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Wednesday, July 7th, 2004
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10:38 am - The smell of hypocrisy surrounds you ...
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No, I'm not dead. I've been mad busy, and posting in my LJ kind of slipped to the bottom of the queue. Though I do post to Slashdot once in a while -- I'm UnrepentantHarlequin over there. I thought my life would be back to something approximating normal a month ago, and instead it's only getting busier.
The following is adapted from a rather long Slashdot post of mine in a discussion about Orrin Hatch and his plan to make criminals of computer programmers. Enjoy.
Let me get this straight:
For years, the music industry has claimed, in Congressional hearing after Congressional hearing, that the creators and distributors of music that encourages its listeners to behave in an anti-social fashion bear no responsibility when those listeners follow along. (I agree with them, by the way, but that's not the point at the moment) They have gone to court over and over again to prove that they have no liability when they tell children to kill, to rape, to use drugs, etc., and those children do so.
Now they want to criminalize the act of writing computer programs which could be used for copyright infringement because that is "inducing" children to break the law.
Now, wait just one cotton-pickin' minute here. If selling music that glorifies committing crimes, and in some cases has a clear and direct call to commit such crimes, is not "inducement" to commit such crimes, then how is writing computer programs which may be used to violate copyrights, among many other legal uses, "inducement" to violate those copyrights? They want to have it both ways.
Ooooh that smell ... Can't you smell that smell ... Ooooh that smell ... The smell of hypocrisy
surrounds you ...
And let's not even get into the gun industry. By Orrin Hatch's logic, since guns are used in crimes, the gun industry is "inducing" children to hold up liquor stores. Handguns in particular should be banned, since their overwhelming use is to either kill human beings or practice killing human beings. It follows the same logic. So how come Hatch is so worked up about copyright infringement but he doesn't care about murder?
What a wonderful concept ... federal laws to defend a failed business model ...
The failed business model in question is the record companies' stranglehold on the music industry.
Few people seem to realize the hypocrisy of their sudden rush to "protect the rights of artists." (When did an "artist" become someone who makes music, not someone who paints? When did "musician" become a dirty word?) The biggest threat to those rights is, and always has been, the record companies themselves.
"The artist formerly known as Prince" didn't change his name to a weird symbol on a whim; he did it because before he was famous, a record company had gotten him to sign a contract so one-sided that they even owned his real-life name. (yes, it's Prince ... talk about child abuse) Going back a few years, the singers and songwriters of some of the real classics of modern music, especially (though far from exclusively) those who were not white males, were paid a pittance for their work that record companies made a fortune from. In court, the record companies have insisted time and again that $100 was more than fair compensation for all rights to a song that they made tens of millions of dollars off of.
Even today, most musicians see only a tiny fraction, if any, of the money from the sales of their CDs. They earn their money primarily from concerts. The money from that overpriced CD -- the one that sells for twice what a DVD of a movie that cost a hundred million dollars to film -- goes straight to the record company, and stays there.
The record companies have a lock on the distribution of music. Anyone can rent a studio and make a CD ... even me (William Hung move over!) ... but if they want to get it in the record stores and on the radio, they have to sell their soul to a record company.
That's why P2P scares the living shit out of the record companies. They know what the real numbers are, not the doctored ones they show Congress. They know that their serfs are deserting them for independant labels and self-distribution. They know that the massive consolidation of radio station ownership since Orrin Hatch and his buddies threw out rules that had preserved competition for decades and handed the market over to their supporter and propaganda wing Clear Channel is costing them a fortune in payola. And I'm sure they know that they're turning out endless streams of overpriced music that, fundamentally, sucks.
But they can't do anything about that. (except maybe the sucky music) They know they're dinosaurs. The know the industry has changed, and their chosen business model -- total control of production, distribution, and sales of music -- is going the way of a business model based on total control of buggy whips. So they're getting people like Orrin Hatch to pass laws to force the market to continue to support that model.
It isn't fans sharing music by the record companies' serfs that the companies fear ... they know, their public statements to the contrary, it isn't hurting their sales, and quite possibly either increasing them or offsetting what would be a greater decline. What leaves them terrified is the existance of a distribution channel that they don't and can't control which will free musicians from being serfs of the record companies in the first place. They fear a system that will allow musicans to keep on doing what they already do -- making their money off of concerts and other sources of revenue -- and not have to sign their lives and their rights over to any record company. They know a system which connects the producer and the consumer directly will have no place for parasites that have gotten fat from feeding off both ends of the line.
This is the same industry, remember, which "can't find" performers like Dolly Parton and David Bowie to pay them royalties and, in a masterpiece of spin, call being nailed by the New York State Attorney general "two years of cooperative efforts." They are not stupid. They know exactly what they are doing. It has nothing to do with the rights of the people who make the music (including Dolly Parton and David Bowie) and everything to do with making sure that they, and they alone, will control the channel between those who create music and those who buy it.
The phrase "combination in restraint of trade" comes to mind right now ...
Talking about it is all good, but if we don't do anything about it, nothing changes. We have to vote against the people who are selling us out to their corporate masters and, more, we have to encourage everyone we know to do the same. We need to do it before they criminalize "inducement" to vote against the party in power.
current mood: working
current music: Seether -- Disclaimer II
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| Tuesday, May 4th, 2004
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12:38 pm - Thinking Is a Criminal Skill
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I've been working on a client's website move/overhaul for three days straight (Judges Guild if you're curious), I fell asleep in my chair last night, and my back feels like someone tried to straighten out a pretzel and use it for a spinal column. This may explain my cynical, sarcastic mood. Oh, wait, I'm like this all the time! Never mind. . . .
I came across this interesting post on Slashdot this morning, while I was taking a break before going back to my labor in the HTML mines. By the way, if you don't read Slashdot you should. Anyway, the fact that government-mandated filters in schools and libraries are blocking Slashdot, and why, got me thinking. It tied in to my mother-in-law's vehement objections to one of my favorite T-shirts, news reports about the anniversary of the Columbine massacre, memories of the days when the fundies picketed game stores selling "Satanic" games like D&D, and other things that would only be connected in the mind of someone rather sleep deprived, and like any self-respecting blogger, I felt the need to share it with the faithful readers of this page, just in case there are any.
So what does this all have to do with my T-shirt? My mother-in-law, who is normally a very wonderful person, will not allow me to wear that shirt in her house. Her objection to it is that it is a "violent" T-shirt (despite my insisting that it is really a very timid shirt and the other shirts beat it up in the drawer) and that "people who wear shirts like that do bad things." Mind you, I have known my husband's family for for about 20 years, and so far as I know, I've shown no signs of becoming a psycho killer . . . but apparently a shirt with dragons on it could change that.
Back when Judges Guild, the folks whose website overhaul has cost me so much sleep, was one of the leading companies in the RPG industry (the paper kind, all we had back then!) there were laws banning the sale of Dungeons & Dragons, protests outside of game stores, etc. The game was described by a newspaper reporter in my hometown as "a manual for murder, rape, and Satanism." Now it's video games. They're "desensitizing people to violence." They're "lessons in mass murder." Now the laws, the newspaper reporters, the protesters, are out to "protect" us from the the terrible threat posed by those malevolent video games. (D&D, it seems, has been proven over the past 30 years to lead to nothing worse than junk food binging on game nights)
The self-appointed defenders of the One True Way from the terrible evil threat of people playing games always have their facts and figures to back them up. They can point to Columbine and say that the murderers played Doom, Quake, and quite probably Solitaire too. They can show that some staggering percentage of people who engage in antisocial acts also played violent video games. Then, with a wonderful fallacy known in Latin as post hoc ergo prompter hoc -- after, therefore because of -- they assign one to the other: If people who who do antisocial things play violent video games, then obviously playing games causes them to do so.
They conveniently ignore alternative explanations, like the fact that playing said games and committing antisocial acts might both come from the same root cause. For instance, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that people who have multiple speeding tickets are more likely to die in rock-climbing accidents than people who have none. Does this mean that the weight of a pocket full of speeding tickets makes one more likely to fall off a cliff? A more reasonable explanation would be that some people just enjoy risky actions -- speeding and unsafe climbing -- and that factor will come out in anything they do. But this type of common sense is totally foreign to those protecting us against our wills from Evil. Likewise, they ignore the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have played the exact same games and done nothing more anti-social than playing the game music too loud.
When you look at what every single mass murderer, every single psychopath, every single criminal of any type, has in common, one thing leaps to the front: they all engaged in thinking. They all had ideas, they all had thoughts, they all did something, however little, with their minds. You might find one somewhere who didn't dress in black, or wear T-shirts with dragons on them, or look at porn, or play Cowboys & Indians or D&D or Postal, but every last one of them thought. They all had brains. What's more, they didn't use those brains solely for government-approved purposes such as voting for the party in power or filling out the 1040 long form. Clearly, we've found the real root of the problem: Thinking is a criminal tool.
Do not fear the thinkers, the video game players, or even the people with violent T-shirts.
Fear the censors.
Fear those who would confine your thoughts to the limits of their own.
Fear the world where political protests are limited to "Free Speech Zones" far from the political event being protested. Slavery is freedom. Fear the world where "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is the military occupation of Iraq. War is peace. Fear the world where the press, once thinkers themselves, readily accepted Newspeak terms like "faith-based organization" (religious group) and "enemy combatant" (prisoner of war) presented to them by the Leader. Ignorance is strength.
1984 has long since passed. Fear 2004.
current mood:  sore
current music: Steeleye Span -- The Bold Poachers
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| Tuesday, April 27th, 2004
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6:57 pm - Creationism Rots the Brain
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Thought for the day:
Creationists make a big point of saying evolution is "just" a theory, deliberately misunderstanding the word theory and treating it as if it meant the same as hypothesis Then, one of the arguments that the creationists claim "proves" that God made the world by magic is that the laws of thermodynamics prove that evolution is impossible, though they equally deliberately ignore the fact that those laws apply to a closed system and we have this big fusion reactor called the Sun pumping energy into this particular system. Now, here's where the funny part comes in:
The part they're missing is that the laws of thermodynamics are just as much theory as the mechanism of evolution!
It's entirely possible that some day, some scientist will find a situation where those three laws break down. Given recent developments that hint that cold fusion might not be crackpot science after all ... who knows what's out there lurking in the sub-atomic realm? But in any event, the creationists claim that evolution shouldn't be taught because it's not a fact, it's "just" a theory ... and then use another "mere" theory to (mis-)prove this point. Um, either you accept scientifically accepted theories, or you don't, but you can't pick and choose the ones you can twist into supporting your religion. And if their religion can only be supported by such twisting of semantics and disregard of logic, it's no wonder that they're afraid to have children taught the scientific method, logic, and rational thought.
I am thinking, and where thinking is taking place, there must by definition be a thinker to do it. Therefore, I exist. But I can know nothing else, not even what form I exist in. All else is theory.
current mood:  pensive
current music: Canto (again)
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| Monday, April 26th, 2004
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1:50 am - George Bush, Demublican
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Or should that be Repubocrat?
When we elect politicians of one party or the other, it's always a trade-off. Democrats are more in accordance with my position on social issues, the environment, civil liberties, etc., but they love spawning huge, inefficient bureaucracies to do things (or to try to do them and fail) and they spend my tax money like water to do it with. Republicans usually stand for limited government and fiscal responsibility, which I strongly support, with the tradeoff being infringements on personal freedom and catering to the corporate interests.
But with George W. Bush, we've got two, yes two, count 'em two presidents in one!
He toes the corporate line on the environment, the religious right's line on social issues, and John Ashcroft's line on the irrelevance of the Bill of Rights and he builds bigger and better bureaucracies (the Vaterland, er, Homeland Security Agency, anyone?) and spends money like a Democrat -- tax money, borrowed money, any money he can get, but most importantly my money!
I'd love to have a 2-in-1 president. I'd like one who kept the government small and hungry, treated my money like his own last dime, protected the environment that we all have to live in, and put individual freedom foremost.
Instead, we seem to have exactly the opposite. In three years we've gone from a record budget surplus to a record deficit. There is a huge intelligence/police/policy agency answerable only to the president. We have the Orwellian horror of the Patriot Act, and the forthcoming Victory Act which expands Patriot and Patriot II to the "war on drugs" and "cyberterrorism." (that used to be called "hacking" but it's easier to justify stripping American citizens of their Constitutional rights if you put the word "terrorism" in there somewhere) We have an administration that cares more about what consenting adults do in their bedrooms than what corporations do in their boardrooms.
Yeah, we've got a Repubocrat all right. Or is that a Demublican?
current mood:  cynical
current music: MÃsla - Canto
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| Monday, April 19th, 2004
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2:24 pm - Technicolor Minnows
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My friends tell me I'm not supposed to be so serious in my posts here. :-/ Well, I'll probably never quite be able to talk about my battle against shower curtain mildew or something, but tough noogies; fight your own mildew. In the interest of being more personal and less grimly serious, however, I have these fish ...
The ones you can see in the picture, slightly blurred because it was taken without flash and of course fish just won't hold still and say "cheese", are Cardinal Tetras, aka Paracheirodon axelrodi. Out of sight are the cleanup crew, which consists of a cory cat (Corydoras sp.) and an oto cat Otocinclus sp) nicknamed the "Amazon algae nibbler." The rock with eyestalks is of course a snail.
They're all from the Amazon, though not precisely the same conditions. The oto cat wants a faster current and a higher oxygen environment, whereas the cardinals need very soft, very acid water ... there are times I think they'd be happy swimming in vinegar. One of the biggest secrets to a thriving fish tank is choosing fish with similar environmental requirements. All too often, people pick an assortment of pretty fish and wind up with something like my blind cave tetras, which prefer hard, cold, alkaline water, and my cardinal tetras, which need soft, warm, acid water, in the same tank. Then they can't understand why the fish don't thrive. (besides the fact that the blind cave tetras will eat anything they can catch, of course) The three species I have are similar enough to do well together. The cardinals are the stars of the show, the cory is the janitor, and the algae niblber keeps the sides of the tank polished. The snail mostly grows algae on his shell to give the nibbler something more to nibble.
The tank is a 5-gallon Regent Bio-Wheel tank -- it's Marineland's discount brand sold through Wal-Mart and possibly other discount retailers. From what I can tell, the Regent equipment is identical to their Eclipse line, but less expensive. The current plants are plastic, but I'm looking to start replacing them with live plants in the near future.
current mood: restless
current music: Chant
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| Tuesday, April 13th, 2004
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4:37 pm - I do not approve of what you say ...
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"I do not approve of what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," mis-attributed to Voltaire, defines freedom of speech in a nutshell.
Without freedom of speech, all other freedom is crippled. If we cannot speak freely, how can we exercise our freedom of religion, or our freedom to assemble? How can we wisely choose the officials of our governmentand and ensure that they are properly doing the job we chose them to do? Without free speech, other rights are hollow shells.
Speech that everyone agrees with does not need protection. Ideas that nobody finds threatening are not themselves threatened. It is exactly the opposite. What the authors of the Constitution of the United States felt it essential to protect -- the very heart of our freedom -- is unpopular speech. Distasteful speech. Things we would rather not hear. Things that we would rather not let anybody hear. The British rulers of the American colonies did not object to the speech of royalists, after all, only that of rebels. It was that right -- the right to say things that the government doesn't like, or even that most other citizens don't like -- that those rebels enshrined in our Constitution.
Freedom in general can be a scary thing. Freedom of religion, for instance, is not just freedom of your religion. If the Southern Baptist child gets to recite the prayer of the day over the school PA system, then the Wiccan child has the same right. How many of those parents demanding prayer in schools would want their child to hear a blessing of the Goddess one day, perhaps a reading from the Koran the next? How many of them would allow their children to even remain in that school? Likewise, freedom of speech is not just the freedom for people to say things that you agree with. It's their freedom to say things that you find hateful, abominable, and repugnant. It is freedom for everyone, and because it is the most fundamental freedom, the one that supports all other freedoms, it must be the most carefully protected.
With that in mind, I give you the Muzzle Awards. Particularly worthy of attention is last year's award to John Ashcroft, who I believe is the most terrifying member of the Triumvirate.
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3:35 pm - Ok, ok, I give in
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Ok, so now I've got a LiveJournal, and I've joined the millions of people who have some sort of blog, though hopefully not the 90% of whom never actually update it. Talk about vanity ... all those millions of people who actually think someone else gives a flying whistle what they think about anything, or worse yet, wants to see the Web equivalent of their home movies.
If you're one of my friends, you can expect more of the usual political rants, social rants, blathering about my excessive collection of hobbies, random comments about the state of the universe, and links to whatever I'm reading lately. If you're not one of my friends, you might want to leave now; I'm not known for my political correctness, tact, or redeeming social value.
For those wondering about the name, it's from one of the best short science fiction stories ever written: "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Tick-Tock Man by Harlan Ellison. It's been anthologized several times; hunt it down and read it.
current mood:  tired
current music: LotR: TT soundtrack
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