Tabloids in the culture wars: What's wrong with AMI?

You know, I think American Media Inc. has gone too far this time. They've always angled towards a distinctly right-wing audience (although the Weekly World News alone among all their papers discovered the value of not taking itself seriously), but they've gone over the deep end lately.

The Sun and the Enquirer don't seem to have had much to say so far, but the Globe for the last two weeks has been running with the long-discredited meme about Obama not being a native-born American, while the Examiner ran a breathless piece about "gay terrorists" being responsible for torching Sarah Palin's church in Alaska. I'm of two minds about this -- on the one hand, people are conditioned not to take AMI rags all that seriously (the Enquirer, sketchy as it is, is the only one worth a damn journalistically, and that isn't saying much), but on the other hand they have a huge and frequently gullible readership. Asking AMI to practice responsible journalism is perhaps a bit extreme, but at the same time it seems hard to justify printing outright fearmongering and hatred.

I'd suggest boycotting, but unlike my grandmother (who was a regular Enquirer reader, much to the bemusement of my mother), I don't think I've ever actually spent money on one. So I don't know...

The banished words list. Woo-hoo, let's start the year with some language snobbery.

Lake Superior State's Banished Words List

Oh boy. Yet another opportunity to grouse about words we're kind of tired of hearing and neologisms that we somehow don't think are necessary. Hell, I bet they think they're a bunch of mavericks, like William Safire. Eh, not so much.

On "The Christmas Shoes"

I had managed to go my entire life until last week never having heard that odious crapfest of a song. Despite my best efforts to avoid its creepy, manipulative, heart-cloggingly schmaltzy lyrics, I've had to hear it twice in the last week. I can only say this:

Take away the lyrics and the Christianity, and this is still an unbelievably shitty piece of late-90s MOR crap, missing only the obligatory gratuitous saxophone stings. If there were no words, this piece of shit song would still make me want to pound crucifixion nails into my ears just listening to the instrumental. It is a perfect shitstorm of crap and should be pulled from the airwaves and every copy microwaved to a sparkly polycarbonate cinder.

For brain bleach (albeit weak), an interesting mediocrity and the bizarre treatment of a well-established alt-music artist: a dance diva who is smoking hot despite having pronounced thighs and no waist to speak of. Also, from a few weeks ago, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon comments on the shafting of Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls by her label for having a supposedly less-than-perfect body. A tale of two record labels it seems.

Where Matt Nisbet fails

I've been a regular reader of ScienceBlogs for about two years and I've always found Matt Nisbet's Framing Science blog to be something of an oddity on that site. Nisbet and Chris Mooney (of The Republican War On Science fame) have been pushing a concept of science framing that has rubbed a lot of people in the science and skeptical community the wrong way, since it seems to be unrelentingly accommodationist, and tends to prefer subtle ways of undermining people's prejudices. Overall, Mooney (and his blog partner Sheril Kirshenbaum) is actually quite an enjoyable writer, and although I may disagree with his concept of framing he's mostly fairly reasonable. Nisbet, however, is another story.

Nisbet has made quite a few enemies on ScienceBlogs (including PZ Myers, Mike the Mad Biologist, and PalMD), and has even alienated people like Orac who sympathize with his aims but don't like his approach. But now I think he's worn out his welcome, at least in this lurker's eyes; he has tried to make the case that the term "denialist" is a Godwin. Wait, what?

He's completely serious about this -- claims that we shouldn't use it because it lumps in creationists, anthrogenic global warming deniers, germ theory deniers, etc, etc, etc with Holocaust deniers. And he actually quotes people who fall into one or another category of denialism to support this. Mark Hoofnagle at ScienceBlogs' awesome Denialism Blog responds. Hoofnagle's response, as well as his analysis of Nisbet's unrelenting obtuseness and evident incompetence as an expert in communications, is pretty much as you'd expect, and I more or less agree. I posted the following on Nisbet's response to attacks on his position, which seems to be little more than the old conservative canard that amounts to "I may be wrong, but at least I'm more civil than you":

Matt, if there's one thing I've noticed about your work it seems to involve bending and accommodating, defending and (attempted) desensitizing, but it constantly and consistently shies away from going on the attack and trying to reclaim the high ground from the anti-intellectuals and shills who have stolen it. We've seen from the last three US Presidential elections that your strategy tends to fail miserably in politics; the main reason Obama succeeded where Kerry failed had at least as much to do with promoting his message in states where no one expected it to take hold as it did any of the candidate's personal charisma (even though Obama has way more of it than Kerry).

It's as if you're teaching an MBA course and telling your students the importance of turning a profit without explaining how to create income. There are no tools for success in your concept of framing, only those to keep the skeptical side from being marginalized too quickly. (And not only that; you've shown yourself to be terrible at the very communication skills you're trying to convince people to have.)

What was so great about esr, anyway?

Seriously. I look back on it and realize that my first post here about him aside, really I've only ever lined up with him on one issue, the value of open source software. On that he's pretty sensible, but the man has completely lost his fucking mind, stuck somewhere between libertarian and neocon.

He opposes net neutrality and he's bought into a lot of the right-wing talking points about Obama. The latter is pretty ridiculous; though he doesn't go so far as to buy into the hysteria of Obama's "associations" with terrorism or his alleged religious preferences, he is completely sold on the whole ACORN lie. But the net neutrality thing -- that's a headscratcher from a practical standpoint. To him it makes sense -- he proposes working around the current internet situation with things such as white space and mesh networking. Uh...

Well, there's more to it than those two, but think about just those items. White space networking does not even exist yet in any meaningful sense; IEEE 802.22 has existed for four years and I had never heard of it until just now looking up the Wikipedia article above. As for mesh networking, well... it's a nice thing overall, and an important part of the OLPC initiative, but when you get right down to it, mesh networking is little more than a hardware-level elaboration on UUCP. Store-and-forward (even if it's almost realtime) is, by its very nature, ad hoc, and -- here's the kicker -- it still has to go out to the public network somehow. You can't route around it, simply because that's where all the content is. White space is fine as well -- I can think of at least a few good uses -- but the very agency that is making the white space initiative possible, the FCC, is one of the agencies that libertarians like Raymond want to get rid of.

I don't know what kind of world libertarians think they're out to create, but Raymond's idea of dealing with a lack of net neutrality regulations really seems to eventually lead to the same sort of corporatist, quasi-feudalistic society that every other libertarian plan seems to. (For that matter, I'm not sure which is worse -- if most libertarians don't realize this, or if they do.) I do know that there is one hell of a lot of rank dishonesty in the anti-net neutrality crowd (comparing it with the fairness doctrine? what the hell?!), but I'm inclined to think that people who take a stand like Raymond's -- principled, but completely and absolutely bonkers (not to mention breathtakingly ignorant for someone who has for years sought but never quite attained the status of alpha hacker except as a historian of the field) -- do more good for the pro-neutrality side by coming to conclusions that make no sense except in light of their fringe politics.

White space networking will be great. (And I'm hoping for some 4m amateur radio as well.) Mesh networking isn't too shabby either. But let's not kid ourselves -- a future of tiered public net service and a cluster of second-class users skulking around on darknets isn't the connectivity DARPA was hoping for when they opened the net to all comers.

Eight years redux

In the world of the blogosphere, there's usually someone better-spoken and more popular who probably said what you intended to say better than you did.

The Rude Pundit, in this case, is that person.

The day after

A few things:

• The John McCain we all thought we knew returned for the concession speech last night. Unfortunately, his thuggish supporters showed up too. Was that disgust on McCain's face as he tried to quiet the boos from a crowd it had been obvious for weeks that he didn't like? I honestly can't say -- I'm a terrible judge of expressions. But let's hope this is a rebirth of the post-Keating McCain of 2000, where even Democrats were impressed with him. He was a better man then, and he can be again.
  
• I'm done with Caribou Barbie. If we're lucky she'll go back to sportscasting. Unfortunately, I fear she'll replace Ann Coulter as the figurehead of the anti-feminist female Right. Fortunately, with the generational shift away from religious fanaticism, it may be a few years until we have to take the extreme Right seriously again.
  
• President Obama will have a long, long laundry list of things to deal with. Let's hope community issues like effective affordable health care (preferably to both the people and the government, nothing like that enormous hematoma that is Medicaid), veteran's benefits, labor rights, and discrimination issues get a chance to take center stage. (If he can do all this and do it on the post-Wall Street bailout shoestring he'll be stuck with, he will be the greatest president ever. That might be aiming a little high.) After that, there's a massive amount of other things that need to be done. But that's where he ought to start.
  
• Obama is one skinny bastard under that suit. Just sayin'.
  
• I mentioned community issues above. In practice, community often means urban, and we've placed far too much focus on a nonexistent ideal of small town America. That needs to go away -- our cities are in dire need of help, and I'm tired of people from the sticks saying that the cities aren't worth saving. But that goes both ways -- methamphetamine, for example, is the public health scourge of small town America, so while we're putting money into the cities, we can't forget how much poverty, violence, and drug use our countrysides see as well.
  
• President Medvedev delivered a scorching address attacking US foreign policy today. While some of the decay of US-Russian relations has to do with Vladimir Putin's rolling back of the clock on Russian democracy, the bulk of it is George Bush's fault. That's a relationship that both Obama and Medvedev are going to have to work hard on repairing.
  

Well, time to get this show on the road. It's not over; it's just beginning.