The Enlightened Despot

What with never writing anything here and all, I haven’t posted this yet, though it’s a few weeks old now. But it is glorious, and deserves recognition.

Having a job has not left me much time to work on the Despot, but I promise I’m doing the best I can. It recently occurred to me that I could do this a bit more efficiently if I used some of the material I have to read for work, but don’t end up getting to use there. For instance, in reading up on news about the video game industry, I scan a lot of game reviews. I have no use for them in a professional capacity, but they are often hilarious - sometimes intentionally, sometimes clearly not. Often I can’t tell. So, while it’s a little outside standard fare for the Despot, here are some excerpts. If people are amused and I continue to come across this stuff, I may return to this feature:

• “Excuse us if we dedicate this entire post to one, single screenshot. A picture — of gigantic metal death spikes protruding from Chuck’s helmet in Dead Rising 2 — is worth a thousand words, after all. Also, that bodysuit is pretty snazzy.”
• “Now, you might be thinking: “Elevator Action Death Parade? I’m already sold on that name alone!” But trust us, this Taito-developed arcade cabinet truly delivers on its namesake: elevator action and death parades.”
• “Seconds after booting up the Tokyo Game Show demo of Army of Two: The 40th Day, we managed to completely botch a hostage “rescue” operation, while brutally murdering the four terrorists involved… While it’s easy to simply accuse Ross of insatiable bloodthirstiness, his less-than-graceful approach at this scenario could be blamed on the (admittedly early) build’s choppy framerate, and the sometimes confusing controls.”
• “New Final Fantasy XIII trailer is heavy on story, light on English”

Jeffrey Toobin, the only remotely sensible person allowed to speak on television about the news on a regular basis, has a crazy idea: we shouldn’t torture Najibullah Zazi. TNR’s Michael Crowley finds this scheme tempting, but he has his reservations:

It’s a well-argued case, and I think I agree. But, let’s play Devil’s Advocate

If it were up to me, I don’t know what I would do; I would need to know more facts. I am not a proponent of torture, which I think has done enormous harm to America’s image abroad and moral fiber at home. But I ride the subways these guys may have been planning to attack and I would like to be quite sure we’ve found all of them. At a minimum, this is a  good opportunity to stress-test* the debate about interrogation techniques, because it may be that life can imitate 24 after all.

I would genuinely like to know: what does “I am not a proponent of torture” even mean here? It seems clear to me that he isn’t using a euphemism screen here (real torture is inexcusable, of course, but what’s a little waterboarding between friends?). But at the same time, he is obviously on the fence about something, and I don’t know how to interpret this such that that something isn’t the question of whether Zazi should be tortured. But if that’s right, why does he so confidently assert that he isn’t a proponent?

The most likely interpretation I can come up with is that Crowley is saying he isn’t enthusiastic about torture, and thinks we’ve done far too much of it in the recent past, but that he isn’t willing to rule it out altogether. This is a much more honest framing of the pro-torture position than one generally sees, but it is the pro-torture position. It’s not as if there are lots of people saying with a straight face “I think we should torture whomever we can, whenever we can.” Willingness to resort to torture in extreme cases to prevent major acts of mass murder is the most pro-torture position that’s on the table.

Now, not being a crazy person, Crowley disagrees with the Dick Cheney about just how often that situation comes up. That speaks well of him. But - whatever some neocons might feel in their hearts - no one* has embraced a more stridently pro-torture philosophy than the one Crowley appears to be leaning toward here.

* No, commenters on Michelle Malkin’s blog don’t count.

Well, not me personally, but anyone who reports on things outside of the context of his 9-5. Schumer is one of the sponsors of the senate version of a federal shield law, which would allow journalists to refuse to testify about their anonymous sources. He recently decided to make his bill a little worse:

Previously, the Senate was working with a version of the shield law (S. 448) that defined a journalist in broad terms, focusing on the process and craft of newsgathering. That stood in contrast to the House version (H.R. 985), which passed in March and defines a journalist as someone who gathers news and information “for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain.”

On Thursday, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offered an amendment to the Senate version that hews toward the professional definition in the House. Under the amendment, which was adopted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, a journalist is defined as someone who:

(iii) obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity—
(I) that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means; and
(II) that—
(aa) publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical;
(bb) operates a radio or television broadcast station, network, cable system, or satellite carrier, or a channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier;
(cc) operates a programming service; or
(dd) operates a news agency or wire service;

Unbelievable:

I’m not in the business of weighing in on debates about just where media is headed. Really, the only thing I’d put money on is that old and new media outlets will keep going under for a while now before a new set of workable business models emerge. This juxtaposition in my Reader feed amused me, though:

With the exception of this man, every serious contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination plus Ron Paul has started a PAC (unless you thing Newt Gingrich or Charlie Crist is a serious contender). These outfits raise money and make donations to the campaigns of other Republicans the candidate supports. Chris Good has a roundup of the fund raising and donations of each of these PACs so far this year. You can click through to see the raw numbers. Here, I’m going to perform a simple calculation and post the results without comment. Here, in ascending order, are the ratios of funds raised to funds dispersed for each candidate:

• Ron Paul: .049
• Rick Santorum: .888
• Mike Huckabee: .905
• Harley Barbour: .965
• Mike Pence: 1.036
• Eric Cantor: 1.021
• Mitt Romney: 1.257
• Sarah Palin: 2.653!!

What? Bolding and punctuating aren’t commenting. I’m just sayin’.

Now, anyone can be cut down to size by Kanye West.

Kanye isn’t just a jackass, he’s a derivative jackass:

Of course, ODB was a crazy person on a good day, and a crack-abusing crazy person on a regular day. What’s Kanye’s excuse?

Words fail:

You know a book-reading technology is doing well when illiterates adopt it. Dan Brown’s new book is flying off the virtual shelves faster than the physical ones.

Over at my day job, I have a post up featuring the first chapter of 50 Cent and Robert Greene’s new guide to success, The 50th Law. Its title refers to Greene’s earlier The 48 Laws of Power.

So, what happened to the 49th Law? Your guess is as good as mine, dear readers.

Sorry, but someone was going to say it.

Frederick has gone on record before in this space saying that Twitter won’t last. I’m not sure if I mentioned it at the time, but I hope it went without saying that I agree with him. As recently as a few months ago, this was more or less the conventional wisdom amongst sensible people, but it is rapidly becoming a reactionary, crank position. Nonsense.

Part of the confusion comes, I think, from running together the future of Twitter with the future of what the kids are calling ’social media’ in general. When people who get really excited by social media talk about it, it’s a lot like people talking about Derrida: full of jargon and buzz words, signifying nothing. But to the extent that the term ’social media’ more or less picks out a set of media that are more or less kinda distinct from other media, it is true that social media are here to stay, that they’ve had a serious impact on the way people communicate and gather information, and that they will continue to do so. No argument there.

Social media has a big future, but isn’t part of that future - or, at least, it is not an important part of that future. Picking winners and losers in these situations is generally a suckers game - a while back, everyone seemed pretty convinced that Facebook had passed it’s prime and was on the verge of losing out to MySpace. They look fairly silly now.

But Twitter is different. The question isn’t whether Twitter will survive or be replaced by a product that executes the same idea better. In fact, the execution of Twitter is terrific, as far as I can tell. It’s the underlying concept that sucks.

Indeed the premise of Twitter is completely ass-backwards. Facebook has contributed exactly zero in the way of major innovation. But it has done a good job of aggregating existing innovation and packaging it well. Why on earth would I want to have a network of friend profiles at Friendster and a forum for sharing my photos at Flickr when I can do both, and more, at Facebook?

Twitter works on the opposite model. Everyone loves status updates, so wouldn’t it be neat to have a site dedicated exclusively to them? After all of Twitter’s success, the answer to that question is still: no, it wouldn’t be neat, it would be incredibly fucking stupid. Absolutely nothing is gained by splitting this function off into a separate venue.

Twitter took off anyway, because they did a great job with this idea. People could update their status from a phone without internet access; this sort of idea has been around forever (I briefly experimented with a service where a robot would read me my email over the phone more than a decade ago), but this was the first really useful implementation. Status update junkies couldn’t get this at Facebook or anywhere else. And the organization of Twitter is excellent. Retweeting, @tweeting, and the rest of it created a network of status update conversations that didn’t exist anywhere else.

Unfortunately, none of that justifies the existence of Twitter in the first place. Phones without access to the internet are presumably not long for this earth, but if that function does continue to be useful for some reason, there is no reason everyone else can’t simply adopt it. Meanwhile, Facebook has been jazzing up its status update system for a while, and now they’re flat out ripping off the rest of what makes Twitter unique. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone - Facebook and sites like it have always been where tweeting belongs.

You would be forgiven for assuming that any day when a senator from Iowa steps down as chairman of the agriculture committee must be a great day for agriculture policy. Certainly, no right-thinking person will miss Tom Harkin’s leadership on all things farm-related. If Harkin is a religious man, he is surely hoping that Thomas Jefferson was right when he said “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God”, and that it goes without saying that the earth in question is American earth; if God has much interest in poor brown people farming in poor brown countries, Harkin is in for an awkward debriefing on the other side.

Unfortunately, the structure of senate committees pretty much ensures that every paid-for chairman will be replaced by another just as bad. Or, as in this case, one that is even worse:

Lincoln is as vigorous a proponent for large farms and livestock interests (think Arkansas-based Tyson Foods) as there is in Congress. Pair her with the panel’s senior Republican, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and you have a powerful one-two punch for the southern perspective on agricultural policy.

The southern perspective being, roughly, the midwestern perspective minus the belief that global warming is bad. So that should be fun.

In other news, you’ll notice an unfamiliar author name at the top of this post. I am, in fact, Akhbar the Great, but from now on I’ll be posting under the absurd name ‘NC Saint’. It’s not quite as dignified, but I’ve landed a gig that could occasionally lead to my writing posts elsewhere, and my new employers refuse to believe that I am a 16th century Mughal emperor. I apologize for combining this news with an unrelated rant about farm subsidies, but King Felix says I’m not allowed to write updates about the status of the blog. But, while I’m at it, I’ll mention that regular posting here resumes now.

Really:

Either the people around him at Fox News are afraid to say anything, or they’ve resigned themselves to the fact that everyone who knows how to spell has moved on. The next logical step, of course, is for Fox to have him shot and killed on-air.