Morgan Wilson: rants

wondering about big media biases (with a postscript about left & right tactics)

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 14:18:41 GMT

I wrote earlier about the unlikely story of how I first experimented with AOL. I’m surprised to say that I still use it from time to time – on a plan which gives me a very small number of dialup access hours. The reason is that now my iBook doesn’t seem to work well with any other dialup ISP. I would be tempted to think that this is something that AOL did to my computer, except that I remember that this problem predated the first time that I used AOL. It’s probably a hardware problem – but because most of the time I use a broadband connection without any problems on my iBook – I’m reluctant to send it in if it’s not really urgent.

My first use of AOL coincided with the beginning of the Iraq war. At the time I noticed a real pro-war bias in the way the war news was reported. It’s interesting to see how this has changed lately.

Last week, they reprinted Salon’s article about John Mellencamp and patriotism.

Am I paranoid to wonder if AOL Time Warner decided to pander to the government’s dogs of war in the lead up to the execrable FCC decision about media ownership, to show the Republicans in power that big media could be supportive of their interests? And that now the FCC rules have been released, AOL Time Warner can be a little more centrist (definitely not left-wing).

Postscript: Along with the Salon article, AOL had one of their ubiquitous polls. The question was along the lines of “Who is more patriotic? – a) the Left, b) the Right, c) Neither – each side is patriotic but they have different opinions.” My recollection of the result was that almost 50% answered “C” for neither, 40% answered “B” for the Right and a measly 10% chose “A” for the Left.

I chose the Neither answer – because I do think that many of the Right-wingers genuinely care for their country, even if their methods or goals are misguided. My reading of this poll – and be assured that I don’t put too much stock in its results – is that people on the left are more reasonable and are mature enough to admit that the other side might sometimes have a point, or at least a legitimate concern. Whereas people on the right (I choose not to call them Conservatives because they a radical agenda of tearing up long-standing social supports and threatening civil liberties) are more fanatical – and refuse to see any good in their opponents or flaws in themselves. I know, it’s kind of petty to be fighting over the high moral ground but it’s still legitimate point. What do you do against an opponent who refuses to play fairly? Do you to stick to your principles and lose (praying that someday the wrongs will be righted) – or adopt their rough-handed tactics in the hope of beating them at their own game?

patriotism corrupted

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 05:28:05 GMT

I did take one little vacation to Iowa, south eastern Iowa to be exact. I attended my first ever Fourth of July parade in the small town of Morningsun. I enjoyed the experience, although it made me feel very much like the foreigner (or resident alien, as the INS prefers to call me). I was struck by the sense of community that I saw. I have never seen so many John Deere tractors in a single day, or beautifully restored old cars, beauty queens of all ages or American flags. Almost every single car or person in the parade bore an American flag, usually with a slogan such as “Support Our Troops!” Sometimes there was a variation, such as “Support our troops, they support you!” Other slogans mentioned the words Freedom and Liberty in connection with the supporting the troops. At this moment, I felt very bad for my American friends who went to the parade with me. They had no Real Freedom or Liberty to say anything like, “Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home!” without being shunned and excoriated by their community. Of course, they could think such thoughts, but that would be setting themselves against the clear message that their community was saying in this parade. The message was that patriotism means wholeheartedly supporting President George W. Bush’s decision to liberate (i.e., invade and occupy) Iraq. It must be hard to love one’s country when patriotism has been hijacked and defined to be jingoistic warmongering. So when did being a true American become reduced to loyally supporting the nation’s secretive and deceitful leaders? I may be an idealistic foreigner, but wouldn’t the true spirit of the Fourth of July involve demonstrating independence of thought from one’s leaders, as did the signatories of the declaration of independence? This travesty made me feel glad that I’m Australian, where there is a long-celebrated tradition of taking the piss out of our leaders, whether in good times or bad. (“taking the piss” might be described as irreverently putting people back in their place)

Music: Liz Phair, Liz Phair, Insanity

confessions of a Mac user who doesn't hate Microsoft + rant against brushed metal interfaces

Tue, 20 May 2003 04:38:23 GMT

Maybe before I nervously start, I should say something about my Mac head credentials. Most of my computers have been Apples: starting with an Apple ][, a Mac classic, a colour Mac classic, and a PowerPC - an awful mid-1990s lemon which turned me off Apple for a few years. All was forgiven with OS X.

I'm fortunate that I work at a place which allows me to bring in my iBook for my work. I can do 95% of my work on the iBook. I hardly ever need to turn on that noisy boring beige fan in a box that's disguised as a computer :)

Mac users often feel like an oppressed minority, united by their stubborn resistance to the Wintel Borg. This is where I encounter difficulties. Although I'd never willingly buy the Windows operating system, I don't hate all things Microsoft. It's like being a very lonely minority within a minority. I'm not here to defend M$'s business practices, just to state the fact that sometimes they make decent software, including their software for the Mac.

It's ironic that what's brought me to this point has been my move away from my Windows PC at work. One of the whole reasons for this transition is that I loathe the GroupWise email and personal information management (PIM) software that my university uses. I wanted to combine all of my stuff under the one roof - and the one thing that worked for me was MS Entourage - their Mac equivalent to Outlook. I felt very guilty about this. I so wanted to rely on iCal, iSynch and Apple's Mail programme like the rest of the Mac faithful. I wasted many an hour trying to find the proper solution, but I missed synchable notes and the symplicity of categories - the elegance of having multiple calendars was wasted on me.

Since I've already sold my soul to Bill Gates, I might as well admit this: now that MSN for OS X has been released, I've decided that this works better for me than the traditionally more-Mac-friendly Earthlink. Sure it has added a few training wheels to get the AOLers, but I can ignore those. In true Microsoft style, the MSN email intregrates very nicely with Entourage - although not the address book or calendar, which is quite annoying.

Something that MSN for OS X does - as well as AOL for OS X - is look very nice in the Mac's new operating system. I recently read an opinion - but cannot remember where so I cannot credit it - wondering why Apple made such an elegant and visually appealing operating system only to ignore it in all the software they produce for it. This is the beginning of my rant against brushed metal. It was a novelty in iTunes, but now it's also in iPhoto, iCal, iSync and now Safari!! Maybe it appeals to Steve Jobs' sparse aesthetics, but I think it looks cold & unfriendly. Microsoft did much a better job with its Office X suite and MSN browser.

And so I'm torn between feeling unworthy to use my Mac - and reveling in my blasphemy.

ranting about the language and symbols of war & peace

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 05:53:44 GMT

It's too bad that Radio doesn't offer a feature similar to LiveJournal's "LJ-cut". I'm improvising an equivalent by posting this potentially inflammatory posting as a story.

catsitting and war

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 04:53:09 GMT

First I was away from my main computer catsitting for some friends. Then this inevitable war broke out - which was always going to happen, despite the opposition of so many "focus groups" in the US or the rest of the world. No, I haven't been spending all my time following this Glorious Showdown with Saddam. I just needed to take a little break and switch off from these depressing, disheartening times. But now I feel ready to get back into the fray...

my silly little obituary for bookmarks

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 02:10:04 GMT

When I first started browsing the web, I was infatuated with bookmarks. Bookmarks were always bookmarks then, never "favorites", because Netscape was the only show in town - unless you counted Mosaic. This was when Microsoft was still in denial about what the web was about.

It was so difficult to find anything on the web in those days. All the search engines seemed inadequate in major ways. So the trick was to dilligently bookmark anything you came across which could possibly be of use, because you never knew if you'd be able to find it again.

I was such a nerd (and still am) that a good set of bookmarks seemed almost like a little treasure. Sometimes to be shared, sometimes hoarded, always valued.

Things are different now. The only bookmarks that I care for are the ones that go along the top of the browser. I would only bookmark a small number of sites that I use a lot - which have URLs which are difficult to remember.

None of these would be other blogs, because I keep track of those in my news aggregator. I generally don't bother with blogs that don't have RSS feeds. It's just too much extra work. I know that I miss out on the some good stuff because of this, but there are only so many hours in a day.

There's nothing more annoying than accumulating so many bookmarks that it takes longer to find a site in your list of bookmarks than it would to look it up on a search engine.

One part of the problem is that I frequently use at least three different computers. My home computer, my main work computer and the reference desk computer. I know that there are services for storing your bookmarks on the web, but they seem kind of clunky.

Maintaining bookmarks is annoying. They get outdated so easily. It's the nature of the web. The whole idea/metaphor of web bookmarks is wrong. To compare a web page to a fixed page of a book that can be marked does not match what the web is really about. Imagine a tornado inside a library. Books and pieces of paper are flying everything. Sometimes new things enter the swirling maelstrom, sometimes things leave it, but things are always changing.

It is in the nature of URLs to change - except for the ones so stable that they could easily be remembered anyway.

I guess another reason why I no longer rely on bookmarks is because I blog. If I find something interesting on the web, I'll blog it. I know that the link will go out of date, but I trust to be able to find it again. Because of the symbiotic relationship between bloggers and Google, I know that my act of blogging a site will help keep it on Google's radar.

following up: arbitary & political distinctions between essential & non-essential services

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 03:32:37 GMT

By pure chance today, I stumbled over the website of the League of Minnesota Cities. I was interested to see that they had quite a scathing response to the State Auditor's report that recommended that state government aid to Minnesota cities be severely cut. Here are some gems from the LMC's response:

The state auditor is generally charged with auditing local government finances. This report goes far beyond the traditional role of the auditor and ventures into the policy arena. ... [my thoughts exactly!]
The report's distinction between essential and non-essential spending is arbitrary and ignores the fact that cities across the state are facing very different circumstances. [my emphasis]
The auditor's report is built on several false premises - ... Services such as airports and transit and libraries, because they are provided by counties or regional governments in some areas of the state, are not essential services anywhere.

Yes, the State of Minnesota is in deficit, like many other states. It's one thing to give libraries a "fair share" of the pain that must go around. It's quite another to give libraries an extra helping of the pain because political leaders are pursuing an extremist agenda to keep taxes low for the rich and punish all the others who actually like some of the things which government can do. Minnesota may become a cultural & educational & environmental wasteland - but hey, at least we'll have low taxes and nice roads to drive our gas guzzling SUVs on!

outrage, political despair, hope

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 05:00:18 GMT

I'm currently taking a class for my Master of Arts in Liberal Studies called the Literature of Hope. At first I wondered if it might be über saccharine sweet, and not helping the way I'm seeing things right now. The instructor makes a big distinction between wishful or naive optimism and the real hope which is conscious of all the horrors in the world and somehow manages to survive.

Now how is this relevant to this blog? Because looking around at what's happening in the world, I struggle to find any hope in the 21st century. Tom Tomorrow's cartoon in today's Salon was about liberal "outrage" but it could have just as well have been about political despair.

*** HOPELESSNESS ALERT! DO NOT CONTINUE READING IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE DEPRESSED!***

Let's begin with the local and particular. Libraries all over are facing budget cuts and rising expenses. A major library vendor has recently collapsed and it is likely that libraries will suffer heavy losses because of this. Just today I read that the Arizona State Law Library has been shut down. In my adopted state of Minnesota, once a tolerant and progressive place, the Republican party won big in the 2002 elections. Now there are plans to balance the budget without raising a cent in taxes or cutting services drastically - all this is code for balancing the budget on the backs of government workers (for whom many people seem to have a visceral hatred, which puzzles me, particularly after 9/11). Last week, a Bill was introduced to the Minnesota legislature which would remove references to sexual orientation to the Minnesota Human Rights Act, and all other laws, including a resolution condemning Nazi persecution. It's unlikely to succeed other than to lower the bar for what is acceptable.

Looking on the federal level, I see civil liberties and library privacy being trashed in the name of "war on terrorism", yet the leaders' of this country are dead-set for a war in Iraq, which will increase our risk to terrorism by one hundred-fold. This country is totally split down the middle, between those who support and believe President Bush, and those who think that his election was illegitimate and that he is the worst, most incompetent and dangerous individual to ever sully the Oval Office. There is little dialogue between the two camps other than shouting matches on talks shows - most recently in the O'Reilly Factor. I despair of ever persuading these people that "you are either with us or against us" is plain wrong - and they despair of ever convincing me that it is right. Although the country is almost divided 50/50, the combination of extra corporate money supporting Republicans and the plague of cowardice, apathy and despair afflicting liberals makes it almost inevitable that the Republicans will win and the large liberal minority is ignored. I wonder if the American democracy is being gradually corrupted into an oligarchy, where the wealthiest companies and individuals hold the reins of both political and economic power. Through their campaign donations, they can own politicians and can dictate the text of anti-consumer statutes like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Supreme Court is not immune to this influence, as demonstrated by Bush v. Gore and the Eldred decision.

I could go on and on. You get the idea. And so now I find this question of hope to be quite relevant. For my major paper, I intend to explore this question: How can an entrenched political minority maintain hope in times like these? When it seems like we will never prevail and cherished democratic ideals are being eroded one by one. Many people just switch off and I can understand why.

After Vaclav Havel was released from the last in a series of prison terms for his protests against the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, and well before the democratic revolution that would overthrow that regime and raise him to the presidency, he told an interviewer, " I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from 'elsewhere.'" For years, Havel and his fellow dissidents had been circulating petitions, drafting manifestos, staging protest plays, smuggling news to the outside world, with very little show for it aside from their prison records. What kept them struggling? Not a belief that their cause would prevail, but a belief that their cause was right. "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism," Havel explained. (Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting for Hope, 1998, p. 27 - my emphasis)

All anyone can do is continue to resist & struggle against these reactionary times. It is quite possibly that we will be defeated - but it is better to go down fighting than to give up. History goes in different cycles and one day the world may be very different - and the better for our resistance. That's why it's important not to give up.

anti-linking policies are anti-web and absurd

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 02:03:01 GMT

Are You Agreed?.

After an extended absence from the office I have just retrieved a voice mail from the Los Angeles Times requesting that I remove the link to the article "Firm says law stifles fair use on DVDs" until we can negotiate a licensing fee.

More here, at Kevin Heller's. The article Kevin linked to in his News sidebar is about the 321 Studios case (mentioned earlier here; the company's news page now is more up to date, but doesn't reference the Times article).

According to the Times' Terms of Service, "... If you operate a Web site and wish to link to Latimes.com, you may do so provided you agree to cease such link upon request from Latimes.com. No other use is permitted without prior written permission of Latimes.com. ..." (Emphasis added.) This is reiterated when one follows the iCopyright linkage at the bottom of an article on the Times' page. The article in question is reprinted, presumably with the Times' permission, at SunSpot.net, where I can't readily locate a linking policy of any sort.

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin's thoughts on linking issues are memorialized here. Cory Doctorow's response on shortcomings of the revised NPR linking policy is here, and an article by Mike Janssen in Current further summarizing and rounding up links about the NPR episode is here. Among other things, Janssen notes that, "The Washington Post and the New York Times openly allow links to all of their pages, and the Los Angeles Times stipulates that webmasters can link to its pages as long as they agree not to if asked."

Bret Fausett's piece discussing the potential enforceability of "click-read" agreements is here, and Kevin Heller's own thoughts as to why such agreements should not be enforceable are here.

Hordes of inbound links to the Times. The Times reaching out and touching people on their voicemail. Hmm. I'd say this one's destined for a bench memo near you, soon. [Bag and Baggage]

Ooh this makes me cross!! Ideas/facts are not themselves copyrightable (only their expression) - although the content business would like to suffocate this fundamental information right in shrink-wrap. A link to a web site is just a statement of a fact - that at a certain place on the web this information exists. The L.A. Times can't prevent a blogger from linking to them, no more than it can copyright any other fact, such as 2+2=4, For the L.A. Times Times to prevent anybody linking to them is like claiming copyright in their own physical address, 220 W 1st Street, Los Angeles. Am I wrong?!

Doubting that Bjork's Greatest Hits CD is copy-protected

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 01:27:06 GMT

Tacky. Today for the first time I consciously refused to buy a CD that I would have bought if it hadn't been copy-protected: Björk, Greatest Hits. ... [The Aardvark Speaks]

I don't usually discuss my musical tastes in this blog, but I'm a huge Björk fan. I pre-ordered both Greatest Hits and the Family Tree box set from her site. I received them on Friday and was able to play them on my iBook and I immediately ripped them with iTunes. That went fine. I've been able to play the MP3s without hassles or noticeable loss of quality. I've haven't tried burning them to another CD yet - but don't see why this would be a problem if I could rip the songs.

I would be extremely surprised if Björk, of all artists, would do this. She seems to be very web-savvy. Her cool bjork.com/unity site has free music and video streaming. Even the contents of Greatest Hits were selected by the members of her site. Björk is innovative with her music and isn't one to shirk risks, but I really doubt that she would choose to be a pioneer in this area. Please excuse the rantings of this fan...