feed the monkey

Towards a Subversive-Free internet.

Alexis Madrigal, at the Atlantic:

Imagine you’re walking down the street and you say out loud, “Down with the government!” For all non-megastars, the vast majority of people within earshot will have no idea who you are. They won’t have access to your employment history or your social network or any of the other things that a Google search allows one to find. The only information they really have about you is your physical characteristics and mode of dress, which are data-rich but which cannot be directly or easily connected to your actual identity. 

…

On the boulevards and town squares of Facebook, you can’t just say, “Down with the government,” with the knowledge that only a small percentage of the people who hear you could connect your statement to you…The pseudonym advocates note that being allowed to pick and choose a different name solves some of these problems. One can choose to tightly couple one’s real-world identity and online identity… or not. One can choose to have multiple identities for separate networks. In the language we were using earlier, pseudonyms allow statements to be public and persistent, but not attached to one’s real identity. 

This is a problem to the extent that social activity online exists entirely within G+ and Facebook, which is why, as disgusting as it often is, a place like 4chan has real value. The online world can’t be subversive-free. 

The American People Are An Ever More Spherical People

Yglesias, quoting some fancy study:

Within the course of the 20th century the American population went through a virtual metamorphosis from being the tallest in the world, to being among the most overweight. The American height advantage over Western and Northern Europeans was between 3 and 9 cm in mid-19th century, and Americans tended to be underweight. However, today, the exact opposite is the case as the Dutch, Swedes, and Norwegians are the tallest, and the Danes, British and Germans — even the East-Germans — are also taller, towering over the Americans by as much as 3–7 cm. Americans also have shorter lives. The hypothesis is worth considering that this adverse development is related to the greater social inequality, an inferior health care system, and fewer social safety nets in the United States than in Western and Northern Europe, in spite of higher per capita income. 

We’re getting shorter, but at least we’re getting fatter. We still have the most mass!

Gojee: A Promising Food Site

Never Forget

Now that he seems to have descended into general tackiness, it’s more important than ever to remember that when Dennis Rodman was a crucial piece of the best basketball team ever, he used his time in the spotlight to be the weirdest, boundary-shiftingest sports star ever. Too many days pass without this being mentioned. It’s like it never happened. And now that he’s buried his makeup bag, we risk forgetting entirely. NEVER FORGET.

Weird Rodman, RIP.

The River, Part 1

I was very late to Bruce.

This was not for lack of opportunity. At sixteen, I got deep into Ryan Adams. I loved, and still love, Heartbreaker, a fine alt-country specimen. But I took more slowly to the follow-up record, Gold, in large part because everyone said he had abandoned alt-country for the sounds of Springsteen. To me, this was a self-apparently bad move. I have no memory of deciding that Bruce was lame. It seems like something I always knew, a fact inherited from everything.

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Bartlett: Obama is a Conservative President

Truth:

Liberals hoped that Obama would overturn conservative policies and launch a new era of government activism. Although Republicans routinely accuse him of being a socialist, an honest examination of his presidency must conclude that he has in fact been moderately conservative to exactly the same degree that Nixon was moderately liberal.

Here are a few examples of Obama’s effective conservatism:

• His stimulus bill was half the size that his advisers thought necessary;
• He continued Bush’s war and national security policies without change and even retained Bush’s defense secretary;
• He put forward a health plan almost identical to those that had been supported by Republicans such as Mitt Romney in the recent past, pointedly rejecting the single-payer option favored by liberals;
• He caved to conservative demands that the Bush tax cuts be extended without getting any quid pro quo whatsoever;
• And in the past few weeks he has supported deficit reductions that go far beyond those offered by Republicans.

…

Conservatives will, of course, scoff at the idea of Obama being any sort of conservative, just as liberals scoffed at Nixon being any kind of liberal. But with the benefit of historical hindsight, it’s now obvious that Nixon was indeed a moderate liberal in practice. And with the passage of time, it’s increasingly obvious that Clinton was essentially an Eisenhower Republican. It may take 20 years before Obama’s basic conservatism is widely accepted as well, but it’s a fact.