Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Spartacus Project

13 Comments

So, now that we know that they’re watching our web visits, web sites, social networks and email, and having seen what the IRS (and other agencies) have been willing to do against what they perceive to be enemies of the state, it might be time to start monkey wrenching them. While it was only a movie, I think we might take a page from the example of the Roman slave revolt.

Imagine if we were to flood the Internet with terms like “Tea Party,” “Benghazi,” “IRS abuse,” etc., to the point at which they’d have so many false leads that it would make it harder for them to track the people who are actually discussing such things? It can’t just be a standard list of the keywords/phrases — that would be easy to spot as a pattern. One could randomly shuffle them around, but that would still be easily detectable. Even generating random subsets of them wouldn’t do the job. What we need is an “enemy of the state” pattern generator, that would throw in a subset of the keywords/phrases, interspersed with a bunch of random English words to make it look to a machine as though they are being discussed in some kind of context, and no two messages alike. I’m imagining a perl (or python, or whatever) script, or whatever. The output might be spammed (OK, that’s the part I don’t like, but I’m not sure how to spread it to enough IPs otherwise — I’m open to alternative suggestions) to the world, and flood the zone to the point that they won’t be able to tell wheat from chaff. We can all be Spartacus, even those of us who had no intention to.

Thoughts?

[Update a couple minutes later]

It’s worth reading the comments at that old blog post, if you haven’t. Particularly this one on how to recognize the end of a Republic.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Mannsuit

5 Comments

The hearing for dismissal ended a while ago in DC. Now we’re just waiting for a ruling from the judge.

[Update a while later]

Note: it could be weeks before we get a ruling. The law says that it should be prompt, but that’s what it said about the hearing as well, and it’s been months since we filed (today’s hearing was originally scheduled for mid-April). But as long as there is no ruling, the case doesn’t move forward.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Modest Abortion Regulation

7 Comments

Professor Althouse has a suggestion.

While I don’t have a strong position personally on whether or not abortion should be legal (other than it’s none of the federal government’s business, either way, and that Roe was a constitutional atrocity), I’m always struck by the callousness of the “pro-choice” movement, which seems to be more of a pro-abortion movement. For instance, they don’t even want to get “bogged down” with the apparently inconsequential issue of whether or not a developing child can feel pain in the womb. And as Yuval Levin notes, as with other issues on the Left, they won’t even grant sincere good will to their political opponents:

The headline in the print edition [of the NYT] is “Unfazed by 2012, G.O.P. Is Seeking Abortion Limits.” As if the people struggling to save the lives of innocent children whose only crime is that they are unwanted by their mothers or would disrupt somebody’s plans should be “fazed” into inaction by the 2012 election.

The article itself offers no sense at all that the pro-life cause has any moral component, no notion that perhaps this isn’t just about this or that election. Just a perfect confusion about why anyone would want to spend time worrying about this issue.

“The re-emergence of abortion as a driving issue among the conservative base has left some moderate Republicans baffled,” the article notes. Has it really? Baffled?

The Times sometimes changes the headlines of its stories when they go online, and I wondered if maybe the online editors saw that this particular headline was ridiculous. So does the story have a different one online? Yup: The online headline is “G.O.P. Pushes New Abortion Limits to Appease Vocal Base.”

Even better.

In a similar vein, KLo writes about the pain of Penelope Trunk:

…it’s almost as if we prefer abortion. It’s an expectation. We’ve adapted our lives to it. And so a whole ideology needs to exist to insist it’s okay, that women and men aren’t feeling what they’re feeling. That this is good, when not very long ago we absolutely knew better. And it was not just priests or self-identified pro-lifers who knew better.

It’s all of a piece with the death merchants of the Left who think that humanity is the world’s biggest problem.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What Might The Scandal End Game Be?

65 Comments

As the cancer on this presidency continues to metastasize, with trust in the president continuing to deteriorate, and a growing realization that the federal government is growing, or perhaps has grown beyond the limits and control intended by the Founders, it’s worthwhile to start to consider the possible political implications down the road. The conventional wisdom remains that, at worst, Barack Obama will lose the Senate next year, fail to regain the House, and be the lamest of ducks until the natural end of his term in 2017. But if things get bad enough, there is a much more radical, but completely constitutional scenario, in which the Republicans could get somewhat of a do over of last fall’s election. This will particularly be the case if enough people come to view its results as illegitimate, having been influenced by the tyrannical actions of the IRS and other federal agencies.

How could it happen? Continue reading What Might The Scandal End Game Be? →

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The “Pragmatic Moderate” In Iran

2 Comments

Just what is that’s “moderate” about this guy, again?

…if we are to speak objectively and without comparison to even more extreme actors, these “pragmatic moderates” are anything but moderate, and their insidious “pragmatism” — i.e., their pose as conventonal political operatives rather than fire-breathing jihadists — makes them more dangerous.

And Assad was a “reformer.” Just ask that idiot, Hillary Clinton.