From the monthly archives:

October 2006

Walmart’s Christmas Site

by Harry on October 6, 2006

Susan Linn from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood was just on the Chris Evans show (of all places) describing Walmart’s new website, on which kids can choose a bunch of toys to add to a list which Walmart will email to their parents. Evans clearly didn’t believe Linn’s description of the site, especially the bit where she says that when you reject a toy one of the elves says that the other elf will lose his job. I think Linn is terrific, but I, too, thought she must be making that bit up, despite, like Evans, having already heard the astonishing accents the elves have been given.

No. Try it. It really is unbelievable. Come on folks, defend poor old Walmart. What good could come of this for the wider world?

Del.icio.us birthday bash

by Eszter Hargittai on October 6, 2006

Del.icio.us cakeYahoo! hosted a party the other day celebrating the third birthday of del.icio.us and the registration of its millionth user. I found out about it thanks to a listing on Upcoming. It was a fun reason to return to Yahoo! headquarters just a few days after Yahoo! Hack Day.

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I just watched the “trailer for 300”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/300/, a film version of a “Frank Miller graphic novel”:http://www.amazon.com/300-Frank-Miller/dp/1569714029 (which I haven’t read) about the battle of Thermopylae. Looks like the core of it is a good old relentless battle in the spirit of “Zulu”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008PC13/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20. There’s also some stuff on Sparta and its amazing toughness, Persia and its big golden thrones, and ambassadors to Sparta standing unwisely close to large open pits. The Spartan tradition of compulsory homosexuality was less in evidence in the trailer. My feeling is that the likes of Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson are already drafting the flinty Op-Ed pieces they’ll publish the week the film comes out. They can add themselves to the “wide variety”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_Labe%21 “of people”:http://irelandsown.net/Nation.htm “who have been”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_Colombia inspired by the story of Thermopylae. It’s all about juggling the analogy to make sure that you get to be one of the lonely 300, and not the vast invading foreign army.

Syllabus construction time

by Chris Bertram on October 5, 2006

I’ve not been blogging much of late, partly because I’ve been making the transition between being on leave and getting back to teaching, a transition that involves desperately trying to get one lot of stuff finished whilst hurriedly updating the things that you last had to think about nearly two years ago. One such is “my final-year global justice course”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/%7Eplcdib/tj.html , which is the usual compromise between things I really think they ought to know about and things that I want to talk about. The main changes have been the inclusion of a lot more material on territory, borders, immigration and the like (weeks 9 and 10), at the expense of things that they should know about already (TJ). (The lecture/seminar distinction, btw, is a little bit artificial on this course and basically distinguishes between teaching hours where I introduce the discussion and ones where students do.) Anyway, it isn’t set in concrete, and I suddenly realized at the last moment that I don’t really know the secession literature at all. So those of you out there that do, or think there’s something else I’m neglecting, feel free to comment.

You don’t say.

by Maria on October 5, 2006

In mean-spirited response to the executive summary of a report I haven’t read, here is a bad-minded slap down. Pew,the people who write generally solid reports on US Internet usage, ‘surveyed 742 top technology thinkers and stakeholders and gave them a series of “future scenarios” involving the internet and digital technologies to comment on in order to get a consensus on the future’.

And this is what the cheerleading tech crowd believes will happen by 2020:
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Hastert watch

by Henry Farrell on October 5, 2006

By my reckoning, Denny Hastert’s “Galbraith Score”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/22/livingstone-campbell-galbraith/ is “now”:http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/061003/3hastert.htm “two”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010153.php . Any bets on whether he’ll stick it out for the grand slam?

Update: We’re now at “three”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/washington/05cnd-hastert.html?hp&ex=1160107200&en=ed644f3ba9b42abf&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Online gambling meltdown

by Henry Farrell on October 4, 2006

The “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ea2a206c-51e4-11db-bce6-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=e676331a-4bb0-11da-997b-0000779e2340.html writes about a ‘meltdown’ in the online gambling sector, thanks to new US legislation.

The online gambling sector was in meltdown in the UK on Monday morning, as the fallout from last week’s moves in the US to tighten anti-gambling laws sent shockwaves through the sector. Legislation passed in Washington on Friday would outlaw the processing of bets taken on-line by banks and credit card companies. The act now only requires the signature of the US president to bring it into effect, a move which is expected in the next two weeks. The bill prohibits US gamblers from using credit cards, cheques and electronic fund transfers to make online wagers, and throws the high-risk industry – already damaged by the impact of arrests of executives on US soil – into turmoil. One person in the industry said the bill was an attempt to “strangle the industry through the banks”. Companies based in the UK, Gibraltar and elsewhere are losing billions of dollars in their stock market valuations, because of their exposure to the US market.

People like “Christopher Caldwell”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/457bddcc-1363-11db-9d6e-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=e676331a-4bb0-11da-997b-0000779e2340.html take these kinds of measures as evidence that governments can indeed regulate the Internet, protect their citizens from nasty content etc etc. I used to more or less agree with them, but after thinking it through and doing some further research, I’m nowhere near as sure as I was. States are indeed able to use third party private actors as proxy regulators as they’re doing here, by pressing credit card companies and companies like Paypal into service as enforcers. They’ve been doing this for years on the state level (Eliot Spitzer pioneered this). But this kind of regulation-by-proxy really seems only to work well when the proxy regulators have real incentives to do what states want them to do, or when the ultimate targets of the regulation are big multinational companies tht don’t want to get caught breaking the law. But according to this “GAO report”:http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0389.pdf (PDF) it isn’t that difficult for offshore gambling companies to mask their transactions as ‘legitimate’ credit card transactions if they want to. Credit card companies don’t have either the means or the incentives to prevent this, as long as they _look_ as though they are trying to comply. So if I was to lay a bet,I’d lay substantial amounts of money that the new government legislation won’t put much of a dent in the willingness of US citizens to gamble on the Internet, or in the eagerness of offshore companies to make easy money by catering to this willingness. What _will_ happen is that the currently dominant multibillion dollar companies will lose control of the market to a congeries of small, shadier companies that are much more willing to cut legal corners than large, publicly quoted companies, because they have much less to fear from prosecution (few fixed assets, no corporate reputation to maintain etc).

Attention Must Be Paid

by Scott McLemee on October 4, 2006

The term “wingnut” gets thrown about rather loosely at times. But the life and work of former Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) embodied all the richness and flavor that expression ought properly to convey. She died yesterday while bravely defying the nanny-state’s intrusive expectation that its charges wear seat belts.

Some highlights of her career are covered over at The Phil Nugent Experience:

Other Republicans had played footsie with the Turner Diaries crowd, but Chenoweth boldly remained attached to them even after the Oklahoma City bombing, an event that inspired her to the optimistic explanation, “Maybe now more people will listen!” Chenoweth married her admiration and concern for the militia groups with her other big obsession, the unspeakable horrors of eco-fascism. Having denounced environmentalism as a deranging form of religion that was at odds with the separation of church and state, she claimed that the government was using its secret black helicopters to terrorize hunters and protect endangered species…. She also, naturally, called for the impeachment of that awful Bill Clinton, but publically declared her support for her kind of world leader, Slobodan Milosovic.

Chenoweth was not simply another opportunist signing onto the “Contract with America” in 1994. “She was,” as Nugent puts it, “a 100% true believer, too radical to ever really accomplish anything and so sincere that you always knew just where you stood with her.”

The Dependable Hugh Hewitt

by Belle Waring on October 4, 2006

Searching for a ray of light in the Foley gloom, Ramesh Ponnuru points us to a voice of calm:

Hugh Hewitt [Ramesh Ponnuru]
The House Republican Conference is sending around his take on Hastert’s role in Foley-gate.

Kathryn Lopez responds:

re: Hugh Hewitt [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I often assume our friend actually works for the House Republican Conference, or RNC!

You know, when K-Lo thinks you’re kind of a hack…weelllll.

But what do Hewitt’s readers ‘think?’:

Thank you Hugh!
I first read the editorial by Dean Barnett and became “alot” annoyed! I did post my opinion of it on that comment section. So, I was so happy when I read your opinion because , well, it’s shared by me! The truth and facts about the Dim.s sickening dirty tricks are with us and we now have the FBI looking for hopefully truth/facts.

Indeed.

Hey, It’s a Plan!

by Jon Mandle on October 4, 2006

Maybe they should try $40 million. (via Atrios)

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

October surprise in Austria

by John Q on October 4, 2006

The Socialists won a surprise victory (or at least plurality) in the recent Austrian elections. The outcome appears to promise a departure from power for Jorg Haider, although the combined vote of the far-right parties was still 15 per cent, which is disappointing.

For CT election-followers, the outcome is of interest in another respect. According to the reports I’ve read, all the polls and all the pundits got this one wrong. So, if betting markets got it right, that would be pretty strong support for claims about the wisdom of crowds. But my (admittedly desultory) scan hasn’t produced any info. Can anyone point to market odds for this outcome?

Campaigning the Old-Fashioned Way

by Brian on October 3, 2006

Up here in Central New York, there are several close congressional races. So we’re being treated to a flood of TV advertising for the various candidates. You’d think it would be pretty easy to run a Democratic campaign these days. Just pick one of the “many things”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/10/2/202150/034 going wrong for Republicans and run with it. In the 25th CD, incumbent Jim Walsh is running TV ads on the “Elect me because I don’t vote for what George Bush wants” line. That would be _Republican_ incumbent Jim Walsh.
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Crooked Timber Academic Blogroll

by Henry Farrell on October 3, 2006

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, it’s been increasingly difficult for one person to keep up with changes in the academic blogosphere. Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time updating the blogroll, removing defunct blogs and what inaccuracies I could detect, and putting in new ones, to lay the foundations for a new, wikified version of the blogroll. The idea is that academics who want to add their own blogs or other academic blogs that they know of don’t need to hassle me; they can instead go and update the list themselves. The new site lives at “http://www.academicblogs.net”:http://www.academicblogs.net and “http://www.academicblogs.org”:http://www.academicblogs.org. I’m also encouraging people to add other kinds of content – descriptions of blogs, lists of blogs at a given university, and other such material that they or others might find useful (stuff which is obviously inappropriate or self-serving is a different matter, obviously). The site is on my own server space (which I hope won’t be overwhelmed by users); the “frequently asked questions list”:http://www.academicblogs.net/wiki/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions provides a more comprehensive description of what the site is, how it works etc.

Sloppy NYTimes illustration

by Eszter Hargittai on October 2, 2006

.. or where we confirm that I am, on occasion, obsessive about some things. The New York Times has a short piece about GMail’s increasing ability to avoid false positives when it comes to legitimate commercial email requested by the user.

What caught my eye was the accompanying illustration (on the left in this image below).

Sloppy illustration

That Inbox screenshot is not from a GMail account. GMail calls spam “Spam” not “Bulk” as per the screen capture on the right. A commenter on my Flickr stream noted that the illustration they put up comes from Yahoo! Mail. Hah. How hard would it have been to feature the matching Inbox?

The Trouble With Diversity

by John Holbo on October 2, 2006

At the Valve we’re hosting a book event discussion of Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble With Diversity [amazon]. You can read a sample chapter at TAP and are cordially invited to attend.

In my post I discuss, in passing, Michael Lind’s Up From Conservatism (1996) – his notion of the ‘overclass’ – and so I happened to notice that he has a new book out just yesterday: The American Way of Strategy [amazon]. I haven’t seen much advance discussion of it. I’d be curious to hear about it.

Doesn’t float your boat? I’ll try to come up with more comic book jokes for later.