Running Chicken

journalofajournalist: …and The Onion for the win,...

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:30:00 -0500

…and The Onion for the win, forever.

Tl;dr: All 10 ways are “Revolutionary Terror.”

When Did We Get Old?

Fri, 25 May 2012 08:38:47 -0500

I went out for dinner last night with one of my very best friends from college and his family; then, after his kids got ready for bed, he and I went out for a drink to catch up a bit.

As the evening was beginning to wind down, after we’d talked about all of the “old person” things in our lives — like work, kids, mortgages, day care policies, and even life insurance — we both mentioned that we don’t really feel like we’ve gotten old.

Even though we’d been reflecting on events that happened 15 years ago, we still felt closer in age to college students than to people in their mid-40s. But it’s almost certainly true that college students think of us as very old men and it’s clear that we have more in common with 45 year olds than with 20 year olds today.

At what point will we feel as old as we are? Is old age something that just sneaks up on you? In other words, will I still feel like I have a lot in common with — and a lot to say to — college students when I’m 60?

The Conservative Fantasy History of Civil Rights

Thu, 24 May 2012 14:15:39 -0500

The other day, Justin Green (approvingly?) quoted Kevin Williamson’s piece on the excellent conservative civil rights pedigree in the National Review Online:

“Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower. And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.”

Green then wrote:

I suspect, at bottom, that his point is plausible if you stretch a few definitions and stories.

Williamson’s piece has been discussed by a number of people since then, including by Scott Lemieux at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog, who awarded Williamson “Revisionist Hack of the Day” honors, citing Jonathan Chait’s delightful take-down of the “conservative fantasy history of civil rights” as he built to this conclusion:

Does this National Review article about how conservatives are the real supporters of civil rights even mention the National Review’s contemporaneous position on civil rights? I think you know the answer. Of course, if you define civil rights so that Jesse Helms can be a supporter, it’s a pretty big tent…

Yes, indeed, that would be quite the definitional stretch …

Do human rights really exist?

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:38:54 -0500

Do human rights really exist?:

About a month ago, Will Self authored a piece for the BBC News Magazine critiquing the whole idea of human rights. I pulled out this particularly telling quote:

[T]he only situation in which human rights could truly obtain would be one where an independent global judiciary, duly and constitutionally constituted by the sovereign will of all humanity, was able to judge violators who had been arrested by an equally incorruptible international police force.

Does anyone actually believe this to be true?

To put it another way, does anyone believe that their domestic rights don’t exist because the local police aren’t incorruptible or because not every violator of the law is brought to justice. Let’s say my bicycle is stolen and the police are unable to arrest the culprit; does this mean that my right to private property doesn’t actually exist?

Or, to put this still another way, does Self not know about the International Criminal Court and the trials underway there of those who have abused human rights on a pretty grand scale? He does not mention the Court once.

I suspect the vast majority of people think it’s unfortunate that human rights aren’t better protected. But it’s also my guess that most people don’t believe this invalidates the idea of human rights.

When you think of the idea of human rights, do you think only of the problem of their enforceability? In other words, how troubled are you that not every human rights violation is punished, that states continue to pursue their own self-interest at the expense of the international human rights regime, and that there’s no global police force to round up violators? Self never actually explains why an enforceability problem entirely negates the existence of the rights. Instead, he simply highlights what everyone already knows:

[T]he Security Council of the United Nations is hamstrung both by its inability to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states (Syria was, after all, itself an initial signatory of the 1948 declaration), and also by the little peccadilloes of its permanent members, two of which effectively deny their citizenship democratic rights - among others - and one of which has a somewhat dubious record when it comes to torture and legalised execution.

Self acts as though he’s just discovered that it’s difficult to get anything done at the UN Security Council and that — unbelievably! — there’s hypocrisy amongst UN member states. But this isn’t actually the challenge to the idea of human rights.

The real challenge, I would say, is that a fair number of people who might come across Self’s thoughts on human rights are very glad to see the Security Council hamstrung over Syria. They don’t think that anyone should intervene in the affairs of others … because they actually don’t believe that there’s any such thing as human rights. I’m thinking here of all the people who were apoplectic about foreign intervention in Libya, even as the Libyans whose lives were in danger were asking for precisely such an intervention.

The relativism about the idea of human rights at the heart of their apoplexy, — which is especially dominant amongst good-hearted progressives in the Global North (where civil and political rights are already pretty secure) — needs to be addressed before we’ll get very far in actually prosecuting or, even better, preventing human rights abuses around the world. If more and more people choose to believe that there’s no such thing as human rights, it will be less and less likely that violators will be prosecuted and then Self will surely be proved right.

Governor urges public vote on gay bias laws

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:23:33 -0500

Governor urges public vote on gay bias laws:

Nebraska’s governor says city ordinances barring discrimination against gay and transgender people should be put to public votes.

Gov. Dave Heineman on Tuesday cited a recent opinion from the state attorney general’s office that said cities would have to amend their charters to offer protections to groups not covered by state law.

Governor Heineman claims that he’s just repeating an opinion from the AG’s office … but in reality what he’s doing is disguising his own position against extending anti-discrimination protection to gays and lesbians. That position, ultimately, is that questions about whether it’s acceptable to discriminate should be decided by a majority of the populace.

I understand that some people don’t like lgbtq individuals; they don’t want them to get married, adopt children, live near them, work in their offices, or look at them on the street. They think they’re icky. They might not feel the same way about Latinos, or African-Americans, or Asians, or Jews, or Mormons, or Catholics, or whomever … but they also might.

And the position of Nebraska’s governor is that a) this is perfectly fine and b) if enough people feel this way, then discrimination against minorities groups is not only acceptable but also the right course of action.

In other words, he seems content to say that whether or not it’s acceptable to discriminate against some group or other should be determined by 51% of the people who turn up to vote. But, frankly, I find it hard to believe that Governor Heineman would agree to this statement if we were talking about discrimination toward any other group of people.

"Colleges and universities are like a museum. They’re filled with all this beautiful art, but someone..."

Wed, 23 May 2012 08:59:09 -0500

““Colleges and universities are like a museum. They’re filled with all this beautiful art, but someone has to turn on the light. If no one turns on the light, nothing else matters.””

- After reading this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education [gated, sadly], my new mantra is student engagement:

There was an identifiable moment in which a faculty member created a spark in them; students became energized or excited by a topic, an idea, or a discipline. In those moments, he said, a faculty member conveyed to the student that he or she could perform on the collegiate level.

[…]

In many cases, all it takes is a faculty member to have a few well-timed interactions with a student, perhaps during office hours or in class. Such moments, he said, trigger something in students, whether it is a desire to learn or try harder, or it convinces them that they belong on campus:

“It is clear from their interviews that something changes quickly, meaningfully, and for the better.”

I’m now thinking about changing a bunch of the assignments in my classes. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do, but I’m thinking about doing away with the medium-length essays — which cause a great deal of angst and which don’t offer opportunities for much revision — in favor of shorter, more dynamic writing assignments.

Students have done really well with a certain style of blogging-as-writing-assignment in the recent past, for example, but I wonder if it makes sense to have students create blogs as the central writing element in an ancient political philosophy course.

I’ll be curious to see what readers think.

Upon Boarding a Flight: A Two Minute Play in One Act

Tue, 22 May 2012 19:54:41 -0500

Gate agent: “Sir, that bag is much too big to be a carry-on.”

Me: “Is it? That’s the first time anyone has ever said that. And it always fits in the overhead bin.”

Gate agent: “Oh, that’s impossible; it’s not even close. I should charge you $25 to check it.”

Me: “OK.” [shoulder shrug]

Gate agent: “I won’t, this time.”

Me: “So, you mean it will fit, then.”

Gate agent: “[…]”

Me: “You have a nice afternoon.”

Exeunt.

Every year, students tell me that racism isn’t the same...

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:18:00 -0500

Every year, students tell me that racism isn’t the same sort of problem that it once was. Twitter, though, is swiftly becoming one-stop shopping for anyone who’s looking for quotable racists to prove these students wrong:

The Jefferson Parish School Board has been under fire recently: civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center filed a complaint alleging that the school system “sends a disproportionate number of black and disabled students to alternative schools to languish for months.” Now the group is targeting Jefferson Parish for employing a school psychologist who has posted a slew of racially charged comments online.

Mark Traina works with the same alternative schools to which so many black and disabled students have been relegated. On his Twitter account, Traina says his interests are “politics, the economy, reading and expressing [his] opinion.” But his opinions are especially problematic given the fact that he’s one of the people responsible for placing students in alternative schools.

More here (HT: Matt Langdon).

Kevin Bleyer hates Nebraska; or, he hates it at least enough...

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:40:14 -0500

Kevin Bleyer hates Nebraska; or, he hates it at least enough that he wrote a whole book chapter about how it shouldn’t be a state anymore.

I once drove through Nebraska, via I-80, days after my girlfriend broke up with me, on a self-imposed road trip from Los Angeles to Cedar Rapids to find my brother’s shoulder and cry on it. It is a long, straight, hypnotically boring drive that not only gave me ample time to think about the loss, but also put my recent heartbreak in much-needed perspective.

It could be worse, I realized. I could live here.

Cold comfort, perhaps, but comfort nonetheless. And so, for providing the enforced monotony that only a dull road trip can provide, and the bleak void to which to compare my own relatively full life, I am grateful to the state of Nebraska. Nebraska has a special place in my heart.

It has no place, however, on a map of the United States.

[…]

There are more Americans in prison than in Nebraska. And not for nothing, but as I drove past endless rows of cornstalks, I couldn’t help but think: What’s the difference? Nebraska, whose official state motto is “Equality Before the Law,” nonetheless feels like a punishment for a crime. And like a criminal, I whiled away the hours (or was it days?) thinking up mottoes that better apply: “Nebraska — a great place to serve some time.” “Nebraska — if you lived here, you’d be bored by now.” “Nebraska — Canada’s Mexico!”

Sure, the argument could be made that Nebraska is in fact an idyllic land full of picturesque cities with enviable small towns steeped in small-town values personified by some of the loveliest Americans to grace the planet — and, I confess, in my wildest dreams I often fantasize about living among them in such a glorious place — but let’s be honest: It’s also a lifeblood-sucking leech on our body politic. Yes, my fellow citizens, despite what the original Constitution of the United States says about the qualifications for statehood and the guarantee of representation in Congress, by every measure that truly matters in America (bigness, crowdedness, awesomeness, Texasness), Nebraska doesn’t deserve its star on the American flag.

We get it, Kevin; you’re really glad that you don’t live here. But you know what? I asked the thirty-six other people who live in this state and we all decided that you’re not welcome here. So even if you did want to live here, we all voted and we decided you can’t. And the vote was not close.

And one more thing:

Do you like eating corn or soybeans or beef? If so, we’re sorry to say that you’ll have to start buying it from another state. We’re officially not selling to you.

It’s official: we’re having a girl!!!

Mon, 21 May 2012 17:34:47 -0500

It’s official: we’re having a girl!!!

Racism, George Zimmerman, and the Death Penalty

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:08:00 -0500

About a week ago, I wrote about all the people who took to the internet to rejoice at the possibility that George Zimmerman might be charged capitally for Trayvon Martin’s murder.

Today, I received the personal confirmation of what I wrote in my original post, namely that “Anyone who opposes the idea that Zimmerman is a monster who needs to be tortured and/or killed is immediately accused of derailing the conversation or of being a racist who supports Zimmerman.”

In other words, I’ve just been notified that I’m a racist.

All of this provides me with an excellent opportunity to write a bit more about this nonsense that supporting some executions makes one a good person while opposing all executions makes one a racist.

Here’s my critic:

It’s racist for a white person to dictate how PoC, especially Black people, should react to racism.

It would be further racist application of the death penalty when Troy Davis (among others) was executed (as he was) if George Zimmerman is allowed to live. Because of the way societal forces are aligned, a push to prevent Zimmerman’s execution is far, far more likely to succeed than the push to prevent, say, Davis’s or Reggie Clemons’s executions.

This means that any push to prevent Zimmerman’s execution is a push to continue applying the death penalty in a racist way, and not a push to end the racist application of the death penalty. Because Zimmerman is protected by white supremacy ingrained into US culture and application of US law, stopping his execution will be of no benefit to the PoC (mostly, specifically Black) victims of the death penalty. Preventing Zimmerman’s execution will only have the effect of upholding white supremacy. Zimmerman being allowed to live does not bring us any closer to a world or even country without executions than executing him would.

Holding to a principle of how we should act in a perfect world does not always advance us closer to it. So, yes, putting the principle that there should be no death penalty above anti-racism is a racist act. I, too, oppose the death penalty. But anyone whose anti-death-penalty politics are not firmly grounded in anti-racism is no comrade of mine.

First of all, let me make perfectly clear that I’m not telling anyone how to feel about George Zimmerman. If you feel that George Zimmerman deserves to die, that’s fine; lots of people feel that way. But our justice system shouldn’t cater to people’s feelings; it ought to be dispassionate.

When we say someone deserves to die, what we’re saying is that an offense has been committed that is so far beyond the range of normal behavior that we can’t even begin to imagine the worldview of the offender and we can’t imagine continuing to occupy the same plane of existence.

I don’t want to be read as saying these feelings are abnormal. Indeed, it’s quite normal to want to express our solidarity with the families of murder victims, make clear our outrage at the terrible crime that has been committed, ensure our safety, and punish these offenders for what they’ve done. But I think there’s a disconnect between these normal feelings and the desire to punish in a manner that causes the most suffering and that strips the offender of his human dignity.

Indeed, here’s a brief exerpt from my original post:

[W]hen so many people have prematurely tried, convicted, and sentenced George Zimmerman to death with such joy, I’m reminded once again how far removed we are from a time when we might conceive of justice as more than simply the paying back of violence with violence. When we gloat over the dead bodies we’ve managed to pile up — regardless of the reason that led to those deaths — we’re really celebrating the basest part of our nature.

[…]

Personally, I’d like to see Americans reflecting on the idea of justice and the proper role of compassion, on why corpses are the only possible validation for so many of us, on what a society that applauds a body count is ultimately missing, on the prejudices and privilege that allow us to cheer and sing when others die … but we’re so very far away from doing any of those things right now because, despite all the killing that’s happening all around us and in our names, our bloodlust somehow still hasn’t been sated.

I’m not clear on why writing about the difference between justice and vengeance amounts to racist or derailing behavior, and I suspect that my critics aren’t clear on it either. The entirety of their argument amounts to the claim that any response that deviates from their feelings, or from the feelings of some people of color, is a racist one that derails people of color from having the conversation they want to have.

From their perspective, I ought to be focusing on people of color who face execution (I do, all the time) and on the racism of the death penalty (again, there are fifteen pages of death penalty posts for you to look through). They claim that opposing the death penalty for George Zimmerman (who isn’t considered a person of color by my critics because he looks white) “is a push to continue applying the death penalty in a racist way, and not a push to end the racist application of the death penalty.” In other words, because Troy Davis was executed — and that was racist — then we must also execute George Zimmerman, or we will be reenforcing the racism of the death penalty.

This is nonsense.

The death penalty is racist. Full stop. People of color are disproportionately represented on death row and an offender is much more likely to be tried capitally in a case with a white victim. But putting more white people on death row or putting to death more offenders who kill people of color in prominent cases like this one isn’t going to solve what is ultimately a systemic problem.

Let me reiterate my position, then: No one ought to be strapped down and poisoned to death by the government, regardless of the color of their skin or the color of their victim’s skin. The death penalty system as a whole is racist, arbitrary, and unfair. I oppose it in all cases, not in a manner that picks and chooses cases that make me feel better or worse.

This week on The Hero Report podcast, we discuss the heroism (or...

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:04:21 -0500

This week on The Hero Report podcast, we discuss the heroism (or lack thereof) in the blockbuster, The Avengers. Did the “hit them over the head with a hammer” technique work for the heroic themes, or did it render them useless?

Tell us what you think about this episode, discuss these issues with us on Twitter (Matt Langdon / Ari Kohen), and join us every Friday at 4pm Eastern on Google+ for our live broadcast (where you can chat with us while we’re on the air and contribute to the conversation).

Want to make the podcast portable? Subscribe via iTunes (audio-only).

Cameron Todd Willingham Exoneration Was Written But Never Filed By Texas Judge

Sun, 20 May 2012 11:46:16 -0500

Cameron Todd Willingham Exoneration Was Written But Never Filed By Texas Judge:

We’ve known for quite some time that our justice system is capable of condemning innocent men to death. But some people — like Antonin Scalia, George W. Bush, and Rick Perry — continued to claim the system worked so well that it was always able to save them from execution. With the all of this information about Carlos DeLuna and Cameron Todd Willingham, it’s hard to believe that anyone will continue to make such a claim going forward. Except we know, of course, that they will.

Many years ago now, I bristled at the plot of The Life of David Gale precisely because it implied that, since innocent people really aren’t executed, opponents of the death penalty would need to go so far as to enter into an elaborate conspiracy to make it happen.

That, of course, is demonstrably false:

A Texas judge who reviewed the controversial 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham planned to posthumously exonerate the father who was put to death for killing his three daughters in a house fire.

Scientific experts who debunked the arson evidence used against Willingham at his 1992 trial and a jailhouse witness who recanted his shaky testimony convinced District Court Judge Charlie Baird in 2010 that “Texas wrongfully convicted” him. But Baird’s order clearing Willingham’s name never became official, because a higher court halted the posthumous inquiry while it considered whether the judge had authority to examine the capital case.

[…]

Baird’s intended order never came to light because the court of appeals criticized his handling of the case and prevented him from resuming work on it before he left the bench at the end of 2010 after choosing not to seek re-election. No one asked him for it after the court of appeals blocked him, he said.

Baird, now an attorney in private practice, said he was moved to share the document with HuffPost after reading about Carlos DeLuna, a Texan who a Columbia University team said this week may have been wrongly executed in 1989.

In 2006, Justice Scalia wrote that there hasn’t been “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

When do we suppose Scalia will be prepared to shout his error from the rooftops?

Both Glenn Loury and Ann Althouse have gay sons. And, in this...

Sat, 19 May 2012 14:55:00 -0500

Both Glenn Loury and Ann Althouse have gay sons. And, in this clip, both of them argue that we shouldn’t consider opposition to same-sex marriage to be akin to bigotry. Loury goes a few steps farther, in fact, and claims that a charge of bigotry really amounts to demagogic politics and that people who oppose same-sex marriage on religious or cultural grounds are morally serious and ought not to be dismissed out of hand.

But it’s never entirely clear why Loury and Althouse believe that the views these people espouse are so morally serious or why we ought to refrain from referring to their condemnation of homosexuality as bigotry. From listening to them, my sense is that their argument rests on the presumption that religious people are morally serious and, as such, they reflect on the tenets of their faiths before coming to their conclusions about matters like same-sex marriage.

That’s all well and good, if it’s true. But it doesn’t explain why we shouldn’t think of it as bigotry. That someone believes something to be true and arrives at his or her belief in a serious manner doesn’t exempt him or her from being challenged on that belief, especially when that belief might impact the lives of others.

Let’s go a few steps down the religious path and see what happens. After all, I attend a weekly religious service, I associate with many of my co-religionist, and I observe many of the strictures of my religion in my daily life. And my religion, Judaism, is one that seems to explicitly condemn homosexuality; indeed, it’s the Hebrew Bible to which people turn when they’re looking for a religious justification for their opposition to same-sex marriage and homosexuality more generally (even though the majority of these people don’t pay much attention to any of the other dictates of the Hebrew Bible).

But Jews are divided on the question of same-sex marriage, with most Orthodox authorities opposing it and most Reform authorities supporting it. Conservative authorities are divided, with some in support and some in opposition. The Hebrew Bible says that one should not lie with a man as one lies with a woman … but the Hebrew Bible also says, for example, that the death penalty should be employed as a punishment in hundreds of circumstances (from homicide to children who curse their parents) yet the vast majority of Jewish authorities oppose capital punishment. After much study and debate, religious authorities have found that the text can be read in more ways than one. And that’s why it seems to me that we can take issue with anyone who claims that their religion mandates their opposition to same-sex marriage or their condemnation of homosexuality. The Orthodox, after all, are not agitating for the ability to resume stoning their children.

In other words, Jews have options (and I presume that Christians and Muslims do too). Despite the injunction against homosexuality in Leviticus, there is no need for a Jew to join a congregation that condemns homosexuality or even makes gays and lesbians feel in any way unwelcome. And so, as a Jew, I gravitate toward congregations that are welcoming to gays and lesbians and toward rabbis who speak out in favor of equal rights and equal treatment.

Religions aren’t monolithic; if people really are involved in deep spiritual reflection on the matter of homosexuality, then they will surely be able to find an interpretation of their religious texts that allows for the kind of evolution that President Obama described. This doesn’t mean I’m not serious about practicing Judaism; it means I’m serious about finding a way to reconcile my belief in the teachings of Judaism with my belief that people should be treated equally. But, obviously, one must actually have both of these beliefs.

What do we call someone who either fails to consider the alternative teaching of his or her religion or rejects that teaching because it doesn’t lead to continued condemnation of gays and lesbians, someone — in other words — who doesn’t actually have both a religious belief and a belief in equality?

With apologies to Loury and Althouse, I think I have to call it bigotry.

I’m incredibly excited for one of the University of...

Sat, 19 May 2012 09:47:05 -0500

I’m incredibly excited for one of the University of Nebraska’s most recent political science graduates, Justin Green, who jumped on a plane to Washington two weeks ago and yesterday snagged a fantastic internship with Matt Lewis at the Daily Caller.

Justin started blogging in earnest because it was a requirement for my human rights class last summer, but over the past year he really focused on American politics and staked out a philosophically sophisticated conservative position on a wide variety of issues.

Here’s his first post at the beginning of my class, about a year ago. Here’s the post, from about a week ago, that Matt Lewis referenced in the tweet above.

I’ve been fortunate to encounter many excellent students in my eight years of teaching at the collegiate level. So when new students visit my office to inquire about what political science majors are doing with their degrees, I often talk about those who are working on their PhDs or finishing up their JDs; those who are overseas on Fulbrights; those who are working for NGOs, or in the local or federal government; and those who are Peace Corps volunteers or working somewhere in the U.S. with AmeriCorps.

But I have to say, next year I’m looking forward to telling students about how Justin landed his current job.

As always, we’re recording a new episode of the Hero...

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:58:00 -0500

As always, we’re recording a new episode of the Hero Report podcast today and you can watch the live broadcast here … days before the podcast is officially released.

Today, we’re talking with Drew Jacob, who is in the final planning stages of a grand heroic adventure. The last time he joined us, my son woke up early from his nap and demanded to watch Elmo videos on YouTube.

Since we’re live from approximately 4-5pm Eastern, you can comment here or head over to Google+ and comment on the live feed there; we try, as much as possible, to answer questions and integrate comments in real time. If you’re seeing this after we’ve finished broadcasting, you can still comment and ask questions, of course, and we’ll be do our best to bring them into next week’s show.

And, if you don’t like watching your podcasts, you can always subscribe via iTunes (audio-only).

Update: Due to technical difficulties, Drew Jacob wasn’t able to join us today so we’ll reschedule for next week. Instead, we talked about the Avengers movie for about forty-five minutes!

Twitter Is Tracking You on the Web

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:24:17 -0500

Twitter Is Tracking You on the Web:

Dustin Curtis writes:

Basically, every time you visit a site that has a follow button or a hovercard, Twitter is recording your behavior. It is transparently watching your movements and storing them somewhere for later use. Right now, that data will make better suggestions for accounts you might want to follow. But what other things can it be used for? The privacy implications of such behavior by a company so large are sweeping and absolute.

John Gruber adds:

The other implication is that every website you visit that includes “tweet this” buttons or -embedded tweets is enabling Twitter to track you on the web.

This raises the obvious question of whether or not it’s something of a moral imperative to remove the embedded tweets from those few posts that feature them and, more importantly, the various social networking buttons from my blog generally. A fair number of people use the buttons — especially the Twitter button — but building that extra traffic on a technology that violates people’s privacy is obviously problematic.

On my understanding, I’m being tracked on about 98% of the websites I visit and I’m guessing that most people who read my blog are in a similar situation. We generally don’t log out from Facebook, Twitter, and Google … and the result is easy tracking.

But even though I think that’s the case, it seems important to at least disclose the fact that there’s tracking going on here — not just within this site but also across sites — and to think seriously about whether or not to go farther and remove the buttons entirely.

Since this affects you who are reading this, what do you think? Will you continue to read if the buttons stay? Will you continue to share posts you like with your friends if it requires a little more effort? Most importantly, how concerned are you about the whole issue of being tracked across the internet by Twitter, Facebook, and the like?

I hope you’ll take a moment to think about this and then comment (below or on whichever link you followed to get here) or send me a note.

I have a stalker! A bona fide, no-foolin’, internet...

Fri, 18 May 2012 10:02:00 -0500

I have a stalker! A bona fide, no-foolin’, internet stalker!

The first few times that this sad clown wrote about me on his Tumblr blog or wrote to me on mine, I attempted to engage him in discussion. But he doesn’t want to have a discussion about the issues he thinks are important, he just wants to shout at and about me. You can check out the comments on this post of his if you want to be sure. In his own words:

There seems to have been a miscommunication: I never intended to have a “serious conversation” with you; I was mocking you.

So I ignored him.

But now he’s taken to responding to people on Twitter when my name or my blog come up, no matter how unrelated the topic might be to the two things in this world he cares about: the evils of warfare and the virtues of Ron Paul. In this case, he clicked on a link to my post yesterday about Trayvon Martin and, reading it, thought to himself, “I hate Ari Kohen’s position on Syria.”

This is very weird and very sad behavior, but I suppose I should be flattered that someone out there is paying this much attention to everything about me. I’d pay him some attention right back, but he hides behind a fake name so it’s tough for me to do it.

Go with God, “Jayel Aheram,” you mighty warrior for truth and freedom. Whenever I worry about the state of the world, it helps to know that someone out there — someone who disguises himself when he attacks other people — is paying so much attention to me.

It seems that a bunch of people either somehow find it amusing...

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:37:08 -0500

It seems that a bunch of people either somehow find it amusing to take pictures of themselves posing as a deceased Trayvon Martin or else they just don’t understand the difference between getting good attention and bad attention for your actions.

As my friend who blogs over at The Noob Yorker rightly points out:

When you mock and belittle the death of Trayvon, you reinforce the racism that underpins our social institutions and in the process produce more events akin those in Florida.

I understand that everyone wants to make the next hot meme and get the internet to pay attention to them for a minute. But, seriously, stop behaving this way. It is awful.

That thing where a politician says about himself exactly what...

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:35:09 -0500

That thing where a politician says about himself exactly what you were going to say about him so that now you don’t have to say it and sound snarky.