Category: Everything Else

Between Barbed Wire and Tinfoil

As William Gibson pointed out, paranoia is often narcissism. Dave Neiwert makes an excellent point today about the fine line between healthy concern and paranoia:

I recall that the right also used to claim that Clinton was not just building concentration camps, but he was also secretly wiretapping American citizens. That he was assassinating political enemies in secret. That he was remaking the presidency into a virtual dictatorship with limitless powers. All without a smidgen of anything approaching factual evidence.

And now we have a president who really is not just preparing to building mass detention centers, but who has been conducting illegal domestic surveillance, who has claimed the power to order assassinations on American soil, who does appear to be claiming limitless powers as a “wartime” executive. Is it any wonder, really, that people’s paranoia meters are running at full blast?

I remember reading some of the Y2K websites back in 1999, and was vaguely amused to find how often they would wander into “New World Order” tinfoil hat rhetoric. Just because we’re seeing similar rhetoric on the other side of the spectrum doesn’t make it more true. As always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

All of which is not to sat that there’s no potential for abuse here. There definitely is, and we need to be aware of it. But jumping to the exact same conclusions that proved to be groundless in 2000 is probably not the way to go.

CraigsList Getting Sued

This crossed my path today:

A civil rights group is suing classifieds website Craigslist for publishing what it calls discriminatory housing ads. Lawyers say some of the offending listings called for “no minorities,” or “no children.”

Other listings were more specific, “African Americans and Arabs…won’t work out,” or, “requirements: Clean Godly Christian male.”

Newspapers clearly cannot publish ads that discriminate. But Craiglist says while it asks people to read and understand the law, it cannot be responsible for ads that break that law.

Ultimately the question seems to be whether Craigslist is a publisher or a service provider. One’s protected, the other isn’t. I’d be surprised if CL doesn’t end up having to make some changes in how housing ads get posted to the site, but time will tell.

Side note — We’ve never found the Craiglist housing ads particularly helpful. All three of the places we’ve ended up renting in the Bay Area have come from other sources — the first was via a paid service, the second from the SF Chronicle ads, the third from the San Mateo Chamber of Commerce.

On Courage

The Heretik says today:

THE COURAGE TO BEGIN is one thing, the courage to continue perhaps greater.

Very true. Even the simplest acts, like starting to write, can be courageous. And we need more courage in this world.

Sometime I think fear is just as dangerous an emotion as hate.

Forget Norway

This is really getting out of hand. Cooler heads need to start prevailing, and fast.

Several thousand Syrian demonstrators set the Danish and the Norwegian embassies on fire on Saturday to protest at the publishing of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad by European newspapers.

The title of this thread comes from a Flash animated cartoon, by the way. Hopefully nobody will be offended by it.

9/11 in American History

With more than 4 years’ distance between 9/11 and today, I suppose it’s time to start asking where 9/11 fits into the larger tapestry that is American history. In the NY Times this weekend, Joseph Ellis takes the question on. He is likely to get roundly smacked in some quarters for this comment:

Where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.

And in fact, by his own definition, I’m not sure even World War II qualifies as “first tier”, because although it was a dire time for many of our allies, I am not convinced that either Germany or Japan would have been able to seriously threaten the survival of the American republic. Perhaps if the war had gone very differently, and then both countries united in an invasion attempt … but I digress.

At any rate, he’s right about 9/11. Now, saying that does not negate the fact that 9/11 was a horrible day for me personally, for the people in my life and my home town, or for the country in general. However, worse things have happened to us, and they may yet again. Demagogues use this to their advantage, though; inflating 9/11’s role in the grand scheme and trying to whip up people’s fears that ‘the terrorists’ are lurking outside their local strip malls and Wal-Marts, ready to strike at a moment’s notice with just a cell phone call from Osama.

The Heretik asks, “Where does it end?” 4+ years later, that’s a more than fair question.