Month: October 2005

The Blogs & the Coffeeroom

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Most of my freshmen rhetoric students choose current topics – off-shoring, CAFTA, privatized social security, the 10% rule–for their series of argumentative papers. (I’ve given up on legalizing drugs; I never got one that was coherent. While I’m sympathetic with the positions expressed on this blog, reading these made me doubt their authors had time or brain cells to waste on recreational drugs. Indeed, their lives seemed pretty much recreational.)

This semester, I added another option. They could choose among some controversial books, read the book, and analyze one of its major arguments. Rhoads, Hayek, Pinker, Lomberg challenge orthodoxies; only a couple of ambitious students chose to do this, but they are becoming quite engaged. Of course, I have an agenda, but since they have to neutrally define the controversy, then write papers both for & against, the goal is less which side than increased understanding.

One girl chose Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously, but has been having trouble finding arguments or reviews. This is her first semester in college, but I suspect this is not just her lack of research skills. Some studies are best left unreviewed. Last week, I approached one of my colleagues from psych and asked if she knew of any work specifically countering his arguments. She hadn’t heard of it.

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What if Miers Loses?

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Intrade is usually right. So, let’s assume she is going to be beaten. Bush being Bush, he won’t back down. So it will go all the way to a vote and she’ll lose — let’s assume that happens for the sake of the discussion.

Then what? This is a blog, what the Hell, we can speculate all over the place.

Does Bush say, after this humiliating defeat, “yeah, I was wrong, I have learned, I have grown. I will now appoint a person with a long, published record which will appeal to the Conservatives who attacked Miers successfully”? Why would he?

Or does he instead say, “I cannot get someone known to be a Conservative onto the Court, and I cannot get a stealth Conservative onto the Court. I’ll just pick a Hispanic who is known to not be anti-Roe, since that appointment is ‘historic’ and generates some ethnic balance and is an easy confirmation that gets this over with”?

I have to think it something like the latter.

I am assuming that Bush did not pick someone with a proven record that Conservatives like because he does not think he can get such a person confirmed, or has no interest in doing so. What his motives really were, we may never know.

Bush certainly has no reason or incentive to give the Conservative wing of his coalition anything they happen to want after they went to war with him on this. Bush is in many ways a “Nixonian” president, spending lots of money, relatively pro-Government, not particularly popular, polarizing, more interested in foreign policy than in domestic policy. Perhaps his response to this episode will be similarly Nixonian, “f*ck the Conservatives, they are a bunch of kooks.”

I think we will see a much more “centrist” and “compassionate” President Bush hereafter, after having his throat cut by his own side. Why not? He is not running for anything again.

Or am I wrong for some reason.

(Of course, Harriet may blow us away in the Senate hearings, after all. I look forward to all that. I would love for this to be over with, one way or the other.)

They Call THIS the “Nuclear Option”?

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The Laotian immigrants that I work with were streaming hip-hop songs from their native country today. Every so often a few recognizable syllables would sometimes rush past my ear in the torrent of Lao. It was a slang word popular with American rappers that begins with the letter “N”.

The significance of this story is that people will find unexpected uses for technology if there is some sort of reward. The Internet was originally intended for the fast transfer of data between scientists and engineers, yesterday it was used by my coworkers to stream crappy popular music from a dirt poor Communist state. If they decide to buy the CD, then both a Laotian rap group and the country’s economy will benefit from the influx of hard American dollars.

There is an anecdote about the beginnings of photography in the 1830’s. The story goes that the assistant of Louis Daguerre was caught by the police on a Paris street when he offered to sell naughty pictures to men passing by. The picture, so it is said, was of a woman making love to a horse.

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Castro, Chavez and increasing repression in Cuba

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As reported on this blog this February, the EU members had agreed among themselves not to invite opponents of the Castro regime to diplomatic receptions at their embassies. The aim was to ‘normalize’ relations with Cuba after the arrest of 75 dissidents had led to vehement disagreement between Cuba and the European Union. Back then the EU was sharply criticized for this pretty lame behavior.

I read an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, unfortunately only available online to subscribers, which I’m not, that the German embassy tried a rather half-hearted approach to show some spine after all: On occasion of the 15th anniversary of German reunification on October 3rd, they had organized two receptions, an official one for Cuban officials up to Fidel Castro himself, and also the international diplomatic corps, and an unofficial one for private citizens, including several opponents of the regime. Quite predictably, not a single local bigwig showed up for the official reception.

According to the article, Castro has by now altogether lost interest in having good relations with the European Union anyway. His close relationship with Hugo Chavez has rescued the country from the increasing isolation it suffered after the demise of the Soviet Union. Considering the high price of oil, Chavez can well afford to be generous with Castro, while gaining some additional credibility with the international left by having him as a kind of political and ‘spiritual’ mentor. This unholy duo also is up to no good, and is trying to export communism to the rest of Latin America, as if were the 1960s all over again. More about that in some other posts.

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Harriet Miers and her grasp (or lack of same) on copyright law?

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I couldn’t care less about Harriet Miers, and if she becomes a Justice at the American Supreme Court per se, but there is one issue where I do care a lot, and that is copy right law. Does this, by all accounts very nice Lady have the intellectual firepower to come to a halfway sensible position, when SCOTUS is ever presented with nonsense like this: (it turns out that this link doesn’t always work*, so here’s the second paragraph at least):

– Copyright term extension is a very fitting memorial for Sonny. This is not only because of his experience as a pioneer in the music and television industries. The most important reason for me was that he was a legislator who understood the delicate balance of the constitutional interests at stake. Last year he sponsored the term extension bill, H.R. 1621, in conjunction with Sen. Hatch. He was active on intellectual property issues because he truly understood the goals of Framers of the Constitution: that by maximizing the incentives for original creation, we help expand the public store-house of art, films music, books and now also, software. It is said that `it all starts with a song,’ and these works have defined our culture to audiences world-wide.

– Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti’s proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

(Emphasis mine).

This from Representative Mary Bono, from a speech before the House of Representatives on October 07, 1998.

That’s right, this is not, repeat not, a joke. Sonny Bono, the male half of Sonny & Cher and later Representative Sonny Bono, had pushed through the extension of copyright protection to 95 years after the death of the originator/copyright holder. Like his widow states in the quote, he really had wanted copyright to last for ever. While this might seem ludicrous, it is no more ludicrous than the notion that it might be illegal to use the CDs you bought and own the way you want to, and that the concept of ‘fair use’ might be soon basically dead and gone. The recording and movie industries will soon have seen to that — in the European Union it is already illegal to convert the songs on a music CD to MP3-files if said CD is in any way copy-protected (I’m not quite so sure about the DMCA, though).

While paying royalties to Julius Caesar’s heirs for reprinting ‘De Bello Gallico’ probably won’t be necessary, for the new law certainly won’t be applied retroactively (I hope), I have no doubt that this ‘forever-minus-a-day’ copyright will get through Congress sooner or later. Too many Representatives and Senators are beholden to the media industry for that not to happen. If that law survives the scrutiny of SCOTUS, the United States will insist that the rest of the world should follow suit, and the round-heels running the EU will only be too happy to comply, being in the pockets of the same industry themselves.

So, to get back to my original question, does that nice Ms. Miers know how to respond properly to this kind of sophistry, or doesn’t she?

* It’s a pretty ‘longstanding’ link, so I’m surprised that it would time out now.