Sensible Liberals

Impeachment IS On The Table

Activism, creative direct action, Democratic (in)action, Madness of King George, Sensible Liberals, US politics
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Nice one. From Raw Story:

[…]

At a dinner honoring Pelosi Saturday evening, pro-impeachment activists slipped elegant placecards onto each place at the table. The cards read:

Remember, We’re the Deciders.
Impeachment is on the table.
Investigate and Impeach Cheney and Bush!

[…]

Secret Service agents blocked Jeeni Criscenzo, the endorsed Democratic Congressional candidate who ran against Darrell Issa, from unfurling a banner at the dinner which read:

Impeach Bush-Cheney Now
No Attack on Iran!

“Where is our freedom?” asked Criscenzo. “Thousands of people have signed this banner and they won’t let us present it to the Speaker quietly and respectfully.” Criscenzo added that she “might just go to Washington for Mother’s Day” to try and present the banner to Pelosi.

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The Case For Shunning

Blogs, Manufacturing consent, Media, Sensible Liberals
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Image from Flickr

A principled disagreement has arisen at Sadly, No over the hiring of Matt Yglesias by the Atlantic magazine, a subject which, although riveting to a minority, is barely a blip on the radar in the larger scheme of things. In the course of the back and forth, though, HTML Mencken nails the much wider and more important point:

[…]

You know who doesn’t deserve being paid for their opinion? Just out of principle? Anyone anywhere who was for the Iraq War for whatever amount of time. Period. I mean, that’s a fucking minimum. And Matt Yglesias doesn’t meet it.

And why Matt Yglesias got that one wrong — again, a very very fucking hard thing to get wrong — isn’t because he’s precisely not a polymath — though real polymaths who ought to be paid for their opinion, people like John Emerson or even Brad DeLong, got Iraq right. It’s because his first instinct is accomodation with the Right; it’s because his political judgement was forged post-Clinton, thus he was completely naive to the facts of innate wingnut depravity. I suspect he thought of the Kosovo operation as the rule rather than an exception; for such bovine people, the sicky-sweet neocon catchphrase “I believe America is a force for good in the world” functioned as a cattlecall. Of course some of us could recognize imperialism’s euphemisms when we heard them; for those who couldn’t, well … it doesn’t really make any difference whether it was from ignorance or stupidity. Fuck ‘em. They need to spend a long time in the journalistic wilderness before they again deserve serious attention.

Iraq is too important to forgive and forget the stupid fucking idiots who got it wrong (and often, not only got it wrong, but concentrated on attacking those who got it right). It’s the touchstone of a pundit’s political judgement.

[…]

Abso-fucking-lutely.

I’d add a corollary to that: it’s also a touchstone of a pundit’s personal moral judgement if she or he chooses to hang out and socialise with people who enabled and supported the Iraq invasion and occupation.

At the moment in Washington there’s more social stigma attached to having a child at the wrong preschool than there is to enabling mass murder, world disaster and institutional thievery on the grandest-ever scale.

Kos Does A Blog-Ratner

Blogs, Feminism, Sensible Liberals, Women
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Lamer than lame Jack McLame, the winner of this year’s Mr Lame competition – Markos Multisas of Daily Kos replies to the critics of his recent post telling women bloggers that death threats are just bad internet manners so get over it, girlies:

Blogging and threats
by kos
Sun Apr 15, 2007 at 09:49:00 AM PDT

I don’t disagree with anything Lindsey wrote. I disagreed with using a bloggers threats as an excuse to foist upon us all a “Blogger Code of Conduct”.

That’s what I was saying. 1) There are assholes that will 2) email stupid shit to any public figure (which includes bloggers, but 3) that won’t be stopped by any blogger code of conduct.

You see, stupid asshole psycho threatening emailers don’t care about codes of conduct. That’s all.

Shorter Kos: “Shut up you buncha nagging wusses, you’re harshing my king of the internet mellow. I Am Kos! Look on my works ye lesser bloggers, and despair! That is all.”

I’m not one for codes of conduct either, so I’m not at all loth to say that Kos is in danger in disappearing up the fundament of his own self-importance.

Kos is where he is now because of luck, mostly. Whilst not denying his undoubted talent and application, nevertheless he just happened to catch the zeitgeist at the right moment. And if it hadn’t been for the ongoing support of the progressive blogosphere – including feminist bloggers and diarists – Daily Kos would never have taken off at all and he’d be just like the rest of us, slogging away in well-deserved obscurity.

Kos seems to have forgotten one of the cardinal rules of marketing (one that Gerald Ratner learned to his cost) – never take the piss out of your customers. They can turn on you.

The Only Real Freedom Is Inside Your Head *

Poetry, Sensible Liberals, Torture, War on Terror
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Boot, meet other foot.

Those of us old enough to recall disco and roll-on, cherry-flavoured lip gloss with a fond smile will also remember, if we were paying attention, the justified outrage of the western intelligentsia when the writings of imprisoned Russian dissidents Solzhenitzyn and Irina Ratushinskaya were published in the West. Their works were hailed on all sides as the triumph of human spirit over torturous repression.

But while I don’t doubt the sincere horror at what was revealed as having been going on behind the Iron Curtain that the commentators of the day displayed I also don’t doubt that many felt a secret relief that it was happening somewhere else, to someone else, safely away from sight.

If you’d told the Dacron-suited, muletted and sideburned disapprovalists of 30-odd years ago that one day there’d be US government-run gulags and torture chambers right in their faces, in their own backyards, they’d’ve been so disgusted and they’ve had you run out of town for even suggesting it. “That’s evil Commie stuff, we’re the Good Guys!”

But where’s their outrage now, when here we are with the first publication of a book of poetry written by Guantanamo Bay detainees?

[Courtesy Rippen Kitten]

From The Wasteland: The Death Poem by Jumah al-Dossari

“Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.“

A-Dossari wrote this poem in Guantanamo Bay where he was tortured by US agents and military.

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“What Did You Do In The Information War, Daddy?”

Activism, Internet, Manufacturing consent, Pointlesss centrism, Sensible Liberals
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The notion of free speech may not last very much longer if the US Department of Homeland Security succeeds in its ongoing attempt to steal the whole bloody internet:

DHS Wants Master Key for DNS
Posted by Zonk on Saturday March 31, @01:33PM
from the they-own-all-the-locks-and-doors dept.

An anonymous reader writes

“At an ICANN meeting in Lisbon, the US Department of Homeland Security made it clear that it has requested the master key for the DNS root zone. The key will play an important role in the new DNSSec security extension, because it will make spoofing IP-addresses impossible. By forcing the IANA to hand out a copy of the master key, the US government will be the only institution that is able to spoof IP addresses and be able to break into computers connected to the Internet without much effort. There’s a further complication, of course, because even ‘if the IANA retains the key … the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA. If the keys are then handed over to ICANN/IANA, there would be even less of an incentive [for the U.S.] to give up this role as a monitor. As a result, the DHS’s demands will probably only heat up the debate about US dominance of the control of Internet resources.'”

This is not just about paranoid American security bods trying to control their own national corner of the internet: this is about the blatant theft by Bushco, dressed up in its spiffy Homeland Security costume, of the DNS root servers, the basic infrastructure of the whole world-wide web.

The root DNS servers are essential to the function of the Internet, as so many protocols use DNS, either directly or indirectly. They are potential points of failure for the entire Internet. For this reason, there are 13 named root servers worldwide. There are no more root servers because a single DNS reply can only be 512 bytes long; while it is possible to fit 15 root servers in a datagram of this size, the variable size of DNS packets makes it prudent to only have 13 root servers.

They are housed in multiple sites with high bandwidth access, to try to prevent attacks such as distributed denial-of-service attacks. Most of these single-site installations are still in the United States. Usually each DNS server in a given site is actually a cluster of servers behind a load-balancing set of routers.

However, a number of root servers lie outside the United States:

i.root-servers.net is in Stockholm and many other locations using anycast

k.root-servers.net has globally visible nodes in Amsterdam, London, Miami, Delhi and Tokyo

m.root-servers.net is in Tokyo, Paris and Seoul using anycast

The modern trend is to use anycast to give resilience and to balance load across a wide geographic area. For example, j.root-servers.net, f.root-servers.net and k.root-servers.net are served using anycast from a number of sites worldwide. The use of anycast
has allowed the growth of non-U.S. root DNS servers until most DNS root instances are outside the U.S.

Details of all the root servers can be seen at the root-servers.org website.

[My emphasis]

This isn’t just about market dominance. This is about invasion, colonialism and the pursuit of imperialist aims by other means. The theatre of war just happens to be virtual. The US government, or any other individual governmment for that matter, has no right to claim control over resources it does not own and which are not located on its territory. But it’s doing it anyway… eminent domain apparently works online too.

But where is the chorus of protest from the geeks?

From what I can see the majority of American IT professionals, with notable exceptions, have been remarkably quiet so far on political matters except for their ad infinitum online arguments about some spurious utopian future with libertarian transhumanisam, polyamory and rocky road ice-cream for all. The doors of their comfy padded cages are slamming shut and they don’t hear a thing. Their freedom (and ours) is being stolen from under their noses.

But hey, look, shiny new gadgets! Oooh, iPhone!

Geeky types like to think of themselves as rebels, outside the mainstream and cleverer than the rest of us lesser mortals. So why are they being so bloody supine while Bushco steals the web?

I have a question for any IT professionals reading this: dammit, people, you are the ones that control and support the IT infrastructure, you could stop this if you wanted to. You could put the skids under the entire Bushco venture if you had a mind.

But do you actually want to ? Homeland Security pays well…

So this is my question – do you really give a damn about freedom or are you just happy to be the future well-paid technocrats of the New Fascism? C’mon geeks, get up off your asses and fight for once, us non-geeks are relying on you.