Gnosis

Spilling out over the side to anyone who will listen

Monday, October 21, 2002

Telemarketers Bothering You?

Try this (courtesy of GMSV).

8:21:58 PM     What do you think? ()

Have Race Relations Gotten Better?

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about the state of race relations in New York now versus at the time of Central Park jogger case in 1989:

Could a similar crime occur again? Of course. Could a wolf pack of wilding teenagers be rounded up near the scene of the crime and be pressured into confessing? Probably, although advances in DNA testing make some mistakes less likely. For the time being, something else has changed, too.

"There is no racial tension," said Edward I. Koch, who was defeated for reelection as mayor in 1989 after yet another sensational crime, the murder of a black man by a white gang in Brooklyn, helped propel David N. Dinkins into the mayoralty. Mr. Dinkins, the city's first black mayor, soon suffered the mirror-image of his predecessor's fate: a succession of outrageous, racially charged crimes left many voters convinced that Mr. Dinkins couldn't control frightened and angry blacks, just as they had previously concluded that Mr. Koch couldn't control frightened and angry whites.

Today, more of the city's population is black, Hispanic and Asian. There is less reported crime, thanks initially to Mr. Dinkins and even more so to his successor, Rudolph W. Giuliani. There are fewer polarizing figures (Mr. Giuliani, for one, is gone; Mr. Morgenthau and the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, are widely respected). After cases of questionable shootings by the police and the brutalization of Abner Louima, a black man, by white police officers, the criminal justice and political systems responded vigorously to protests by blacks and whites together. Race is no longer reflexively injected into every issue, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's recent selection of a schools chancellor, who happens to be white.

Is this all true? Is there a decrease in racial tension in New York? From my perspective as a white New Yorker, racial issues do seem to appear far less in public discussions, but I wonder if this reflects any sort of underlying change or if it's just a change in media focus.

For a far more humorous take on the topic of race relations, Miss Feva points to the brilliant Black People Love Us!.

8:19:18 PM     What do you think? ()

Do You Ever Want to See Yourself in Doonesbury?

My wife says, "I look forward to Garry Trudeau mocking all of you."

8:20:23 AM     What do you think? ()

Is Saddam Hussein to the United States What Napster Is to the RIAA?

In the New York Times review of Kenneth M. Pollack's The Threatening Storm, I came across this thought about deterrence versus invasion in Iraq:

Muslim outrage could also make it much more difficult to keep the nuclear materials now in Pakistan out of terrorist hands. The Pakistani public has been encouraged to consider its nuclear weapons "Islamic bombs." President Pervez Musharraf seems to be making a serious effort to bring Islamic fanatics under control, but most likely their sympathizers still infest his government. Even a successful invasion of Iraq could have the perverse effect of increasing the threat we had tried to eliminate. While Saddam Hussein can, with determined effort, be deterred, Osama bin Laden and his like cannot.

For me, that calls to mind a parallel between Iraq and Napster. Leaving aside the issue of who is right with regard to file sharing, I always thought that the RIAA committed a grave strategic blunder by bankrupting Napster. Napster was a centralized location for the bulk of the file sharing activity then occurring on the Internet, and it was a company with which the RIAA could negotiate. By putting Napster out of business, they have not stopped file sharing, they have only destroyed a negotiating partner. They've made file sharing a decentralized, widely dispersed, and clandestine activity which is much more difficult to address.

8:15:45 AM     What do you think? ()