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Rebecca Blood’s “Bloggers on Blogging” interview

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About six months ago, while I was deep in the editing process for my book, Rebecca Blood emailed me and asked if I would be interested in doing an interview for her series “Bloggers on Blogging.”

Rebecca is one of the people who literally wrote the book (well, a book, one of the first and best) on blogging. So I said, sure — as soon as I’m done with Dreaming in Code. We reconnected over the summer and exchanged emails on a wonderfully leisurely schedule that actually gave me time to think about my answers.

Today she posted the result. I’m grateful for the opportunity to spout off at length both about my writing and about the nature of blogging, my ideas about it, how blogging has affected national politics, and more. It’s a great series — and great company to be in.

Here’s a taste:

With regard to blogging, what was your most memorable moment?

I think it would be sitting down at the computer late at night a couple of days before Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. I was heartbroken at the prospect of an unnecessary and ill-advised war. I grew up at the tail end of Vietnam and always assumed that, whatever other mistakes the nation would make in my lifetime, we would never let ourselves make that one again. I put my kids to bed, thought about the world Bush’s mistake was likely to shape for them, and poured out my heart in a post I titled Eve of Destruction (the comments are still at the old location).

When I hear people arguing that we didn’t and couldn’t know before we invaded Iraq what we know now, I recall that moment. It reminds me that many people knew just how deceptive and stupid the Iraq policy was from the start. And it makes me grateful that the Web and our blogs serve as a day-by-day and hour-by-hour collective record of what we knew and when we said it.

[tags]scott rosenberg, rebecca blood, blogging, bloggers on blogging[/tags]

COPA trial begins

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As longtime readers of this blog know, Salon and I have both been deeply involved in the ACLU’s challenge to the 1998 Child Online Protection Act from the start, which means this epic has been going on for something like eight years.

Under normal circumstances, the fact that multiple courts have already preliminarily ruled against the law — an Internet censorship bill masquerading as a “protect our kids from porn” measure — should have sounded its death knell a long time ago. But the Bush Justice Department loves its social issues, and instead of folding up its tent based on the preliminary proceedings, Justice has taken the issue to a full trial.

The trial started this week in Philadelphia. Joan Walsh, Salon’s editor, testified Monday. There’s a full transcript of the day’s proceedings available from the ACLU. (Back in 2004 I wrote about the Supreme Court hearing on COPA.) As there’s news on this I’ll keep posting it.
[tags]copa, child online protection act, internet censorship, aclu, salon[/tags]

Eye-raq: Santorum, Tolkien and terror

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I am the first in line to enjoy a good Lord of the Rings analogy. But there is something distinctly off in Sen. Rick Santorum’s effort to recast the Iraq War in Tolkienian terms:

Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has been drawn to Iraq instead.

Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1950s fantasy classic “Lord of the Rings,” to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” Santorum continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

The trouble here is not that Santorum is daring to compare a bloody real-life tragedy to a fantasy novel — pace my colleague Tim Grieve, who brought this bizarre tirade to my attention, or the spokesman for Santorum’s opponent, who complains, “You have to really question the judgment of a U.S. senator who compares the war in Iraq to a fantasy book.” That doesn’t bother me. Myths and fictions offer us powerful ways of seeing and talking about the real world. Popular politicians — like Ronald Reagan, who borrowed his “Evil Empire” imagery from George Lucas — understand this.

No, the problem is that Santorum’s analogy makes no sense. I think the senator means to offer a Middle Earth version of the GOP’s “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” but he’s messed it up badly. (Warning: Tolkienian geekery ahead!)

First of all, in Tolkien’s saga, the good guys are outgunned and outmanned by the Dark Lord, whereas in our world, the U.S. is a “hyperpower” whose military, in 2001-2, seemed to bestride the world. Second, in Tolkien, the good guys sent Frodo with the Ring into the depths of Mordor as a sort of last-ditch, bet-everything gamble; then they sent an army to the gates of Mordor as a diversion — to keep the Eye occupied and distract it from the hobbits headed for Mount Doom.

Santorum says the war in Iraq was meant to keep the Eye distracted. But what kind of diversionary maneuver keeps more than a hundred thousand troops fighting and dying for years? And what are we distracting our enemy from? Who are our hobbits? What secret plan is underway to break the power of Al-Qaeda once and for all? None, of course, because this is where the analogy dissolves into air: In Middle Earth, the Dark Lord’s forces are centralized and his minions are incapable of operating independently; in our world, our enemy is organized as a headless guerrilla network. There is no “Eye” to distract.

It’s hard, in truth, to find any useful Middle Earth analogy to the Iraq War: the parallels break down across the board. Still, you might think of Bush’s invasion of Iraq as the equivalent of a beleaguered Gondor, attacked by the armies of Mordor across the River Anduin, sending its army off on an expedition to Far Harad, after its leaders issued proclamations that the White Council had incontrovertible evidence of the Haradrim’s possession of Rings of Mass Destruction.

Something like that, anyway. But as you can see it really doesn’t work, even when you try harder than Santorum.
[tags]iraq, rick santorum, tolkien, lord of the rings[/tags]

Ballmer explains Windows delays — or, how Vista is like Iraq

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Steve Ballmer was interviewed in Saturday’s Times. Noted:

Q. What was the lesson learned in Windows Vista? After all, it wasn’t supposed to ship more than five years after Windows XP.

A. No. No, it wasn’t. We tried to re-engineer every piece of Windows in one big bang. That was the original post-Windows XP design philosophy. And it wasn’t misshapen. It wasn’t executed, but it wasn’t misshapen. We said, let’s try to give them a new file system and a new presentation system and a new user interface all at the same time. It’s not like we had them and were just trying to integrate them. We were trying to develop and integrate at the same time. And that was beyond the state of the art.

This is at once an unusually candid and an oddly defensive statement.

Ballmer is saying that, in 2001-2, as Microsoft pondered the next phase of Windows’ evolution post-XP, the company deliberately chose to “re-engineer every piece of Windows in one big bang.” It’s a telling choice of phrase. In the software development world, “big bang” (typically used in “big bang integration”) is used to describe a bet-it-all strategy that involves building lots of parts of a system separately and waiting until the end to hook them up and hope they play nicely together.

So Ballmer is essentially admitting that the “design philosophy” of the new Windows was founded on a risky, widely discredited approach. Then he turns around and says that it wasn’t “misshapen” — twice.

Misshapen? Is this a new buzzword I’ve somehow missed? Did the Times reporters mistranscribe “mistaken”? What is Ballmer talking about?

Then he says, “It wasn’t executed.” Note the passive voice, correct for it: “We didn’t execute it.” Which means, “We didn’t do it.” That’s, you know, obvious, I’d think.

Then Ballmer closes the explanation by declaring that the problem wasn’t one of integration; it was even worse than that — it was that Microsoft, the largest and most successful software company in the world, set out to simultaneously “develop and integrate” new versions of all the core functions of its central product. Now, in 2006, the company understands that this was “beyond the state of the art.” But back in 2001-2, they didn’t see that.

This is a fascinating rationalization. I’m loathe to draw too facile a comparison between the tribulations of a technology company and the drama of global conflict. But here, I think, there’s a clear and illuminating parallel between Microsoft’s hubris in this era and the Bush administration’s overreaching in Iraq — two phenomena that overlap almost precisely on the historical timeline.

And no, of course I don’t mean to suggest that there is any moral equivalence, or that the sad saga of a software product’s delay is in any way an event of equal import to the tragedy of an unnecessary war of choice resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. But there are some similarities, too, to wit:

Bush’s team — chests puffed large from its success in invading Afghanistan post-9/11 — ignored conventional wisdom and disregarded expert intelligence and invaded Iraq, only to discover that the effort to control and transform that country was beyond its means.

Gates’ team — surveying a decimated post-dotcom industry landscape as the “sole superpower” of technology — simiarly ignored conventional wisdom and disregarded expert knowledge. Incremental development? Continuous integration? They are for mere mortals. Microsoft, with its mountain of cash and its armies of developers, could bring brute force to bear on the most intractable of large-systems development problems. The company would rip out the guts of all of Windows’ key subsystems and renovate them at the same time — because it was invincible!

The result was predictable. Now a more humbled Microsoft is limping to the finish line with a version of Windows that — whether users find it reat or so-so or terrible — will always be overshadowed by the ambitious claims once made for it. In the context of that falling off, Ballmer’s statement is positively bizarre.
[tags]microsoft, steve ballmer, windows, vista[/tags]

North Korea in 60 words or less

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Josh Marshall has crisply debunked the Bush team’s attempt to throw smoke in the world’s eyes at the failure of its “we don’t talk with the axis of evil” stance in regard to North Korea’s nuclear test. With the administration desperately trying to cloud the issue, it is worth simply reposting his description:

“Failure” =1994-2002 — Era of Clinton ‘Agreed Framework’: No plutonium production. All existing plutonium under international inspection. No bomb.

“Success” = 2002-2006 — Bush Policy Era: Active plutonium production. No international inspections of plutonium stocks. Nuclear warhead detonated.

Face it. They ditched an imperfect but working policy. They replaced it with nothing. Now North Korea is a nuclear state.

[tags]north korea, nuclear proliferation, bush administration[/tags]

Fallows on Iraq

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We’d sent James Fallows my book because I knew he’d had a longstanding interest in software — how it’s created and how creative people use it — and so I figured there was a chance he’d enjoy it. I’d chatted briefly with him when he interviewed me last spring for an article he was writing about Chandler. But I’d never met him in person.

So when I learned that he was scheduled for a book-tour stop right here in Berkeley today, on the publication of his new Blind Into Baghdad, I rolled myself down the hill to the UC Journalism School for his packed lunchtime talk on Iraq.

If any American journalist has a right to shout “I told you so!” about everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq, it’s Fallows: his Nov. 2002 Atlantic piece, “The 51st State,” foretold the endless difficulties the U.S. would face in the wake of a successful assault on Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Shouting isn’t Fallows’ style. Instead he spoke forcefully and thoughtfully for 45 minutes. He argued that, right now, there are simply no good alternatives or “right” choices for the U.S., just varying degrees of bad options. The Democrats, he said, shouldn’t fall into the trap of offering specific proposals about what to do to fix things. Instead, they should point to the upcoming elections as a simple moment of accountability — a chance to offer a vote of no confidence in a president who says “stay the course!” and a vice president who says he’d do everything “exactly the same” if he had another chance. Then, if Democrats succeed in winning any share of power, they’ll need to devise an “adaptive” policy, since no one can predict how events will unfold.

Asked about how future historians will view the Bush administration, Fallows pointed to 2002 as a pivotal year, in which the nation started with a budget surplus, considerable national unity and unprecedented global support. Where did it all go? Why did Bush throw so much down the Iraq hole? Ten days after 9/11 the president delivered a great speech — then he did nothing in the months that followed to summon national resolve, develop an energy policy or express a broader strategy.

Questioned about the prospect of military action against Iran, Fallows said an attack would be “the most reckless military action in my lifetime. And I don’t think it’s going to happen.” The U.S. military is “100 percent” opposed, he said. He guessed that the Bush administration’s hints and leaks about possible military moves against Iran were part of a “crazy man negotiating strategy.”

This gave me a flashback to fall of 2002, when I’d returned to my high school alma mater for the celebration of its newspaper‘s centennial, and hosted an alumni panel of journalists and political insiders discussing the prospect of an invasion of Iraq.

The consensus of the panel — Robert Caro, Marc Fisher, Mark Penn, and Nicholas Horrock — was that the Bush administration was unlikely to deliver on its threats to invade Saddam’s Iraq. The sabre-rattling was a negotiating tactic — a big game of chicken.

Oops. That was one inaccurate consensus — composed, I imagine, of part wishful thinking and part underestimation of the Bush administration’s recklessness. I dearly hope Fallows’s guess on Iran isn’t rooted in a similar thought-mix.
[tags]James Fallows, Iraq, Iran, Blind into Baghdad[/tags]

Foley: With so much mud flying, it’s hard to think clearly

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The Foley scandal has reached that point of implosion where the endangered pols are flinging anything and everything against the wall, praying that something will stick. So before the air becomes completely unbreathable, let’s just lay out a handful of principles that should be obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention:

(1) This isn’t about homosexuality, or, for that matter, homophobia. Certainly, the fact that Foley’s sexual come-ons were directed at teenage males rather than females grosses out some Republican leaders, along with most of their “base.” But this scandal’s offenses would be identical whether Foley was hitting on male or female pages. This story is about abuse of the power of office, betrayal of the responsibility not to take advantage of young people who are under your protection, and a party that placed protecting its majority over protecting those kids.

Which is why (2) “Blame the liberals!” is a non-starter. There is no logic to the right-wing diagnosis that Foley’s disgrace is a byproduct of liberal permissiveness and support for notions like gay marriage. (See David Brooks’s bizarre argument that “expressive individualism,” not political self-interest, is the root problem here.) Foley is a conservative Republican leader who wrote laws to protect minors from predators, remember? If making passes at pages is the inevitable end-result of support for gay rights, surely Foley would have had to wait in line for his fun behind a long list of jailbait-hunting liberal congresspeople. The only way this bizarre argument makes sense is if you believe that, beneath the surface, basically anyone who’s gay is itching to molest teenagers. Come to think of it, maybe this argument will make some headway with “the base.”

(3) It’s just like Monica? No. Why this story is different: (A) Monica wasn’t underage. (B) She was over the age of consent. (C) Did we say she was not a minor?

(4) Why it is similar to Monica: The disgraced politician(s) failed to tell the truth.

(5) Why it’s really different from Monica: The hypocrisy factor. Bill Clinton disgraced himself with his intern scandal, but the nation that ultimately forgave him understood that he’d lied about a stupid and weak mistake that really had nothing to do with the policies and ideas he stood for. Foley was a member of a GOP leadership whose party’s idea of “family values” excludes gays and which drums up votes by “tougher on pederasts than thou” positions. So his personal lapse not only harmed the kids he hit on; it made a mockery of his, and his party’s, policies.

(6) There’s no vast left-wing conspiracy here. How could there be? Dennis Hastert has echoed some of the nuttier right-wing sites in complaining that the whole Foley affair is somehow a late-election-cycle dirty trick — that it’s all the Democrats’ fault, that Democrats knew about this all along but waited till they could do maximum harm to engineer a scandal.

This notion evaporates on first contact with fact: When the page oversight committee chair heard about the complaint that started this scandal, he failed to notify the committee’s one Democratic member. And ABC’s original source for the story was no Clinton operative; it was a Republican who stepped forward. This whole saga is about information moving — or not moving — among Republicans. The whole point of the scandal is that some Republicans knew about Foley’s problem for years, and the GOP leadership failed to investigate or take action. Far better to hold onto a precious seat. They played dumb, and now they’re trying to play dirty, instead of clearing the air.
[tags]Mark Foley, Denis Hastert, David Brooks, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky[/tags]

October surprise watch

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As Josh Marshall has pointed out, the GOP argument that the Foley scandal is somehow all a political setup or dirty trick of some kind doesn’t make much sense:

Is this really a winning argument or is it, as it seems to me, a sign that the House GOP leadership is currently exploring the outer reaches of the galaxy of desperation?

I mean, is it a diabolical plot to reveal that one of members of the House leadership (Foley was a deputy whip) spent the last decade hitting on teenage pages and passed the time between votes having cybersex with them?

Is he like a plant? A pervy Manchurian candidate hived into the 1994 Republican Revolution by the Dems?

Foley’s downfall was no October surprise. But now that it is crowding the headlines and threatening to deep-six Republican hopes to hold onto Congress, I’ve set my timer. I’m just not going to be too surprised if some time in the next few days we wake up to read one of the following:

  • Terror alert level raised (only to be lowered after the polls close)
  • Justice Department nabs group of plotters in Florida/upstate New York/North Dakota (later we learn that they’re just doofuses who fell for an FBI sting)
  • Osama bin Laden captured at last!

In other words, October still has a long way to go, and the party in power has the October surprise controls, so — look out. As it is, we’ve already got Hastert arguing that if he loses his job over this, it’s a win for the terrorists. Anything is possible in the dying days of a corrupt regime (alas, we’re only talking about the GOP Congressional regime — the Bush administration is likely to be thrashing in lame duck-ness for two more years no matter what).
[tags]bush, october surprise, mark foley[/tags]

Mark Foley: “Measure for Measure,” 2006 edition

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The saga of now-former congressman Mark Foley has evolved in less than a day from a tawdry scandal confined to a single Florida district into something considerably more consequential.

For those who haven’t been haunting the blogs (Talking Points Memo has been keeping tabs through the night), the deal seems to be this: the Republican House leadership knew last year that Foley had been engaging in salacious IM sessions and emails with underage House pages. The Republican House leadership did not investigate. The Republican House leadership did not, apparently, do anything.

The fact that takes this sorry tale of individual misbehavior and political fumbles and elevates it to a grander level of political melodrama is this: Foley wasn’t just your average conservative congressman; he was one of the leaders of the GOP’s “Let’s protect our young ‘uns from those pervs on the Net” brigade. As tomorrow’s Washington Post explains, “Foley chaired the House caucus on missing and exploited children and was credited with writing the sexual-predator provisions of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which Bush signed in July.”

That’s not just appallingly hypocritical — it’s “sick sick sick sick sick,” to quote one of the pages at the receiving end of Foley’s attentions. While he was authoring laws aimed at (as the White House’s press release on the law puts it) “Making It Harder For Sex Predators To Reach Our Children On The Internet,” he was trading tips on masturbation techniques with teenage House pages. Nice.

The historical record is full of puritanical hypocrites who publicly campaign against some carnal sin while privately indulging it. It’s an archetype, dating back at least as far as Shakespeare’s Angelo — the substitute ruler in “Measure for Measure” who brings the death penalty to Vienna’s fornicators, only to fall bad for a near-nun when she comes to plead for her brother’s life. Angelo’s fall is swift; he’s transformed overnight from puritan scourge to lascivious blackmailer. But at least he starts out with a clean slate.

From what we can tell, Foley seems to have the “Measure for Measure” sequence backwards: first he indulged in sordid behavior, then he toughened the laws against said behavior. That’s not just outrageous, it’s stupid — and could result in a cruel sort of justice, if the penalties of the Adam Walsh law end up falling on Foley himself.
[tags]politics, mark foley, sexual predators, shakespeare, measure for measure[/tags]

Weisberg : the Iraq war is hopeless, but if you say so I’ll complain that you’re a divisive fringe leftie

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Slate’s Jacob Weisberg was most recently warning Democrats that if they let themselves get too worked up into an anti-war lather through their support of Ned Lamont they will repeat the divisions of 1968 and exile themselves to the political wilderness. But now he’s criticizing Democrats for not talking enough about what to do in Iraq: “The situation is hopeless. The best that our leading foreign-policy minds have been able to come up with is a grim choice among forms of failure and defeat. In a country of optimists, no politician wants to deliver that message.”

Excuse me, but isn’t that pretty much the message Ned Lamont offered in response to Joe Lieberman’s mindless “stay the course”-itude? Back when Lamont said it, Weisberg slapped him for being a “callow” “novice” heading up an antiwar movement that would destroy the party. Now Weisberg’s complaining that Democrats are too chicken to admit the disturbing truth.

If Slate’s editor isn’t careful, he will find his self-contradictions escalating to a height of Escher-like complexity previously attained only by David Brooks.

(On the other hand, I give Slate much credit for publishing Tim Wu’s ode to the high art of Chinese dumplings, which reminded me to go out for dim sum more.)
[tags]slate, jacob weisberg, iraq, ned lamont, tim wu, dumplings[/tags]