Socialist America

Politics, , , , , , , ,

John Nichols suggests that all the talk of creeping “socialism” during the Republican primaries and beyond may have actually increased Americans’ positive disposition towards socialism generally:

A new Gallup Poll finds that socialism is now viewed positively by 39 percent of Americans, up from 36 percent in 2010. Among self-described liberals, socialism enjoyed a 62 percent positive rating, while 53 percent of Democrats and independent voters who lean Democratic gave socialism a thumb’s up.

Needless to say, this provoked the predictable fine whine of right-wing media. The conservative Washington Times newspaper declared: “Yes, Democrats, liberals favor socialism.” The Business Insider website announced: “Everything Republicans Fear About Democrats Is True.” William F. Buckley’s old magazine, National Review, allowed as how there is “much that is peculiar, and much that is worrying” about the new polling data.

That reactionary Republicans get a little hysterical at the mention of the word “socialism” is not news. But the reaction to there reaction is. No two groups of Americans talk so much about socialism in so many public settings these days as Republican candidates and conservative commentators. And this appears to be influencing the discourse.

Indeed, it is fair to say that nothing has done more to promote the cause of socialism than the ranting and raving of Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. It’s not just that the right has spread the word about socialism, raising the ideology’s profile to levels rarely experienced in recent decades—if ever—and associating the ideology with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, President Obama and a lot of other programs and people that Americans actually like. The fact that so many agitated, angry and—at least in some cases—politically toxic characters go apoplectic at the mere mention of the ideology has undoubtedly caused millions of Americans who don’t know much about socialism to say to themselves, “Anything that Paul Ryan does not like must have some merit.”

But I have to agree with the National Review assessment that the Gallup survey information “is worrying”—at least for conservatives. The most significant increases in sympathy for socialism over the past two years—since the last time Gallup polled on economic and ideological terms such as “socialism” and “capitalism”—have been among self-identified “conservatives” and “Republicans.”

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Egypt’s dangerous proposed constitution

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morsi

Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi has scheduled a national referendum for December 15 to vote on the new proposed constitution. Juan Cole is concerned:

The new constitution promises many rights, but also limits them in vague ways that could be opening to abuse.

As a historian, I am fascinated by the parallels of this proposed constitution with the 1906 Iranian constitution. In the latter, a committee of five ayatollahs was given review power to decide if legislation is in accordance with Islam. That provision was never really implemented (in 1979 it was made moot when the clerics just took over altogether). Likewise, the Egyptian constitution gives to the Muslim clerics of Al-Azhar Seminary (the closest thing the Sunni world has to a Vatican) the prerogative of interpreting Islamic law as it pertains to the constitution. Since the constitution puts Muslim Egyptians under Islamic law for personal status purposes, and has other provisions that invoke Islamic law, someone had to decide what Islamic law is. Having al-Azhar make determinations that then feed into constitutional law is a way of ensuring orthodoxy.

The Iraqi Constituent Assembly in 2005 drafted a similar provision, for the Shiite clergy of Najaf to review legislation and interpret Islamic law as it touched the constitution. That article was dropped, however, under severe pressure from the US ambassador of the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, and from other Iraqi groups such as the Kurds.

Putting Muslim Egyptians under Islamic law for matters of personal status is also troubling. Many secularists would not want to have their private lives governed in this way. In cases of intestacy, their daughters would only inherit half what their sons did. There is also a danger that this constitution could normalize the interference of religious groups and authorities in private matters such as marriage.

Disappearing the Internet

Politics, Technology, , , , ,

Ezra Klein takes a look at how difficult it would be for the government to shut off the Internet in various countries, as the nation of Syria just did on Thursday:

There are 61 nations, including Syria and Libya and even Greenland, where there are only one or two providers connecting people to the outside world. “Under those circumstances,” Cowie writes, “it’s almost trivial for a government to issue an order that would take down the Internet. Make a few phone calls, or turn off power in a couple of central facilities, and you’ve (legally) disconnected the domestic Internet from the global Internet.”

But countries with a more diversified Internet infrastructure are harder to cut off. It took Hosni Mubarak’s government a few days to shut down Egypt’s Internet. And a blackout is even harder to pull off in countries like Mexico and India. (It’s interesting to see that China is ranked as a “low risk” countries. As James Fallowsreported a few years ago, the Chinese government was able to set up its “Great Firewall” to censor the Internet in part because most of the country’s access runs through fiber-optic cables at just three points.)

Meanwhile, it would be nearly impossible for a government to shut down the entire Internet in the United States or Western Europe. “There are just too many paths into and out of the country,” Cowie writes, “too many independent providers who would have to be coerced or damaged, to make a rapid countrywide shutdown plausible to execute.”

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After the end of the world

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tree

Artist Lori Nix creates painstakingly detailed miniatures of bleak, post-apocalyptic landscapes:

“I loved Towering Inferno, and it just happened the other day, in Dubai,” she says, referring to the 34-story tower that went up in flames on November 18th. The diorama, Control Room, which was inspired by Chernobyl, brings to mind Hurricane Sandy and New York’s flooded subways. While the collection started a few years ago, Nix has added new scenes along the way (the subway and anatomy classroom dioramas above were completed last month).

“Our life as we know it is spinning wildly out of control and we may not be able to finance our way back to a healthy planet,” says Nix. This is The City’s premise, though Nix doesn’t specify exactly how human beings have screwed up the planet–and, ultimately, become extinct. “It could be climate change, nuclear annihilation, a virus. I leave it up to the reader to decide. But if you were the last person left alive, these are the scenes you might find.”

Finally, a reason to visit the museum

Miscellaneous, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is now featuring video games:

In a blog post by curator Paola Antonelli, it was announced that the museum has acquired and will exhibit games including Pac-Man, Tetris, Out of This World, Myst, SimCity, Vib-Ribbon, The Sims, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, Portal, flOw,Passage and Canabalt.

“Are video games art?” asks Antonelli. “They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design — a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.”

The games will be exhibited as part of the museum’s Architecture and Design collection. It plans to add 26 additional games, to bring the total to around 40 in the near future, including Pong, Snake, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Minecraft.

The games are selected based not only on their visual quality, but the elegance of the code and the design of the player’s behavior. They were looking for games that combined historical and cultural relevance as well as innovative approaches to technology. The curators have consulted scholars, critics and digital conservation experts to understand how to display and conserve these digital, interactive artifacts.

iTunes gets a facelift

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Courtesy of Mashable.com.

But Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo is more frustrated with the music software than ever, and he has corralled quite the imaginative narrative style to register his annoyance:

I picture frazzled engineers growing increasingly alarmed as they discover that the iTunes codebase has been overrun by some kind of self-replicating virus that keeps adding random features and redesigns. The coders can’t figure out what’s going on—why iTunes, alone among Apple products, keeps growing more ungainly. At the head of the team is a grizzled old engineer who’s been at Apple forever. He’s surly and crude, always making vulgar jokes about iPads. But the company can’t afford to get rid of him—he’s the only one who understands how to operate the furnaces in the iTunes boiler room.

Then one morning the crew hears a strange clanging from iTunes’ starboard side. Scouts report that an ancient piston—something added for compatibility with the U2 iPod and then refashioned dozens of times—has been damaged while craftsmen removed the last remnants of a feature named Ping whose purpose has been lost to history. The old engineer dons his grease-covered overalls and heads down to check it out. Many anxious minutes pass. Then the crew is shaken by a huge blast. A minute later, they hear a lone, muffled wail. They send a medic, but it’s too late. The engineer has been battered by shrapnel from the iOS app management system, which is always on the fritz. His last words haunt the team forever: She can’t take much more of this. Too. Many. Features.

Anyway, so iTunes 11 finally hit the Internet today.