Quote of the Day

Bottom line is: the world has changed, we’re not living in the fifties anymore and when a tyrant is kicked out, no other tyrant can claim his place. Why? Because nothing can be done behind closed doors anymore, the whole world can watch and have a say in almost everything everywhere and the era when thugs could reach power against a nation’s choice is over. The world has simply changed and the change cannot be reversed.

Omar

The ’60s: Feh (Counterpoint on Hunter Thompson)

James, Captain Mojo and Lex have weighed in with eloquent posts about the late Hunter Thompson. I encourage you to read them if you haven’t. Lex is particularly insightful about where Thompson fit in the big social and political picture of the 1960s.

I confess to reading one of Thompson’s books and maybe a few articles, and to having read quite a bit about him over the years. He was brilliantly insightful in his day but didn’t seem to change much subsequently. I found him personally unattractive (and I seem not to be alone). It’s too bad he died but the muted burst of ’60s nostalgia that accompanied his passing got under my skin. ’60s nostalgia is a bit like humidity: frequently present, usually cloying and we’d be better off without it. It comes with qualifiers — yes, the war was bad, but the music was good; yes, the riots were bad, but people really got in touch with each other; yes, the drug culture was destructive, but there was real freedom of speech without today’s stifling political correctness. And so on. I always thought that most of this talk was either after-the-fact rationalization or coded nostalgia for high and licentious times. I think it was generally a lousy period. Many people disagree.

Lex and I were going back and forth on this topic by email. He announced that “it is time for post-revisionsism on the 60s,” and asserted that it was an age of “glorious music, terrific economic performance, beautiful automobiles, heroic achievements (space, civil rights) disastrous public policy, riots, our worst war.” This got me riled up and I responded that the ’60s were

More negative than positive. The music and pop culture were crap (sorry), the economy that boomed in the early 60s ended in a major and prolonged recession, stock market crash and inflation. The cars were stylish but far inferior to modern ones. The clothes and other fashions were ugly. Moral confusion was epidemic. The seeds of today’s academic anti-intellectualism were sown. The hippie drug culture was a shadow of earlier youth cults. I can’t fucking stand hippies, or for that matter anybody who would rather dope up and look in the mirror than learn about the world. The 60s were full of that kind of thing. The hubris of the hippies was at least as bad as that of the technocrats and generals. I think you are excessively nostalgic for that which you almost experienced. I am a few years closer to having experienced it, or at least to having seen some of it, and I think it mainly sucked.

There were some pretty bad wars too, not just Vietnam: India and Pakistan, the Nigerian civil war. Not to mention the Soviet suppression of the Czechs. And as I mentioned in a comment on the blog, most of the civil-rights progress was made before the 60s. During the 60s the civil-rights organizations started their long march to the leftist fringe, having achieved most of what could be achieved by govt.

[Tom] Wolfe was being kind to his old friend — de mortuis etc. Thompson was washed-up long ago and only stayed in the public eye because of boomer nostalgia and his outlandish behavior, not his ideas, which were tired and foolish.

Lex was apparently still in ’60s mode when he read this, because he responded that it was “raw and vital” and that I should post it on the blog. OK. That was a couple of days ago, and as I reread my email it seems a bit overdone, but only a bit. The 1960s were not as destructive as the 1930s, but they were a period during which the nation lost ground in many ways. We are still repairing some of the damage. (Would Saddam Hussein have invaded Kuwait in 1990 if we had not abandoned Vietnam in 1975 after mishandling the war in the 1960s?) Most people don’t think of cars and music first when they think of the 1930s. Part of the problem with some people’s opinions about the ’60s is that their nostalgia for the funky lightweight stuff overrides more-serious appraisal of the period.

Anticipating “Internet Fame”

Michael Blowhard speculates:

Are there lessons to be drawn from the episode? It seems likely to me that kids growing up with the Web are going be wrestling with at least one stark choice: does it 1) make more sense to maintain total control over your photographs and videotapes? Or is it 2) more economical (and entertaining) to say “What the hell,” put it all out there, and enjoy whatever consequences ensue?

And why do I suspect that we’ll be seeing a lot of people opting for Choice Number Two?

Just as sensitive online communications that are currently safely encrypted may one day, after technological advances, become public, it may be that someone will eventually develop an effective Internet search engine for images (i.e., one based on something like facial recognition, rather than text as is currently the case). If that happens, a lot of the images that were put on the Internet before anybody expected them to be searchable will become searchable. Photos posted long ago, without accompanying text information, will no longer reliably remain obscure. This is as much true for photos that someone else took of you as it is for your own uploads. The implications for learning about other people in great detail are obvious, though the extent to which this will be a problem will not become clear until we get there.

Michael posits that kids growing up in the new age will face disclosure dilemmas, and they may. But I think it’s at least as likely that most people growing up now and in the foreseeable future will take the lack of privacy for granted. It’s the people now alive who grew up before the Internet who may have the hardest time, because there’s a lot of information out there about many of them that they once assumed would forever remain private.

If you don’t want an image or document to become widely known in the far future, don’t transmit it by or post it on the Internet.

Kind of Like the “Girls Gone Wild” Videos, Except Really Wild

Last year I wrote this post, where I expressed doubt that the people who claim to have taught apes sign language are legit. The main reason why I smelled a rat was due to the reluctance of the researchers to allow outside observers who could sign interact with the apes.

Now there’s this news story. It seems that Francine Patterson, the head of the Gorilla Foundation, told three female employees at different times to bare their breasts. She claimed that Koko, the most famous of the signing gorillas, was requesting it.

Two of the employees were fired and filed suit against the Foundation. The third employee actually figured that stripping for the ape was the only way to keep her job, so she flashed some chest. Now she’s signed on as co-suer.

You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of where something like this worked. (If the suit has merit and isn’t some bizarre attempt at free money, that is.) Usually saying that it’s your dog who wants to get a gander at the goods results in a slapped face. There’s going to be a run on exotic animal pet stores as frat boys buy up the country’s monkey population.

The second thing that occurs to me is that it was Ms. Patterson who was telling the three women what Koko wanted. None of them could understand ASL and tell what the ape was trying to say, even though they were entrusted to work in the closest proximity to the star attraction.

Makes me wonder.

I wonder why, if it’s Koko and not Ms. Patterson with the breast fetish, why they don’t just get her an Internet connection and a credit card number. Seems it would be cheaper than a lawsuit.