’re the sort of person who likes to read a lot of best-sellers as soon as they come out, e-books may be a reasonable choice for you.) Hopefully their dollars will sustain the industry until it can come up with a business model that makes sense to the rest of us. And perhaps there are others who thought the cutting-edge technology they bought was a wise investment, and are now fuming about how their hopes have been dashed, their expectations frustrated. All of this has happened before, and it all will happen again.
In the meantime, paper books are serving me well, so I’ll keep buying them.
Health care reform: state of play
Every once in a while my wife asks me, “So what is in this health-care reform bill, anyway, and what good will it do us?” And I usually answer something like “a hummina hummina hummina”, because with all the negotiations and plans and bills and amendments and proposals that have been floated for the past nine months, it’s hard to keep track. Fortunately, Igor Volsky, of the Center for American Progress’s “Wonk Room” blog, has compiled a handy table showing the salient differences between the bill passed by the House, the bill passed by the Senate, and the compromise that the White House has proposed today.
The common points, briefly, are:
- Everybody except the very lowest-income families, or people whose premiums would be more than a certain percentage of their income, must buy insurance.
- Most employers will be pressured to provide insurance to their employees, but the exemption for small employers and the exact form of pressure varies among the bills.
- Lower-income households would get subsidies to help them pay their premiums.
- The subsidies are financed by some combination of an excise tax on high-premium insurance plans and a tax hike for higher-income families.
- If you like your current coverage, you can keep it, and will receive additional consumer protections.
- The “donut hole” in Medicare Part D will be gradually reduced or eliminated.
