Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: World Affairs

  • And I thought I was so cool (the incredible speed of Internet memes)

    I had been having a back-and-forth about global warming with a friend in Japan. Just on a lark, I sent a silly music video that was a remix of an infomercial . It is absurd and yet it’s hard to resist rewatching (“Stop having boring tuna!”).

    My friend in Japan is a bit crazy, but he’s generally pretty tuned into American culture (he grew up in Houston).  A few hours later, he replied by sending me another remix of the song; apparently not only had he already seen the video, but he had found  a “better” version.  I couldn’t believe it. This video was just a minor example of American pop culture, but apparently my friend saw it before I did.

    A few years ago I used to take comfort in  William Gibson’s thought that the future is already here;  but it’s unevenly distributed. I would still receive the occasional email about Nieman-Marcus cookies or the Bill Gates chain mail for charity. It comforted me that people were stumbling upon these things for the first time while for other people like me, it was old hat. It made me feel so hip and avante-garde.

    Nowadays, I am no longer so sure. An Albanian friend of mine watches Friends more religiously than I ever did. A Brazilian friend of mine had also watched every episode of Lost (I knew Lost was a worldwide phenomena; I just didn’t know that the level of obsession was to be found everywhere). A Ukrainian friend is telling me he has already seen the music video I sent him, and I tell him I had already seen the crazy stunt video he had sent me. I had been reading an obscure and erudite book on a provocative topic, and I find to my astonishment that my Albanian friend had been reading a pirated digital version of the exact same book!  I thought I had found something unique and unknown when I discovered a wedding dance video and my family members told me they enjoyed watching it. That dance video was on CNN a day later; the same thing happened for the United Breaks Guitars song and several other minor Internet phenomena. Since when has CNN been so quick to identify cultural trends? (My glib answer would be: ever since the invention of Digg, Reddit and Google Hot Trends). Media outlets like CNN amplify certain aspects of pop culture (creating enough momentum for these trends to take off).   Facebook has certainly added a new dimensi0n to everything. Now you see the memes which are infecting your friends, and you infect other friends with the same Meme. Assuming that your friends are interested in the same kinds of things, it now seems that you are sharing the same cultural signposts.

    For a while, I thought Slashdot was driving the cultural memes in geek culture (and to a lesser extent, Metafilter). Then it was Digg and then it was BoingBoing (actually BoingBoing was always big and still is). Now it seems that the video clip sites are taking over (Collegehumor, blip.tv, etc) while certain political icons are also exerting a lot of influence (Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen). For a while, I stopped blogging about anything that appeared in Slashdot or BoingBoing. I just assumed that if it had appeared on BoingBoing,  the world had already heard of it.

    Is it possible that Internet memes transcend cultural and geographic boundaries?  Obviously email and facebook allow URLs to be shared, and so it is theoretically possible. On the other hand, I would expect aspects of pop America to interest only Americans (and maybe only English-speaking countries). Yet that does not appear to be the case. On the other hand, this may simply reflect the fact that English still exerts a lot of influence over world culture; surely that is changing; pretty soon Philipinos or Brazilians  will no longer be interested in our stupid music videos (and we will no longer be interested in theirs).

    I really don’t think there is anything magical about the Internet memes I have described. The wedding dance video just isn’t that funny or clever.  But it took off because people found it cute enough to share with friends. (One characteristic of an Internet meme is its harmlessness and inoffensiveness; if an Internet meme were offensive, it wouldn’t be shared as often). This criteria of inoffensiveness meshes perfectly with the criteria of  mainstream media (which cannot risk offending its audience or advertisers). Even though Big Media amplifies certain aspects of pop culture, I doubt that they are wholly responsible for it.

    Perhaps these cultural memes serve as social exchanges, and the ability to recognize these memes as potential social exchanges is hard-wired in our brains. Certain messages and jokes are shareable; certain ones are not, and the unconscious human brain is equipped to tell the difference. Perhaps cave man would have some synapse in their brain that fired at the sight of the Slap Chop video which would have prompted him to want to share it.

    Semi-Related: This post was the inspiration for another one.

    Post-script: “Lewis Black’s Law” (mentioned here) states even if you don’t seek out Internet sensations, they will come finding you, hounding you nonstop until the winds of the fad die down. I guess the opportunity to miss the Gangnam Style sensations is  a rare privilege to be savored.

    Post-script 2: There will soon come a time when people who stumble upon this blog entry (if it exists) will not recognize any of the references or names. At this point they will need to consult some archive of historical Internet memes (if they are motivated enough).  A meme is bad enough when it is first born. Later though, it will be viewed as tiresome historical curiosities which perhaps can be co-opted by another meme which is newer and more ludicrous.

  • Surgical Strikes are not surgical and are not precise

    Matt Duss scolds the New York Times for this bellicose editorial advocating Iranian bombing. He notes this passage:

    Incentives and sanctions will not work, but air strikes could degrade and deter Iran’s bomb program at relatively little cost or risk, and therefore are worth a try. They should be precision attacks, aimed only at nuclear facilities, to remind Iran of the many other valuable sites that could be bombed if it were foolish enough to retaliate.

    Duss comments:

    Ah, yes, “precision attacks” that wonderful salve for the modern, sophisticated warmonger’s conscience. This paragraph, by itself, should have disqualified Kuperman’s op-ed from running in any serious publication. The amount of work that “relatively” is doing is here is pretty staggering. One can argue that the benefits of a strike outweigh the risks and costs. I think that’s clearly wrong, but one could argue it. But stating that those costs and risks would be “little” — even “relatively” — is a flat out, bald-faced admission that you just haven’t bothered to do the work.

    Perhaps the point is not worth belaboring, but surgical strikes and precision bombing fail an awful lot. When they fail, people get hurt, and that undermines the rationale behind it. This BBC article on NATO blunders during the Kosovo conflict reveals the full extent of it.  One of its most bizarre episodes was a NATO bomb intended for Serbia that fell in a suburb of Sophia, Bulgaria (about 50 kilometers away from the Yugoslav border). Luckily, no one was seriously hurt (and it was reported nowhere in the American press – though it was reported in Eastern Europe).

    Central_and_Eastern_Europe_Map-reduced

    I generally supported the NATO action on Kosovo, though the conflict made clear how empty were the claims that modern weaponry could avoid civilian casualties. I’d actually been fooled by articles about the Gulf War which claimed that bombs would focus on one building and ignore the rest.

    I’m sure that modern guidance systems have improved considerably over time but doubt that they have made a difference about human casualties. Why?

    1. All machines & software have glitches and do not function as planned. I’ve worked a bit in software testing, and let me say that even for official software, there are always bugs and unexpected behavior. Developers can only work at suppressing the most egregious.
    2. A weapon interacts with other military systems, sometimes with systems of the opposition. True, US guided missiles might be able to outmaneuver other radar systems better, but that does not mean that an interaction between these two systems can’t have unpredictable consequences.
    3. Failures of human intelligence. Often the technology can work perfectly fine, but the military intelligence over what the function of a building is can be wrong or outdated. That was what happened with the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, an accident with disastrous consequences.
    4. Incompetent/Malicious soldiers. Planners assume that all soldiers are basically competent and sane and that weapons systems are failsafe. We cannot know that. (Perhaps they were talking on a cell phone to their commander when they accidentally pushed a button?)
    5. The natural tendency to make weapons more lethal over time offsets any overall gains in precision. If a bomb had the power of a single bullet and could be guided to blast through a window and assassinate a single leader, that would be precision bombing. Even though GPS may provide a predictable path to the target,  it would be ridiculous to award this intelligence to a single bullet; it just isn’t lethal enough; that would have to be a helluva expensive bullet.  I once visited a burger place where they had three sizes of milkshakes: medium, large and extra-large. The medium was 16 ounces, the large was 24 ounces and the extra large was 32 ounces. A 16 ounce milkshake already has  423 calories (i.e., 2 candy bars). Even if you order the medium, you are still ordering more calories than what you really needed. Sure, the military can create a “medium-sized” bomb, but by definition it is going to be more destructive than what was really necessary. The use of such costly bombs don’t make sense unless it can cause a significant amount of damage.
    6. Lack of real time information. You may know for a fact that Osama bin Laden will be in a certain room at a certain time, but you may not know the people around him or not have a way of knowing whether he was delayed somewhere. A related problem is the unexpected arrival of people who weren’t supposed to be there. NATO et al can always claim that they assumed they were bombing a target at a time when the target was isolated or unmanned, but it’s hard or time-consuming to anticipate what kind of people are around or inside a building at any particular moment.
    7. Failure to predict direction of debris. You may know Osama bin Laden is in a certain room at a certain time, but it’s hard to predict how the bomb would explode or where the debris will fly.

    Unless the US can voluntarily agree to voluntarily downgrade the lethality of its weapons, it seems unlikely that precision bombing can actually be achieved despite its repeated use in opinion pieces.  Generally, military people have accepted this inevitability. (“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.” ) But when you use the language of “surgical strikes” and “precision bombing” you are hoping the unsuspecting reader will believe this nonsense and start to believe that the phrase itself protects you from a messy uncertainty.

    Update: . Glen Greenwald complains about how the military leaks airstrike information strategically:

    But far more often, these boasting claims regarding a controversial U.S. air attack or missile strike turn out to be completely false. It’s painfully obvious that these assertions are made to overwhelm, distort and suppress any discussions of the actual effects of the attack — who the strike really killed, whether it was justified, legal or wise, whether we should continue to drop bombs in more and more Muslim countries. Yet no matter how many times these claims prove to be false, American media outlets not only dutifully and mindlessly print them without challenge or skepticism, but also allow these claims to dictate their headlines and the overwhelming focus of their “reporting” on the attacks (U.S. Air Strike Said to Kill Top Al Qaeda Leaders). As a result, Americans are innundated with false claims about things that never actually happened — pure myths and falsehoods — while the actual consequences of our actions (the corpses of innocent Muslim men, women and children being pulled from the rubble) are widely disseminated in the Muslim world, yet are barely mentioned by our media. And then we walk around, confounded and confused, about how there could be such a grave disparity in perception among our rational, free and well-informed selves versus those irrational, mislead, paranoid, and primitive Muslims.

  • Attention Larry King, Attention US publishers!

    Glen Greenwald deconstructs a New York Times piece on the wrongful Gitmo imprisonment of a Sudanese journalist. Greenwald writes:

    By stark contrast, the American public is, as Stelter notes, almost completely ignorant of what our government has done in this regard.  And why is that?  Because the same media that fixates endlessly on the imprisonment of American journalists by other countries all but blacked out any reporting on what we did to al-Hajj (again, other than columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is commendably as concerned by the American imprisonment of foreign journalists as he is when other governments do it to ours).  As I documented back in May, a Nexis search of media outlets finds that "Roxana Saberi" — the American journalist detained for three months by Iran and then quickly given a trial and appeal — was mentioned 2,201 times during the first two months of her ordeal alone; by contrast "Sami al-Haj" was mentioned a grand total of 101 times during the first six years of his lawless detention at Guantanamo.  The short imprisonment of an American journalist by a hated nation merits a full-on media blitz from the American press; the imprisonment of a foreign journalist by the U.S. Government merits almost nothing.

    …

    So just consider the record here.  The New York Times will frequently label what other governments do as "torture" but steadfastly refuses to use that term for what the American government did.  It promiscuously accuses foreign countries of "human rights atrocities" but self-righteously objects when that term is applied to our own government even after it abducts, disappears, lawlessly imprisons, and tortures people even to the point of death.  It accords extreme deference and respect to the claims of government officials even when those claims are patently false.  In other words, The New York Times‘ journalistic practices create — either by design or effect — the false impression that torture and human rights abuses are things that other governments do, but not our own.  Who is it exactly, then, who is departing from "journalistic objectivity"?

    Let me say that Gleenwald is being a tad unfair. Saberi was an attractive young women – an easy and appealing journalistic subject with numerous ties in the US. Al-Hajj was from a distant land. Also, I think Stelter does a good job of acknowledging the double standards at work here and finally writing the article which should have been written years ago. The real problem is that journalists didn’t try hard enough to gain information about Gitmo prisoners.

    The solution, I’m afraid, is for NY publishers to publish tell-all books by these prisoners and then  arrange for these “political prisoners/celebrities” to be invited on Larry King/Oprah/60 Minutes. The only way the media can acknowledge the injustice is if a monied interest is cajoling them for coverage.  If Larry King had a regular feature called “Interview with the Falsely Imprisoned Foreigner”, you better believe that the US government would stop the practice.

    Alternate solution: Require that all overseas people imprisoned by the US military to receive mandatory English lessons (plus access to literary agents and PR agents). I’m only being slightly nonserious.

  • Denialism, Denialist Blog and Health Care

    I am way behind on blogging. Facebook microblogging has taken a lot of wind out of my blogging sails.

    Joe Romm on denialism. This is one of the fiercest denunciations of denialism I have seen.

    Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.

    …

    My personal experience is that no amount of scientific evidence can convince the well-known “skeptics.”… The media — and everyone else — should stop using the term. It makes a mockery of the English language, it is an insult to real scientific skeptics, and it feeds the overall disinformation effort that makes humanity’s self-destruction more likely.

    The deniers and delayers, as CP uses the terms, are those who aggressively embrace one or both parts of a two-fold strategy. First, they deny the strong and growing scientific understanding that the climate change we are witnessing is primarily human-caused, that the human component of the climate forcing will increasingly dominate the climate system, and that we face multiple catastrophic impacts if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends sharply and soon.  Second, they work to delay this country from taking any serious action beyond perhaps investing in new technology (although even that is mostly lip service since the overwhelming majority of deniers and delayers are conservatives and libertarians who oppose all serious efforts to accelerate the development and deployment of low carbon technologies).

    …

    Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.

    Steve Running on the 5 stages of climate grief. Following up on this 5 stages, Romm adds a final (though loftier) kind of denialism:

    Finally, you end up in a kind of denial. It just becomes impossible to believe that the human race is going to be so stupid.  Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we’re going to avoid catastrophic global warming, as any regular CP reader knows.  But my heart, in denial, is certain that we will The great New Yorker write Elizabeth Kolbert perhaps best summed up this form of denial.  Her three-part series, “The Climate of Man,” which became the terrific book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, famously ends: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

    Actually this is a form of denialism I do not subscribe to.  I believe we in fact are capable of slowly destroying the planet without taking corrective action.  Global warming is a slow-acting disaster without direct effects. Even if the North Pole totally de-ices, that doesn’t impress people in Houston. The problem with global warming.

    (I’ll be commenting more about Steve Running in a future post).

    Here is a listing of climate change denialist arguments, ranked in order of popularity.

    The Denialist blog is a great science blog dedicated to debunking pseudo-science.  (Here’s a Deck of Cards about how to recognize/refute denialists.

    (Even though i published this, I have a few more links to add).

  • Fun with Bank Graphs

    I enjoyed this graph in the financial times.

    It’s market capitalization of the world’s 20 largest banks.

    Here’s the best part. At the bottom of the graph is a a slider, so you can see how the listing changes over a 10 year period.

    Fun games you can play:

    1. Look at Citigroup’s capitalization over time. Notice anything peculiar about the most  recent year?
    2. Look at HSBC (the company I am suing). It seems to have ups and downs.
    3. Look at the biggest banks in 1999. See how it compares with the biggest banks in 2009. Can you draw any conclusions about the world economy from it?
    4. Look at Fannie Mae (did you even know it was a bank?) Track its rise and fall.
    5. Look at how the color bars grow and decline over time (the color bars represent the wealth of all humanity).
    6. Wow, look at how great a year 2007 was for banks!
    7. Wow, where did Bank of America go?

    Essay question: is the  better performance of Asian banks in 2009 a result of 1)China’s  modernization or 2)China’s cautious investment
    policy or 3)incompetence of US banks or d)all of the above.

    Update: Darn, it looks like this fun graph is now behind a pay wall. Last time I link to FT!

    See also: Tyler Cowen’s New York Times piece about why the AIG bailout costs  more taxpayer money than those oft-talked about corporate bonuses.

    Is it just me or does the whole world eagerly await Robert Reich’s blogposts?  Friday he said we need to recognize a depression for what it is and just a few minutes ago he complains that Geithner’s threat to fire CEO’s dependent on government handouts is essentially empty. He writes:

    All told, about one out of every five large American companies depends on government contracts, and a majority of these firms are losing money right now. So … off with their heads.

    Simon Johnson notes that the prescription for rescuing the US economy is similar to that the IMF gives to developing nations: stop coddling your corporate fat cats! Simon Johnson writes for Baseline Scenario, a great recession blog.