Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
I give you the greatest C-SPAN vote count in the history of mankind:
20:06 x Thomas x /politics/national/congress x link x 2 comments
This declassified 1944 manual on sabotage (via the Joho Blog) is filled with awesomeness, particularly in the parts that have to do with political defiance instead of just smashing machines:
(9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11.) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
I'm pretty sure that they've handed this out at several past employers, perhaps retitling it "Management 101."
(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.
My next visit to the DMV is going to be the best ever.
11:28 x Thomas x /politics/the_new_protest x link x 0 comments
This is not a post about how the Bank makes my taxes a mess, and hence I won't be getting my stimulus check until late. Because I am not the kind of person who would complain about such a thing.
A few weeks ago, my friend Chris P. put up a link on his Facebook feed about a friend's stimulus check. It's on howispentmystimulus.com, a site that I had no idea existed, and which I find slightly melancholy. The writer had traded in his stimulus for silver coins from the Federal Mint, as a protest against printing more money as a fix for the economic downturn. I'm not sure I applaud the exact sentiment, but I do find the protest appealing.
It's important to remember, and I think many people are unaware of this, but a stimulus check is not a gift. It's a loan, one that will have to be repaid at some point. It may be repaid by a future generation, and not by us, but the debt is still there. In many ways, it's a bet: the government wagers that by paying us money now, we will be in good economic shape later when the bill comes due. I am not an economist (I only play one on TV), but the wisdom of this policy is not immediately obvious to me. My check will go into savings, personally. I'm lucky that I can afford to do that.
It is interesting to watch the reactions on How I Spent My Stimulus. There are two basic trends that I've noticed. One side is composed of people who are struggling--they're spending the checks on medical expenses, or on home loans, or to pay off their debts. The other trend are people who use the stimulus to buy firearms. Large, shiny, high-caliber firearms.
This country really does scare me sometimes.
12:21 x Thomas x /politics/issues/economy x link x 6 comments
In our technology story arc meetings at CQ, we've tried to find ways of looking at the direction of ICT, particularly for hotspots like open access or network neutrality--so for example, maybe you look at it as "new vs. old business" or "content providers vs. network providers." A frame that I've found particularly helpful is to look at these controversies as two basic philosophies: software people and hardware people.
Software people are Google, Microsoft, NBC, etc. They want to sell you information, with or without DRM, but when push comes to shove they are probably more likely to say that information should be "free." They only care about the network insofar as it can move content. On the other side are the hardware people, like Comcast or Verizon. The hardware people want to sell you physical objects, or hook you up to physical networks, through which you will be connected to content at the hardware provider's whim--and when push comes to shove, they will prioritize the health and performance of the network (such as it is, in the case of US broadband) over the intangible information inside it.
These aren't hard and fast categories--some hardware people want to be software people, and vice versa--but it helps me, at least. It applies the old question of "What would you rescue from a burning house?" to the actors in this drama: would they save the content? Or will they save the pipes?
If you're a dissenting voice using new media, I suspect the question is similar, but it's not about what they'll save. It asks "where will they cut?" Ultimately, that's the bottom line.
Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody offers an intriguing glimpse of Internet-enabled political protest, with examples of flash mobs in Belarus and twitter-enabled dissidents. It also explores, to some extent, the possibility that police or counter-movements can eavesdrop or disrupt (through firewalls and censorship) those tools. These are the software problems.
In 2005, Nepal's president took power, cutting off phone lines and Internet connections as he did so to silence and disorient dissenters. In 2007, during a vicious crackdown on protestors, the Burmese government shut down all Internet traffic for several days and did not fully restore it (for certain values of "restore" that include censorship and firewalling) for almost two weeks.
Those are the hardware problems. All the proxy servers and chat rooms in the world won't help when the phones are turned off. It's something I want to keep in mind while I'm looking up cool examples of technology and political/social movements: above all, when the movement becomes too much of a nuisance to the powers that be, where will they choose to cut it off? Ignorance of this point is a profound failure of the rhetorical strategy.
22:21 x Thomas x /politics/the_new_protest x link x 2 comments
No, Says the Man in Washington
What is it with libertarians and watercraft?
11:20 x Thomas x /politics/wingnuts x link x 2 comments
15:12 x Thomas x /politics/blogs/linky x link x 0 comments
Slate (in addition to various other media outlets) has been running a series of editorials by former Iraq war boosters on why they got the war so horribly wrong, five years later. In other words, why did they think that everything would be rainbows and kittens six months after the invasion?
This is a silly question. It allows these people to look back on their views and pontificate endlessly about how they were fooled, leading to an endless array of excuses. "Oh, the administration was so convincing" (seriously?) or "oh, September 11th made me so angry and afraid" (the one in 2001 that was in no way connected to Iraq?) or "oh, Saddam was a bad, bad man" (your point?).
I have yet to see anyone give what is the correct answer: "Somehow, I believed (despite all the historical evidence) that forcing our way into a country and completely upsetting their political system (not to mention killing a lot of people) would lead to the 52nd State of America. Yes, I am an idiot." Because that's really what it all boils down to, in the end. You can point to a number of intellectual distractions, but the fundamental problem is that pro-war sloganeers believe (note the present tense) that war is a perfectly good initial solution to their international problems.
Sadly, the fact that this is a really obvious error will not stop these people from being paid to offer their opinions for the rest of their natural lives. You get the pundit class you deserve, I guess.
Nobody seems to be particularly interested in paying people who were right about the invasion to expand on their views, perhaps because Daniel Davies already did it about as well as anyone could, for free.
12:18 x Thomas x /politics/issues/defense x link x 1 comment
Since my boss knows that I used to work for the Bank, and that I still freelance for them sometimes, she asked whether I missed days like this, when the World Bank is listed as a protest target.
Not really, to be honest. During my time we never really got any good protesters. I've always regretted this. I wanted to go out wearing my Bank ID badge and join the protest, yelling at my employer. I suspect that most staff might have enjoyed the same impulse every now and then. But the groups that I usually saw were not serious--not like the masses that turn out for the big anti-war or immigration marches. I suspect that even today, the Bank won't get real attention. That'll be reserved for higher-profile targets, like the IRS and beltway bandits, or the main marches on the Mall.
My boss drew attention to this event from DCist's coverage:
"March of the Dead": Dozens of activists will roam the city dressed in black representing those killed in the Iraq war. Minimal disruptions are likely."Dozens?" That's not much of a representation. If you're going to do this, do it right: get yourself ~4,000 activists in uniform black clothes and some kind of mask. Otherwise, it kind of misses the point, doesn't it?
11:55 x Thomas x /politics/activism x link x 0 comments
My Senators, Let Me Show You Them
Ending the first week at CQ. I have joked that if they go on vacation and leave me here without more training, the site will be replaced entirely with Congressional LOL Cats by the time they get back.
17:02 x Thomas x /politics/national/congress x link x 0 comments
In the wake of Bioshock's undersea Ayn Rand, China Mieville exposes the Freedom Ship fantasy. Who knew? Someone wants to build a Rapture for real:
It is a libertarian dream. Hexagonal neighborhoods of square apartments bob sedately by tiny coiffed parks and tastefully featureless marinas, an Orange County of the soul. It is the ultimate gated community, designed not by the very rich and certainly not by the very powerful, but by the middlingly so. As a utopia, the Atlantis Project is pitiful. Beyond the single one-trick fact of its watery location, it is tragically non-ambitious, crippled with class anxiety, nostalgic not for mythic glory but for the anonymous sanctimony of an invented 1950s. This is no ruling class vision: it is the plaintive daydream of a petty bourgeoisie, whose sulky solution to perceived social problems is to run away--set sail into a tax-free sunset.
16:51 x Thomas x /politics/wingnuts x link x 0 comments
