A Hazy Kind of Clarity

A while back, I wrote a piece detailing the recent history of blogging and federal election laws. The short version is that, in September 2004, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's produced a decision that implied that Internet postings could constitute political speech and should therefore be the subject of FEC regulation.

Well, we're nearing that point, as this article shows. The Federal Election Commission has produced some draft regulations which, I should say, I don't find to be that intrusive. Here, the argument seems to center around tracking financial connections between campaigns and bloggers, rather than looking for the kind of nebulous "coordination" that has bedeviled bloggers in the past. In short: if you take money from a campaign to write a piece in your blog, you have to post a disclaimer to that effect.

This is not as scary as it could have been, and is well in line with other industries--in the financial-services field, for example, an analyst hawking a stock needs to make public any financial stake he/she has in that stock. Well, we'll see how this goes down--after all, there are plenty of people on no one's payroll who will be happy to spout an uncritical party line. Then, I'm afraid, we'll see the specter of "coordination" pop up again.

To show what kind of non-compensated coordination is possible, consider for a moment this hagiography (I know he's not dead yet, but what better word is there?) of Bernie Sanders produced and distrubuted by the AP.

An interesting perspective from the left

I was having a conversation with my neighbor yesterday, a well-educated, well-meaning man whose politics lean strongly to the left (once, in an unguarded moment, he referred to the right as "the dark side," but he's not one of those "angry left" types). Anyway, after the initial pleasantries about mulch and the amount of rain, the talk veered sharply into politics; specifically, the polarization of the American electorate.

I must admit here that I don't feel that the electorate is particularly polarized. Things always get heated around election time, since we are generally presented with two candidates, and we always choose between them whether they are distasteful or not. Most people are sensible, most people are "moderate," and most people do not live their lives based on the teachings of Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken.

But I was shocked to hear my neighbor's explanation of why the "extreme right" is so "feared": apparently, at the extreme right end of the political spectrum lies fascism. I immediately objected and talk was carefully steered elsewhere before I could spell out my arguments against this view.

There are many obvious problems with this simplification, such as the fact that the GOP generally prefers smaller government over state control. Surely, this is being challenged by the so-called "culture wars," but it is no straight-line trip.

But I think the most compelling part of my neighbor's view is that it makes no account for what lies at the extreme left. I suspect he believes that the spectrum looks something like:

Left<------------------------------------->Right
Power to the People<--------->Power to the State

My advantage here is that I have seen, with my own eyes, the extreme left in action, in perhaps its most innocuous form. I spent time in the USSR in 1988, during the years of perestroika and glasnost, and what I saw (even the sanitized Intourist view) scared the bejezus out of me. This was a state which considered things like individual choice, religion, and free speech to be contrary to the good of the state, and in which democracy was viewed as an evil to be (at best) kept firmly under lock and key. Allowing the people a say in how they lived their lives could well have resulted in a rejection of the Marxist-Leninist worldview of the state, and this could not be tolerated. Give the people the right to choose and they may make the "wrong" choice.

The USSR was a totalitarian, repressive state, pure and simple--just as were the fascist states of recent memory. Neither extreme is acceptable.

My worry is that my neighbor might well be right--if the people as a whole are more afraid of a fascist takeover from extreme rightist elements than from an assault from the left, then there is a dangerous historical ignorance at work in the electorate.

Left<------------------------------------->Right
Dictatorship<---------------------->Dictatorship

Movie Review: Revenge of the Sith

Disappointed, I am.

[Note: Returning again from another trip, and thus the period of inactivity. So if the next few posts seem a little disjointed and draft-y, it's because those were the things I was messing around with during my absence.]

I am proud to say that I attended the first, midnight showing of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith back on the 19th. This completes a 22-year streak for me--since Jedi, I've seen all the films on their opening day. It was an event, full of pageantry and divertingly pleasant geekery; but the film was...wanting.

I think it was fine; but as one reviewer said, the audience is strangely ready to be happy with a film that simply doesn't suck. It does tie up the loose ends (which we didn't really need tied up quite so neatly--in a way, it almost seems as if no time passes between Episode III and IV, the ends are so sharp); it does this, by turns, heavy-handedly and deftly. The scenes with Chewbacca have no function except to introduce Chewbacca (and to give Yoda a reason to be somewhere other than Coruscant); on the other hand, there is a nice little scene at the very end showing Vader standing with someone who must be a young Tarkin, played to the delightful hilt in the original Star Wars by Peter Cushing. And they do wipe Threepio's memory, which has been bothering me every five minutes through these prequels.

My wife and I went to the Guggenheim Museum in NYC a while back; in one room there was an exhibit of some artist's work, a person who specialized in painting photorealistic images (magazine-photo collages) on enormous canvases. Really big. At the time I said to myself, "I appreciate the technical skill, but I'm not really moved by the composition in any way." I had this reaction to Sith. I only felt a visceral twinge at two points: one where some undeserved violence is being unleashed on the unsuspecting, and one in which Yoda (a computer-generated character!) is desperately trying to hang onto something. (Yoda, by the way, puts in the best performance of all the "actors," with the possible exception of Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine. Read what you want into this; my take is that we should recognize Frank Oz as the American treasure he is.)

That is this film--a big, beautiful canvas, largely devoid of feeling. It's worth seeing, especially for the single, delicate plot point which makes the whole story--almost--worthwhile. But don't expect to be blown away, despite what some "professional" reviewers tell you.

---

UPDATE: I saw the movie for the second time last night, and I have to say it's beginning to grow on me. The clunkiest lines still grate like the screeching brakes on a UPS truck ("Let's go to Naboo and remember a time when all we needed was our love" and so forth); but the truth is that the story is not unnuanced. Clearly, the most compelling angle--Anakin's internal struggle between loyalty (and I think this is loyalty to Obi-Wan more than to the Jedi code) and self-interest (he wants to save Padme, but I think not so much for her sake as for the fact that he can't bear to be without her)--could have been done better, since when the time comes it's like someone simply flipped Anakin's switch from "Good" to "Evil." But the run-up to that is interesting, and laden with (mostly unexplored, sadly) possibilities.

Palpatine convinces Anakin that the Jedi want to wrest power from the Senate...and, well, that's true. In this way it's possible for the Jedi to be painted in a very unflattering light, but this is only possible because the Jedi jealously guard their independence. Palpatine tells Anakin that the Jedi are hiding knowledge about the Force from him...and, well, they are. And when Palpatine tells Anakin that the Jedi represent a threat to the democratic nature of the Republic, he's absolutely right: the Jedi feel that things should run a certain way, regardless of the democratic machinations of the Senate, and furthermore they will intervene to see this vision remain in place.

I came out of the theater thinking that it would have been much easier for Lucas to take a page from Roman history and simply 1) have Palpatine use his "Order 66" to take personal command of the clone troopers (which by now are on pretty much every planet) and 2) use this as a weapon to cow a rump Senate into declaring him Emperor. Those Roman senators could always be counted on to debase themselves as soon as some general brought his legions within sight of the Tiber. In this way, the Jedi wouldn't seem to be related to, for instance, the Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks of 1917--fanatically devoted to a philosophy and willing to do whatever it takes to see it put in place.

A Paragon of Responsibility

I would shrug this off, if it were the first time something like this had happened. You may remember that Newsweek recently reported, in a story that was picked up immediately by just about everybody, that American interogators flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet in an attempt to get prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to talk. Newsweek reported this in a rather casual fashion, apparently inserting the small piece into one of their roundup-type columns.

Well, as you can imagine (and I'm sure as Newsweek could have imagined), all hell broke loose in the Muslim world. Massive protests, flag burnings, demands for the US to apologize...and in the end, 16 people died and 100 were wounded in Afghanistan in the course of these actions.

So here we are on a cool Sunday evening, possibly the slowest news time of the week, and what do we see? Newsweek now admits that there is no evidence for the story, and that their source has become confused. It seems that they relied on a single guy who claimed not to have actually seen or participated in this activity, but to have read about it in a military report. Now the man says it may not have been in a report, but maybe it was in a draft of this or that, but man, he's sure he saw it somewhere.

A single source. No eyewitness. No confirmation. No documentary evidence. I didn't go to journalism school, but I can sure as hell smell a poorly researched story when I hear one. If they wanted to hold onto it as a tip and do further work, fine. But this is the "mainstream media" we're always hearing about, and this is shoddier than most blog-level commentary.

They were careless. People died. And the saddest part is it will happen again, just as soon as someone gets wind of a topic that's too "sexy" to hang onto long enough to research properly.

"A campephilus principalis is a ... woodpecker"

Another diversion into esoterica, if you'll permit me. I've been captivated by the news that the ivory-billed woodpecker isn't extinct after all. In fact, they have the thing on video. And apparently this isn't the only species to make a return from the grave, as the announced demise of the wonderfully named Miss Waldron's monkey has been withdrawn as premature. And moreover, an entirely new family of mammals has recently been discovered in Laos.

If you think that because of my right-wing bent I'm going to use this to rant against the Endangered Species Act, you're wrong. I think what this shows is that our planet is a wild and crazy place, full of surprises about the tenacity of life.

But I would also like to point out here, and for the record, that the ornithologists' assumption that Woody Woodpecker is a "pileated woodpecker" are simply nonsense. In a 1960s short, Woody is directly identified as campephilus principalis, the ivory-billed woodpecker. He torments a guy who wants to catch him, and that guy is in turn tormented by a game warden who makes it known that Woody is an endangered, and protected, species. It appears that Woody has indeed had the last laugh. And boy, does that put a spring in my step.

And the ad hominem continues...

Let's get ready to rumble

Yesterday, Senate minority leader Harry Reid, addressing a group of high-school students, "I think this guy [Bush] is a loser." To his credit, he seems to have immediately recognized this as the kind of gaffe the press loves to pick up, so he in turn picked up the phone and called Karl Rove to apologize.

You don't like the man? Fine. You think he's a loser? Fine. But if you're one of the leaders of a major political party, perhaps you shouldn't say such things in public.

Or should you? After all, the nominal leader of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, has been quoted as saying any number of insulting things about Republicans, calling them, by turns, 'evil,' 'corrupt' and 'brain-dead'. So maybe we shouldn't blame Ried for following the sterling example of his commander-in-chief.

To be honest, none of this really bothers me. In fact, I welcome it--the truth is (and it's a truth that the Dems have a blind spot about) that a lot of people actually like Predident Bush. Therefore, this line of attack will undoubtedly fail the left when the midterm elections roll around. I understand the point about "rallying the base" (though it should be noted that this has also failed thus far, says Bob Novak in a quick rundown of fundraising), but the press has a long memory. You can't, to put it simply, say something today and hope that it will be forgotten when you try to start focusing on policy points. It will undercut your credibility and make you look like whiners pretty much regardless of your policy stances. But hey, if that's what's working for you...

Hollywood celebrities' political thoughts? Sign me up!

So today is apparently the debut of The Huffington Post, a left-leaning blog-type site offered up by Arianna Huffington. Not something I'd have marked on my calendar, of course; but I came across it and took a look.

I probably shouldn't be one to bash someone else's work, but this does appear to be a stinker. I'll point you to an interesting negative commentary for something more in-depth, but as far as my thoughts:

• The subhead for the site reads, "DELIVERING NEWS AND OPINION SINCE MAY 9, 2005." I know you're blogging for the ages, but perhaps could you have come up with something for today, which didn't actually imply you'd only been doing this for a few hours?
  
• There is a more or less overt sense that this is meant as a counterpoint to the
  Drudge Report, which many seem to think is some kind of right-wing bastion. Drudge, however, is generally a collection of links to interesting news bits (right now, one of the headlines is "PRINCE CAUGHT SMOKING..."--there's the right-wing bias for you), and the only editorial content is generally the headlines. Sure, there are Drudge "exclusives," but any regular reader knows these are wrong about 70% of the time.
  
• But the real problem with Arianna's blog is simply that the commentary is terrible. It's no better than what you'd read elsewhere (certainly not better than anything I can come up with); and where it tries to be funny (too much!), it simply falls down. And this is the stuff they've had lots of time to produce. What will be spewed out when they have to come up with material every few days or so?
  
• The worst thing, the absolutely worst thing for me was David Mamet's contribution. It is not worthy of him. I admit that my knowledge of his corpus is not strong, but a man who cried at the death of Barrett Bonden certainly knows a thing or two about writing.
  

Look, maybe I am some kind of right-wing shill. But go and take a look for yourself and I bet you'll agree with me. I mean, who came up with this idea, anyway? "Hey, let's get a lot of Hollywood personalities--people who make their living in a visual medium--and see how well they write! People will flock to it!" The Left, simply put, deserves better.

So where have I been?

Two weeks and no word from me. Such a long disappearance does not bode well when it arrives early in a blog's life. But any actual explanation would be pointless. Sure, there were intervening events (an interruption in my connection, the unexpected collapse of the home network, etc.), but these could have been worked around. If I had to blame something in particular, it's my aversion to posting when I have nothing (or, more appropriately, nothing properly prepared) to say. But writing begets writing, so I figure it's time to put something in the box.

My recent flirtations with Go have ended, for now. A good friend was kind (evil) enough to send me an enormous number of excellent chess publications; these have brought me back to the True Faith. My asian mistress will have to wait in the wings. However, I offer you the little tactic I developed to fluster my computerized 9x9 Go opponent, a tactic which instantly catapulted me from 9 kyu to 4 kyu in its bizarre rating system.

I always got hammered playing white against the computer, though I often wound up solidly within the komi. Moves like black 5 I found difficult to counter--my instinct was to play for the center with 6; but while this is a good space grabber, it makes my 4 and 6 stones easy to cut with a black play at f6. I would often play there at the first opportunity to prevent the cut, but then black slides under me with a move at h6 and pillages in "my" corner. So I decided that I first needed to block black's access to the upper right. Thus, while black solidifies his territory with 7, I move at 8. This is, by the way, considered to be a bad move the "compromised diagonal") in some ways, because it can be easily cut. But the "standard" response to it (to prevent me from rampaging down the side) is black 9. Now, with this in place and with white having the initiative, I can move in at 10. Then I am set up to march in all sorts of directions, keeping black on a serious defensive. A direct challenge to my tactics, via a black play at g6, for instance, simply doesn't occur to the computer.

But I've set all that aside for now, taking up some serious chess repertoire work at present (not what I need to improve, butsomething I'll feel happy is behind me). Mostly it's just building up a framework to study and keep up-to-date with the things I already play, and filling in some holes. And in case you're eager for a taste, let me just say that if you're a 1 e4 player, you'd better be ready for my Petrov.

Some political work, too: been tinkering with some writeups on judicial activism and the filibuster issue; but again, since one of the purposes of this blog is for me to have a "scratch pad" on which to formulate my arguments, I'm reluctant to put something down that's completely raw. Plus, the lawn is giving me fits, so work proceeds slowly...