Then there's the other kind of Holy Warrior

Take this op-ed author in the New York Times who seems to suggest that churches ought to be forced to perform same-sex marriages lest life-long discrimination by religious organizations continue. That's the sort of friend to the cause of gay rights that should make one prefer one's enemies. If you make it illegal to not perform same-sex marriages, Churches won't comply. They can't, since they believe that God forbids it, and if they're not there to do God's will, what the heck are they there for? Actually, if they started performing gay marriages because the state ordered them too, I'd have much less respect for them.

What do you do then? You either let them ignore the law or you start a full-scale persecution. The latter is probably the only thing that could reverse the trend towards gay equality in America at this point. What's next? Banning people expressing moral disapproval of homosexuality (however wrong-headed they may be)?

One other thing: this sort of attitude actually gives religious people a legitimate reason to oppose gay marriage (presuming their doctrine's were true in the first place, which they do). If you ask them, "What business is it of yours if I get married or not?" they can quite understandably say, "If we stand by and let you gays get married, then soon you'll be forcing us to abandon our doctrines under penalty of law."

Things are so bad...

That President Romney with a Republican congress and a closely divided Senate is one of the least bad scenarios, actually. At least Romney is reasonably intelligent, sane, and totally unprincipled (which is a good thing in the context of the radicalized GOP today). Heaven help us if Palin, or worse Bachmann, gets elected on Obama's failures. Fortunately, the primogeniture principle still exists in the Republican party, whereby the loser of the last nomination gets the nomination this time around, and the GOP has a prejudice against identity politics. The latter is a marked difference from the Democratic Party, where Hillary Clinton's campaign meant no white male, no matter how qualified, could compete against her.

Obama's Counterfactual Problem

The Atlantic makes the observation that Obama is running on counterfactuals, i.e., how much worse things would have been without him. The problem with that is first of all, as the Atlantic points out, that counterfactuals make lame arguments. The other problem with that, which they don't delve into, is that the counterfactuals also weigh against him. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the case can be made the liberalism would have been better off if McCain had squeaked through with no coattails.

Facing a heavily Democratic House and Senate, he'd not be able to accomplish much in the way of Right Wing policy and it might have moderated the GOP overall. If anything, 2010 would have made the Congress more Democratic. The economy would suck worse, as whatever stimulus got through would probably (though not certainly) be less adequate, but McCain would have taken the blame (running against the Bush-McCain economy would be political hold) As things stand, we have a crazy GOP House which is forcing through draconian cuts at gunpoint, even threatening to abolish Medicare and replace it with a private insurance voucher scheme. Obama is in real danger of taking all the blame for the Great Recession, making Bush a faint memory. We're also in real danger of getting a Republican President+Congress when we haven't even begun to heal from the disastrous Bush years. We could've had 20 years of Democratic hegemony again after the fall of John McCain.

Maybe the problem is that Obama really wasn't experienced enough. He couldn't effectively get his agenda through Congress and ended up blowing everything on a healthcare plan that most of the country dislikes and will probably either be repealed or struck down by the Supreme Court. Both the crises with the GOP House this year were eminently preventable. If he had gotten Congress to pass a budget last year (which could have been done even over filibustering if he hadn't lost the MA Senate seat over healthcare or he hadn't blown the Budget Reconciliation in the Senate on ramming through Obamacare), there would have been no shutdown showdown. And we wouldn't be under debt of default if he'd taken the sensible position of making an increase in the debt limit an absolute condition of extending the Bush taxcuts (arguing that a decrease in expected revenue requires and increase in borrowing authority).

The Religious Right fails utterly again

New York just democratically enacted gay marriage, the first large state to do so. This is likely the tip of the iceberg and further indication that gay marriage nationwide is only a matter of time. It looks again like the Religious Right has utterly failed in their goals, just like on abortion (we tend to have more liberal abortion laws than Europe, where there is very little controversy over abortion rights).

If they'd been willing to accept Civil Unions in the early 2000s, that may have led to a compromise position. It probably wouldn't have lasted long-term, both because of the pace of societal evolution and because of our countries unique experience with "separate but equal" schemes, at least not unless a constitutional amendment were passed banning gay marriage and establishing nationwide civil unions in one go. It's too late for any compromise now, though. They turned it into a Holy War and lost.

The net result of the Holy Culture Wars is electing Republican presidents who then (fortunately) do uncommonly close to nothing on the Culture Wars issues (only enough to save face and get the polarized liberal groups to condemn them as neanderthals), but do manage to give enormous tax breaks to the rich, make things much cozier for corporations, and make the US more belligerent. Funny how that works out. Nothing will change, though. The Religious Right won't accept defeat or acknowlege that society is moving past them.

The Palin soap opera just took a disturbing turn

Bristol Palin's account losing her virginity sounds like date rape. Assuming she's not exaggerating, that's terrible. I don't blame those that point out that she has a huge motivation to minimize her own responsibility (blaming it all on the boy is typical for extremely religious girls who stray and it would give her an excuse to Mom not to marry her child's father, not to mention her abstinence advocacy career...), but the author of the piece is right that we can't let ourselves fall into automatic suspicion of rape victims. Nor should we automatically assume the men they accuse are guilty without trial. She didn't accuse him of date-rape, just made it sound like it, so there won't be any trial and so we'll never know whether it's the straight up truth or not.

What's interests me more is the authors editorializing about rape and the media on the second page:

This year, for example, the House of Representatives was forced to drop language from an anti-abortion bill that would allow only victims of “forcible rape” to access federal funds for abortion after activists pointed out that all rape is “forcible.” The latest trend in misnaming sexual assault is calling some rape “gray rape,” as if being assaulted weren’t a black-and-white issue.

I get what she, and the activists she quotes, mean when they say that all rape is "forcible," but I think the category is necessary. On the one hand you have rape that is committed through the use or threat of physical violence. That's a black and white issue. On the other hand you have rape that is sexual activity with the subjective consent of both parties but where one party is not legally capable of giving consent (because they're too young, too intoxicated, etc.). That most definitely does produce gray areas at the margins. Or is the boy who just turned 18 who has sex with his girlfriend a week before she turns sixteen on the wrong side of the state line the same as the guy who forcible rapes a woman in the park? Only a moron would say so. The fact that statutory rape laws vary so widely proves that it isn't a black and white issue.

 

Will the Democrats look back and wish McCain had won?

It's a reasonable question, given the direction things are going. Obama has been a disappointment in many ways, and what's worse the nation has lurched seriously to the Right in response to lack of success in generating a strong economic recovery and his unpopular healthcare plan (which, ironically, is probably the most right-wing way of doing universal healthcare possible, originally devised by Republicans and first instituted by Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney). Now that the House is controlled by Republicans again, and crazy ones at that who are threatening to let the country go into default if their demands aren't met, which means no further stimulus is possible. The already totally inadequate recovery is sputtering, which means there's a very serious possibility that Republicans will sweep the 2012 elections--assuming Obama can't ride their delusional decision to push Paul Ryan's abolish-Medicare-and-replace-it-with-Obamacare plan all the way to reelection. It also assumes they don't give themselves another serious self-inflicted wound, such as nominated a lunatic (hello, Michele Bachman) and the Tea Party doesn't run it's own candidate (if, for example, Romney gets it, which Republican nomination history suggests he will).

There's a serious argument that McCain, hamstrung by a heavily Democratic congress, would have been the better way to go. Assuming he didn't do anything nuts, and didn't drop dead leaving Sarah Palin in charge, the practical results probably wouldn't have been that different from what we've actually gotten from Obama. We wouldn't have Obamacare, but that's quite unpopular anyway and might end up being repealed in 2013 before it is fully implemented. Also, the bad economy would have reinforced the Bush legacy and might have led to 20 years of Democratic hegemony, as happened during the Great Depression. Instead, it's putting the same people who caused the collapse back in power.

This isn't the first time that Democrats have won an election they'd have been better off losing. I doubt any liberal thinks their cause was advanced by Jimmy Carter winning the White House. Quite the opposite, dramatically so in fact. One can even make the argument that liberalism would have been better off if George H.W. Bush had gotten a second term (heck, the fact that it would've made George W. Bush much less likely to be president alone makes that idea very attractive).

I just discovered Instapaper

I first thought it was no different than using a bookmark. I was wrong. It is way better, at least if you have a mobile device of some sort. Even with just a wifi Kindle 3 I find this service amazing. I highly recommend it.

This is encouraging, though it is ultimately symbolic

Ethanol is an absurd boondoggle that does precious little except make gas and food more expensive. It takes almost as much energy to produce as it gives when burned and we need to eat corn. Corn growers love it because it jacks up the price, but other than that it's a plague on our country and does practically nothing to combat global warming or solve our energy problems.

If you really want useful ethanol, eliminate sugar tariffs and get it from there. The energy gain from sugar ethanol puts corn ethanol to shame and sugar is not a staple crop.

If Romney gets the Republican nomination, this will have to show up in attack ads

"I'm also unemployed." Being too rich to need a real job and retiring early from the governor's mansion so you can run for president doesn't really qualify as unemployed in any normal person's book. Throw in a bit about his support for making the Bush tax cuts, including the cuts in dividend taxation that he no doubt profits from significantly, and you've got political gold.

Nintendo's Wii U won't play DVDs or Blu-Rays

This isn't surprising, considering that their consoles have never been standard-media friendly. They've also consistently been a generation behind in storage capacity, though that was only really a problem with the Nintendo 64 since it opted out of the optical storage revolution and single-handedly took Nintendo from being the undisputed champion of the video game world to being an also-ran surviving solely on it's own first party franchises (which were and are extremely popular).

Nintendo's always been paranoid about piracy. That's one reason why they chose to keep cartridges in the Nintendo 64, killing their massive third-party support, and that's why they opted for funky proprietary optical solutions in the Gamecube and Wii.

The scare thing about the Republican strategy on debt...

which is to vote for ever more extreme measures that don't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law is that it might actually convince people that they're serious about reducing the deficit. Of course whenever they're really in power they run up enormous deficits (see Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser extent Bush I).

I particularly enjoyed the congressman who brought up abortion when the Democrats were pointing out how their stupid amendment would affect children. No doubt they'd do that to defend themselves if they were proposing that the children of parents who defaulted be sold into slavery to pay their creditors. The sad thing is, I think a lot of religious people would probably buy it then too. I've spent enough time on conservative religious blogs to know that nothing else matters to them. No matter what the Republicans do, many will never fail to vote for them and most of the rest will never consider voting Democrat.

Update: Okay, I've got the text of the amendment. It's basically the same idiotic supermajority requirement (with three-fifths instead of two-thirds) for tax increases and (practically) for budgets that California has (or had, they got rid of the budget part last year, thank goodness). It doesn't apply to times of war, so it's basically a dead letter since we're always at war nowadays. That makes it even dumber.

DRM for ebooks will probably be the last to go

Music DRM is already dead because it never made sense in the first place. Every work of music was and is available in a DRM-free lossless digital format called the compact disc. Music also never had a history of copy-protection. Video still has DRM, but that's because the content holders are out of touch with reality. DVDs may be DRMed, but the DRM is useless and effortlessly cracked by even a novice with an outdated computer. Video does have a long history of copy protection though, going back to Macrovision for VHS (Macrovision is still around in DVDs, but it's much better to copy DVDs digitally than by hooking a DVD player up to a DVD recorder).

Books are a whole different animal. Paper books aren't copy protected, but copying them requires a multi-stage process. The first part, scanning them, is either very labor-intensive or requires very expensive equipment. The second part, OCR, requires expensive software if you want good quality image-to-text conversion. The final part, proof-reading, is also labor-intensive. Even some publishers aren't bothering with that. The Victorian Internet, a great little book about the history of the telegraph, is one such example. It is full of blatantly obvious OCR errors in the Kindle edition. I've been meaning to complain about that, actually.

So I don't expect publishers to offer DRM-free ebooks any time soon. I suspect it will take DRM-stripping of Kindle/Nook/Etc. ebooks to become truly pervasive before it's even considered. It will also require book piracy to reach the level of music piracy.

Stallman thinks we should boycott ebooks

I don't agree with that, but I do think that DRM in general is damaging and mainly punishes people who don't pirate. All DRM can be cracked or worked around, through the analog hole if nothing else, and if there's sufficient interest in a artistic or literary work, it will become generally available on the Internet with or without DRM.

The only place where DRM makes a real difference is in less-popular works, since it increases the barrier to pirate and they might not reach the heightened threshold. Popular works will already surpass that barrier; no amount of DRM will change that. It is debatable, I suppose, whether the higher exposure easy piracy provides to lesser-known works ends up making up for the readers who don't pay.

I don't think that legalizing file-sharing and instituting a quasi-communist author-compensation scheme is the answer (enact an Internet tax and have it paid to the artists based on the cube root of their popularity on p2p, BitTorrent, etc.). I do, however, think a new model is required for the new technology.

The paywall seems to be working for the New York Times

The article-writer's snarky attitude aside, this is an interesting development. I wasn't expecting this to be positive for them any more than anyone else, at least not until I saw how porous the paywall really was. That, I think, is the key to its success: most people will never see the paywall since they barely ever read the Times except for Twitter, Facebook, and blog links, which don't trigger the paywall. The "digerati" themselves are savvy enough to set nytimes.com cookies to be session-only so their article quota resets every time they restart their web browser. I strongly suspect if they locked down the paywall and made it water-tight things would be different.

It is worth noting, though, that the biggest benefit of the paywall is to encourage more print subscriptions. One reason is that the print version comes with digital access. I guess that's okay, but it does feel like promoting obsolete technology because they haven't figured out how to make as much money on the new technology. I don't think it really is, but it feels that way.

The take-home for this is that the New York Times has hit on a winning formula for general interest newspaper paywalls. Let's hope they don't change it.

It certainly does seem like the Libya no-fly zone is illegal

It is inexplicable that the Obama administration hasn't come to Congress for authorization. If they refused to give it, or if they tried to hold it hostage, it would be almost as big a political gift to Obama as the Medicare abolition plan.

It just goes to show: presidents usually work to increase executive power. They will almost NEVER decrease it, especially when doing so is controversial. Alas, I doubt the Republican House will do anything serious to curtail executive power. They are, as ever, too invested in having it when they get back into the White House and they are full of full-fledged militarists.

Rand Paul advocates jailing attendees of radical rallies

This is quite incredible. He specifically referred to "someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government" as being someone who "should be deported or put in prison." Even putting aside his own flirtation with such rhetoric, as referenced at the end of the linked post, tons of his and his father's supporters would be open to prison-terms if "attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government" were to be made a crime. I guess it goes without saying that he only intended this to be applied to non-Christians.

OpenOffice.org to be handed over to Apache

I suspect this will lead to option number 2 of my predictions of OpenOffice's future being the case. Assuming the two projects don't find a way to run in parallel (with improvements of one being implemented in the other and vice-versa) or compete with each other until both flounder. The latter seems unlikely, because I have a hard time seeing anything else taking OpenOffice/LibreOffice's particular niche. Commercial software certainly can't, and I don't think Google Docs really fits in that space either. Aside from change-tracking and collaboration (which are phenomenal), Google Docs is too primative currently and doesn't work offline anymore (though that's expected to change sometime in the future).