Another socialist blog

I’ve been having some fun in a Usnet discussion of spam recently. In response to some complaints that the Democrats and Republicans are getting into spamming, I noted that the Socialist Party does no such thing, and challenged other third-party folks to take a position on spam. Update 3/29/02: Speaking of Democrats and Republicans spamming, the Jeb Bush campaign spammed several hundred Democrats recently, according to the Miami Herald.

Arthur Anderson, the accounting firm that helped Enron shred the evidence, has been fired by no less a client than Waste Management, Inc.. How sleazy have you become, as a corporation, when a company with multiple felony convictions thinks you’re too disreputable to work for them?

The list of reasons to repeal the DMCA is long, and now is longer: Google has been forced to remove all references to web site critical of the cult of Scientology on the grounds of alleged copyright infringement. The bizarre claims by the cult of Scientology that their religious beliefs are protected by copyright have been around a long time, and have never been tested in a court of law. Under the DMCA a mere allegation of infringement is sufficient to censor a web site on behalf of a corporation.

Nuclear deterrence is once again in the news. I’ve always found the theory behind nuclear weapons a little implausible, for so many reasons. Here are just a few:

1. We can’t win a nuclear war. Once nuclear weapons are used on any significant scale, say 1 percent of the total arsenal, it doesn’t matter whether you were the winner or the loser, because you have to deal with the resulting nuclear winter. Nuclear winter would kill a billion people worldwide, above and beyond the number killed outright during the war.
2. The people we are angry at are few, the innocent victims would be many. After all, what is our beef with North Korea? Among other grievances, North Korea is not democratic. By definition, people who are governed by a dictatorship have no control over their government. If they have no control, then they have no culpability either. Yet we are prepared to kill them for the sins of their dictatorial government. When anyone else threatens to use weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians, we rightly call such threats terrorism.
3. For deterrence to work, we have to believe that our enemies are rational. They must examine the facts, weigh their options, evaluate risks versus benefits, and then decide that the price of attacking the United States is too high to bear. If they aren’t rational, if they get angry or stupid, if they decide that they are willing to die and go to heaven rather than submit, then our nukes are worthless as a deterrent. And, of course, they in turn have to believe that we are out of our fucking minds. They have to be convinced that we are willing to blow up the whole world in a nuclear counterattack, ourselves included, for spite.

Capitalism is all about privatizing the profits, while socializing the costs. Email spammers have hit on an advertising medium paid for by others: the Internet. They send out millions of emails, and the recipients pay, through their subscription fees, to receive them. It’s not like sending junk mail postage due, it is sending junk mail postage due. Some big ISPs are a huge part of the problem, notably Pacific Bell (hence the spam-pink banner ad below).

If you’re tired of sifting through pyramid schemes and ads for hardcore bestiality porn in your email, there are several options. My personal favorite is SpamCop, a service that lets you quickly and easily analyze a spam email, get past all the forgeries and misdirection to reveal its actual source, and complain to the appropriate ISP. With reputable ISPs this results in the swift cancellation of the spammer’s Internet service, reducing the problem at its source just a little. There are some other anti-spam pointers elsewhere on this site.

My brief paean to stupidity left out Celebrity Boxing, for which I am properly ashamed. I understand from a Seattle native that Tonya Harding has had some experience at fisticuffs, apparently preferring the bar to the ring.

And old peace song is in my head lately, “The Bankers and the Diplomats”.

    Oh, the bankers and the diplomats are going in the army:
    Oh, happy day, I'd spend my pay to see them on parade,
    Their paunches at attention and their stri-ped pants at ease -
    They've gotten patriotic and they're going overseas.
    We'll have to do the best we can and bravely carry on,
    So we'll just keep the laddies here to manage while they're gone.
  

I’d love to have a recording of someone singing it.

Today’s entry is devoted to that force against which even the gods strive in vain, stupidity. You have no doubt heard elsewhere that George W waved to Stevie Wonder at the Ford’s Theater Presidential Gala on March 3. Wonder “understandably did not respond.” Shame on Saturday Night Live for needlessly adding a punchline to this story.

Honorable Mention goes to The McLaughlin Group, where the topic was recently the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada. Host John McLaughlin suggested (loudly, as always) that a dedicated surveillance satellite be placed “in geosynchronous orbit right over the site.” Which sounds nice but is physically impossible for any site not on the equator.

This from Slashdot, which I couldn’t have said better myself: “Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, has reported that the year 2001 was the ‘greatest box office year in film history’ with movie admissions reaching their highest level since 1959. Isn’t this the same industry that is complaining that piracy is putting them out of business?”

Liberals are being blamed for the presumed defeat of Charles Pickering’s nomination to the Court of Appeals. Orrin Hatch has called the outcry against Pickering a “lynching,” which is awfully ironic coming from a man who helped the Judiciary Committee beat up on Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings.