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Cool projects: MadLiberals, JPG

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  • If, like me, you spent some significant portion of your childhood in the back of a car dreaming up parts of speech to complete Mad Libs, you may find this site, and the book it’s based on, irresistible. Even if you didn’t, it’s worth a look. MadLiberals takes the classic fill-in-the-blanks game and updates it for the Bush era. The Web site offers a few interactive “MadLiberator” pages; an old-fashioned book is also available.

    (Full disclosure: My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, also served as the agent for MadLiberals, and he wants people to know that a substantial chunk of the proceeds will go straight to various charities and nonprofits.) And here, for the heck of it, are some more, more traditional, amusing Mad Libs.

  • Derek Powazek and Heather Champ have been publishing a cool little photo magazine called JPG for some time. Now they’ve expanded the project into a Web community intended to feed the magazine with contributions. (More on their blog.) Derek is a veteran Web designer and instigator of Web communities; Heather created the Mirror Project way back when. So it’s no surprise they’ve put a lot of thought and care into their project. The photos are pretty great, too.

Torture as an abstruse legal issue

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In August I noted how regularly the Bush administration has relied on formulations like “No one could have anticipated…” and “No one expected…” to explain its missteps. They’re at it again, this time with regard to the dustup between Bush’s demand for the right to torture and the senators in his own party who think that unilaterally carving out exceptions to the Geneva Conventions might be a bad idea.

Here’s what some anonymous administration official told the New York Times’ David Sanger about the controversy:

“I don’t think anyone anticipated the avalanche of opinion that would be assembled on the other side of what seemed like a pretty abstruse legal issue,” one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to discuss the issue with a reporter.

No one anticipated it, nope. Abstruse legal issue. John McCain’s position on the matter? Big surprise. Disagreement over abandoning a central tenet of the 150-year-old foundational agreement on wartime ethics? Who’da thunk?
[tags]torture, bush administration, john mccain[/tags]

9/11, Breughel and Auden

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Thomas Hoepker's 9/11 photo The photo shows five people on the Brooklyn waterfront on 9/11. Two crouch, facing the smoke rising from lower Manhattan; three others stretch out on the embankment, facing away from the unfolding tragedy.

The photographer, Thomas Hoepker, waited four years to publish the image. He told David Friend, the author of the 9/11 book “Watching the World Change,” that his subjects were “totally relaxed like any normal afternoon.” Frank Rich wrote about the photo in his column last Sunday, saying it represented how the 9/11 trauma “would recede quickly for many.”

Now there’s a bit of a controversy, fanned by David Plotz in Slate, who argues that Rich was wrong on the face of it: “They’re almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they’re bored with 9/11, but because they’re citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate.”
Ed Cone agrees.

Surely the photographer who was there understands the moment best? But wait — now one of the people in the photo has written in to Slate to say, no, the photographer got it all wrong, he never even talked to the people he was photographing, and of course they were talking about the attack on the World Trade Center and not just going about their daily business.

Breughel's IcarusWho knows? I wouldn’t jump to blame-throwing in any direction. Rather, I’d note that the power and the appeal of the image lies in the archetype it evokes, one that goes back to an extremely famous Breughel painting: Breughel’s Icarus. You’ve probably seen it — it’s the one with the closeup of the ploughman in the foreground and the mythic tragedy unfolding so far in the distance it barely registers. W.H. Auden explicated the painting in his “Musee des Beaux Arts”; it’s about relative perspective, life going on while great events unfold in the background, and the way the ripples of tragedy and heroism pass over the surface of deep waters leaving nothing behind.

If Hoepker got his explanation of his image wrong, it’s important to know; and bless the Internet for making it easy for people to correct the record. Still, the image is potent on its own because it plugs into this tradition of thought. The people in Hoepker’s photo may have been fully engaged with the events of 9/11 at the instant the image was captured, but the image itself tells a different story, one of people at a safe remove from tragedy, unaffected visibly by it.

As Auden said: Suffering “takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Towers fall, yet “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” That’s the truth, and I think that’s ultimately what Rich was writing about.
[tags]9/11, photography, w.h. auden, breughel[/tags]

The war without end, at one and five years

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Today’s 9/11 anniversary hoopla left me cold. May the dead rest in peace, may the living go in peace, and may the U.S. never again live through such a day. And may we never again be governed by such a gang of incompetent, self-serving, short-sighted fools.

I have little to add to the words Frank Rich offered this past weekend, lamenting the disappearance of the all-too-brief moment of national unity after the al-Qaeda attacks, squandered by an administration determined to drive wedges rather than build alliances and to start new wars rather than finish current ones. My colleague Walter Shapiro offers an astute analysis of Bush’s speech tonight, with its hyperbolic rhetoric of war without end; I couldn’t bear to watch it.

Instead, in thinking back to the immediate post-9/11 era, I looked back at a brief piece I wrote on the one-year anniversary of those attacks. At that time, Bush and his team were rolling out their autumn offensive (the appropriate time to unveil a new product, as his spokespeople had reminded us earlier that summer) to persuade the electorate and the world that their war on terror demanded an invasion of Iraq. Long ago, I’d been a student of military history, and I basically said, hold on a minute: before we go start another war, how are we doing on the one we’re already fighting?

Then and now, the Bush administration has so successfully defined the war on terror as a vague global struggle, generations long and apocalyptic in scope, that it resists the application of any conventional yardstick of performance. There are metrics you can apply to normal wars — casualty rates, dollars spent, enemy capabilities impaired; but when you’re fighting “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” as Bush called it tonight, you can get away with pretty much anything.

In September 2002, I said that since the president wouldn’t ever tell us how the war was going, we’d better start asking questions ourselves.

Had we prevented further terorrist attacks on American soil and citizens? Yes then and yes now.

Had we apprehended the parties responsible for the 9/11 attacks? Limited success then, minus the big prizes; no further success since.

Had we eliminated state-supported havens for al-Qaeda? Limited success then, and some ground lost since, as the border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan reverts to Taliban control — a prospect that seemed inconceivable four years ago.

Had we successfully rebuilt Afghanistan to win international support for our anti-terror campaign? I rated this “mixed to positive” four years ago; this grade is considerably lower today.

Have we prevented the spread of Islamic radicalism and support for bin Laden? Again, I said the results were mixed in 2002, but since then the disastrous Iraq war and other missteps, including the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon, have left us far worse on this score.

Have we protected the U.S. economy as the backbone of our war effort? In 2002 I’d said “mixed to negative” here; today, the economy is somewhat improved in the short term, but long-term we’ve created an economic house of cards, thanks to a president and governing party that tell us we’re fighting the war of the century but won’t levy the taxes to pay for it (or even include its cost in their budgets).

Have we preserved the ideals of our open society in the face of terrorist threats? I over-optimistically judged this “mixed to positive” in 2002; this was before Abu Ghraib, before revelations of the Bush administration’s wiretapping efforts, before we came to understand that the president was claiming the right to incarcerate anyone anywhere in the world forever without trial. I still think we’ve succeeded in resisting the worst overreactions to terror that nations have made; we don’t live in a police state — but I can’t help thinking the president and vice president wish we did.

Have we kept dangerous weapons and material out of terrorists’ hands? I marked this a blank in 2002; today I’d have to say we’ve lost ground, given the failure of nuclear non-proliferation under the Bush team’s “we don’t talk to people we don’t like” diplomacy. We launched an invasion of a country that didn’t have weapons of mass destruction instead of working at containing countries that sought to produce them; we gave those countries a big incentive to hurry up and finish their deterrents before we attack them.

Have we cut American consumption of Mideast oil to reduce our exposure to instability in the area and our dependence on despotic regimes there? This was a failure in 2002 and remains one today. If anything, the rise in oil prices has hurt our economy and helped those of our enemies, real and potential.

Based on this set of yardsticks, I’d say that we’ve made no progress since 2002 and lost significant ground on a variety of fronts. In the current Atlantic, James Fallows offers a different argument, one that says, actually, we’re doing pretty well against al-Qaeda today — we’ve crippled its operational capacity, and the worst thing we have to fear is our own over-reaction to the remaining threat.

Fallows’ argument is persuasive in many ways, but so much of the progress he cites was achieved in the first year after 9/11; the years since, overshadowed by the Iraq adventure, have not helped much. He may be right that we should declare victory in the war on terror and move on. Sadly, we could have done that four years, and untold thousands of deaths, ago.
[tags]war on terror, james fallows[/tags]

Standing behind your words

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A fascinating thread runs through a pair of this week’s scandals.

First we have two of the top names in Silicon Valley’s old-boy network at odds over some quite possibly illegal boardroom shenanigans at one of its most hallowed companies. In an effort to plug media leaks they were sure emanated from a board member, Hewlett-Packard’s chairman, Patricia Dunn, hired a private consulting firm that apparently hired someone else who obtained private phone records of board members via, not to mince words, fraudulent means.

Those means now bear the delightfully euphemistic label “pretexting,” which sounds like something harmless, out of high school debating. But what we’re really talking about is calling up institutions like phone companies and claiming to be the person whose records you’re trying to obtain. Old-fashioned black-hat hackers used to call this “social engineering.” I’m not a lawyer, and others will determine the precise legality or lack thereof of what went down at H-P; but whatever you call it, it’s deceitful and dishonorable, and that is plainly why Silicon Valley grandee Tom Perkins, whose name bedecks the industry’s most august venture-capital firm, quit the H-P board in a huff. Perkins is now at odds with Valley uber-lawyer Larry Sonsini, who represents H-P’s board and who has been saying that the company did nothing illegal. (Leading technology journalists were also apparently targeted by the H-P-sponsored “pretexting.”)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the New Republic, a little magazine with a venerable history, has suspended one of its critics, Lee Siegel. Siegel was caught posting anonymously on his own blog, under the name “sprezzatura,” singing hosannas to his own genius and lashing out at his critics.

It’s self-evident that there’s something loathsome about any writer who would don a virtual ski-mask in order to post pompous paeans to his own work along the lines of “Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be” — and then, when confronted by users who suspect the truth, deny it with “I’m not Lee Siegel, you imbecile. If you knew who I was you and your n + 1 buddies would crap in your pants.” Wit! Intelligence! Grace!

But how, asks Slate’s Jack Shafer, is what Siegel did any different from what legions of blog-commenters do every day in posting anonymous comments? Shafer is too locked into Slate’s contrarian-for-contrarianhood’s-sake stance (a journalistic mode pioneered by Slate founder Michael Kinsley when he ran the New Republic years ago) to grasp the simple and obvious difference: As the author of the blog, Siegel writes from a position of privilege. He can defend his own work from the stage mike without concocting a fake claque to cheer himself. By inventing “sprezzatura” he is not only deceiving his readership, he’s casting doubt on anything anyone has ever posted in favor of his work elsewhere on the Web. Now anytime you read anything nice posted on a blog about Siegel’s work, you’re going to be wondering, is this a real comment? Or is this Siegel playing games?

Anonymity is not a simple good — it’s a complex phenomenon that cuts positively or negatively depending on the power equation in play. When anonymity allows an insider to blow a whistle on corruption, or a dissident in a repressive regime to communicate about atrocities, it is plainly good. When anonymity allows people in positions of power to shrug off responsibility for their words, it’s problematic at least, and often harmful.

Siegel’s “sprezzatura” impersonation is a relatively low-stakes matter; with its exposure the only real harm is to the writer’s own reputation and to his publication’s dignity. But the common practice among denizens of the Bush White House of defending their actions and ambushing their opponents via anonymous, disownable statements shares in Siegel’s dishonor. They’re in power. They control the dialogue. There’s no excuse for them not to stand behind their words — and their record of unwillingness to put their names behind their statements has now fully eroded their credibility.

Back at the H-P boardroom, we have a sort of double-deniability maneuver: a primary act of impersonation on the part of investigators seeking to unmask an anonymous boardroom leaker, and then a secondary act of anonymous distancing on the part of the board and its chairman, who claim they didn’t know what their henchmen were up to. Henry II invented this “plausible deniability” gambit 900 years ago when he wanted to off Thomas Becket; it’s no more credible today.

According to CNET, before he quit the H-P board Perkins suggested that the chairman “just ask the board members if they had leaked information, rather than launch a full-blown investigation, and ask for a private apology.” Good plan. Too bad even this statement is attributed to an anonymous source.

To be fair, Perkins and his adversaries are all now tightly bound in legal webs as to what they can and can’t say. Nonetheless, we’re left with the spectacle of a group of rich, powerful people behaving appallingly. When a corporate board reaches a point as far gone as this, it’s time for everyone to resign. And I don’t mind being quoted on that — by name.
[tags]Hewlett-Packard, anonymous sources, lee siegel[/tags]

Links: Games, open systems, premature Democratic obituary

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  • Greg Costikyan’s Manifesto Games is now live. It’s offering a catalogue of independently produced and distributed downloadable computer games, curated by smart people who clearly love playing them and writing about them and sharing their pleasure.
  • James Boyle writes in the Financial Times that human beings seem to be inherently biased against open systems: “We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard).”
  • Amusing to stumble on a bit of dated GOP triumphalism — “The Democratic Party is Toast,” Grover Norquist in the Washington Monthly, Sept. 04: “Without effective control of the government, the Democratic Party is like a fish out of water…” Only the fish seems to have survived — even evolved a bit — and in November, it’s increasingly looking like a lot of Republicans in Congress will be left gill-less and gasping.

[tags]gaming, open source, democratic party[/tags]

Bush as Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog

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Billmon reminds us of Isaiah Berlin’s ever-useful concept, drawn from Archilochus, of the hedgehog and the fox — “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” — and applies it witheringly to the twilight of the Bush era:

At this point, I would say Shrub is acting like a hedgehog on hallucinogens. His one big integrative idea — exporting American-style “democracy” to Iraq at the point of a gun — has proven fatally, disastrously wrong, but he can’t let go of it, because it’s the only idea he’s got. He’s fully vested in it, like a ’90s e-trader who decided to throw caution to the wind, empty his retirement account and bet it all on pets.com.

I think if Shrub were ever forced to let go of his vision, his one big idea, it would not only crush his fragile ego, it would leave him completely incapable of making any sense at all out of his presidency, out of America’s role in the Middle East, out of the universe.

So now he’s imitating the hedgehog as literally as any human being can — he’s rolled himself up into a defensive ball, spines out. He has nothing useful to say and absolutely no strategy beyond hunkering down and passively defying reality. Which leaves the generals and the troops no choice but to hunker down with him.

The next two and a half years are going to be very long ones.

Long and painful.

The scourge of Net video: letting no pol hide from his words

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Today I caught up with a very peculiar Times Week in Review piece by Ryan Lizza that perhaps was meant as a covert satire of some kind. How else to explain the thesis of “The YouTube Election” — that the rise of populist Web video might harm the Republic, because more voters will get the chance to see their elected representatives in unguarded moments?

I’m not making this up. Lizza, and the consultant pundits he quotes, seems to think that the problem with George Allen’s “macaca” incident wasn’t that a sitting U.S. senator used a racist epithet on the public stump but rather that technology has empowered the public to witness such revealing incidents.

If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?…

Letting voters see and hear what candidates say will strip them of their last shreds of authenticity! We must fight for their right to keep their off-color remarks under wraps! Note that Lizza is suddenly talking about “any moment of a candidate’s life” being exposed — but all the examples he cites from the campaigns of Allen and Joe Lieberman are of public statements in public forums.

“Politicians can’t experiment with messages,” Mr. Dowd said. “They can’t get voter response. Seventy or 80 years ago, a politician could go give a speech in Des Moines and road-test some ideas and then refine it and then test it again in Milwaukee.”

Horrors — now politicians will have a harder time saying different things to different constituencies! They might have to be (gasp) consistent!

Wait, this is the kicker:

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not known for her spontaneity, agrees. “It is a continuation of a trend in which politicians have to assume they are on live TV all the time,” Mr. Wolfson said. “You can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark and assume it won’t get out.”

All right, it’s time to pack up and emigrate. What good is American democracy if politicians can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark? Isn’t there some sort of Bill of Rights codicil granting them that right? If there isn’t, can’t President Bush add one via a signing statement?
[tags]george allen, youtube, new york times[/tags]

Links: DoD PowerPoint, interface combat, David Kaiser

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  • I did not know that the historian David Kaiser, who taught at Harvard when I was a student, has a blog, and a good one, indeed. Most recently he puts Judge Anita Taylor’s recent decision against Bush’s domestic wiretapping program (full text of the ruling) in context:

    I was inspired by her opinion and am distressed that a variety of legal scholars, including some opposing the program, have claimed that it lacked legal sophistication. Certainly it did not focus primarily on recent precedents, although it cited some of them, nor did it, in accepted legal fashion, attempt to decide the question on the narrowest possible grounds. Instead, Judge Taylor reached back to the origin of the Republic and to the text and essential philosophy of the Constitution to point out that a President, once again, was taking advantage of an emergency to disregard both…. to those legal professionals who found fault with Judge Taylor’s opinion, I can only reply that it is clear enough to be understood by any intelligent high school student, much less a grown citizen — and that, like the finest opinions of Justice Black, it relies above all on the simple tactic of arguing that the Constitution means what it says.

    [via Brad DeLong]

[tags]flash, powerpoint, rumsfeld, wiretapping[/tags]

David Brooks: Muslims’ “search for meaning” means we’re doomed

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New York Times columnist David Brooks often produces fuzzily incoherent and self-contradictory commentary, but his piece this past Sunday (Times Select firewall there, sorry) deserves special note: It takes a bizarre last-paragraph leap from fatuity into boneheaded fatalism, and it suggests that Brooks needs either a tough editor, a long vacation, or both.

Most of the piece represents Brooks’ familiar argument about culture: culture shapes people, and cultures take a long time to change. Apparently this is stop-press news in Brooks’ circle. After an uncharacteristic foray into an idea that conservatives usually consider hogwash relativism — “All cultures have value because they provide coherence” — Brooks finally gets to his point. He cites the work of Lawrence E. Harrison to note that “cultural change can’t be imposed from the outside….cultural change is measured in centuries, not decades… cultures are separated from one another by veils of complexity and difference.”

Might’ve been worth knowing all this before we invaded Iraq. But never mind. This is simply a “duh” moment; the “huh?” comes next:

If Harrison is right, it is no wonder that young Muslim men in Britain might decide to renounce freedom and prosperity for midair martyrdom. They are driven by a deep cultural need for meaning. But it is also foolish to think we can address the root causes of their toxic desires. We’ll just have to fight the symptoms of a disease we can neither cure nor understand.

There are probably too many layers of lunacy here to grasp in one pass. I think Brooks is saying: Muslims are “driven by a deep cultural need for meaning,” and that need for meaning cannot be changed very quickly — we can’t turn them into non-meaning-seekers without centuries of effort! Which would be fine, except apparently their “need for meaning” is also the “root cause” of their “toxic desire” to blow up airplanes. Since we can’t change them, we must — what? “Fight them” as a sympton of a “disease we can neither cure nor understand”? That sounds pretty hopeless.

Brooks here is shooting himself so far into the stratosphere beyond earthly events and social cause-and-effect that I think his brain has shut down from oxygen lack. Absent from his picture is the possibility that the would-be midair-martyr Muslims, however criminal their intent, might actually be motivated by real-world factors that lie somewhat within our control — like the occupation of Iraq, or the festering of the Palestinian problem, or the indefinite detention and occasional torture of prisoners in American custody. No, the problem is so huge and intractable that we don’t need to bother thinking about the messes on the ground that we’ve helped make; all we can do is “fight the symptoms.”

It is worth pointing out that this analysis is not only detached from reality; it represents a sort of despair. It assumes there is nothing Americans can do to stem the tide of would-be terrorists and make our nation safer. That might require hard, slow work (like the painstaking labors of British intelligence in identifying the bomb plot), whereas Brooks, and the Bush supporters he is channeling, are much happier to cast themselves in a titanic global fight between good and evil — even if the good guys are, as Brooks would have it, likely to lose.

At a moment when Republicans are tossing around labels like “Defeatocrats” to denigrate anyone who dares to suggest we not throw more lives down the Iraqi rabbit-hole, this sort of reasoning is the real defeatism. Why does it appeal to Brooks? One hesitates to stride too far into the thickets of his unreason, but perhaps the “we can’t change them, only fight them” rationale is a way of excusing the manifold failures of Bush’s war-on-terror policy: To Brooks, it’s not that Bush picked the wrong strategic framework and tactics, it’s simply that the foe is too strong.
[tags]David Brooks, war on terror, new york times[/tags]