Everybody's an Expert on Iran
Dave Winer on Twitter Sunday:
BTW, it's lame to change your location to Tehran and your timezone to GMT +3.30. Instead, our friends at twitter.com should detect and block about 13 hours ago from web
It should be against the terms of service to use the Twitter API to persecute and kill users. Yes? about 12 hours ago from web
There's a lot of cringe-inducing commentary coming from American bloggers and twitterers about the situation in Iran. Although most of it is well-intentioned, the massive outbreak of overnight expertise reminds me of warbloggers lining up Muslim countries for the U.S. to bomb in the days after 9/11.
Who knew there were thousands of people who could speak with authority on the complex internal politics of an anti-American Islamic theocracy halfway around the globe? Take that, Juan Cole! You may have a master's degree in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, but I reloaded Andrew Sullivan's blog 150 times on Saturday alone. And I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.
The situation in Iran also has sparked numerous calls for symbolic gestures like turning your web site green or switching your Twitter timezone to GMT +3:30 and your location to Tehran, thus making it harder for Iranian authorities to find and crack down on real Iranian protesters using the service.
I love Winer's suggestion that the Twitter API be amended to forbid its use to "persecute and kill users."
If the Iranian regime decides to hunt down its own citizens for participating in Twitter during the election unrest, I'm not convinced that it could be stopped by a terms of service agreement.
Meet the Fourth Jonas Brother
You may not know this, but there's a fourth Jonas Brother -- a ginormous bald black guy named Big Rob who comes out occasionally to supplement their musical caterwauling with rap.
Until I found a blog entry by Rickey Laurentiis, I was not aware that Big Rob was an attempt to establish white supremacy in an unsuspecting audience of tween girls:
I've seen them around, figuratively, on the covers of magazines and on the TV, but I didn't really take notice until So You Think You Can Dance final where they performed. I was bored, to say the least, until this big, black guy came jumping onto the stage like the Koolaid Man. He appeared to be some sort of hype man ... rapping or whatever. I didn't really listen after the first few minutes. I was nauseated.
I just couldn't help but think about the (national) image of black men as soon as he -- I've learned his name is Big Rob and he's the brothers' body guard -- appeared. I mean, historically and presently. The black man as monster, brute, murderous; the black man as mandigo, rapist, oversexed animal; gross, perverse. Perhaps, perhaps I'm overreacting (but, sorry, I'm not white so I don't have the privilege not to think of these things), but when I see Big Rob flanked by the three other Jonas Brothers, I can't help but to see a very strategic move:
Big Rob is mostly obviously Other. On that stage, in that audience. His skin, bald head and not mention very large, tall size completely otherize him. In turn, as the surrogate "what is that?", The Jonas Brothers, their whiteness, is cemented, so to speak.
When I saw the Jonas Brothers perform on the broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game last fall, I noticed there was something different about Big Rob too. I think he's adopted.
Relaunching Watching the Watchers
I recently relaunched Watching the Watchers as an Utne Reader-style digest of interesting political news and commentary published on sites that permit redistribution. In the first phase, most of the content is coming from Daily Kos, which has the following license:
Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified.
Hundreds of diary entries roll through Daily Kos every day, and a lot of interesting stuff falls through the cracks. I only consider Kos diaries that didn't make the site's front page or get linked on the front page in the 24 hours after they were published. Stories are chosen manually, not through an automated process, and all republished stories have a link to the author at the top and the original Kos page at the bottom.
Here's a sampling of stories selected for Watchers:
- Iran Fears a George Soros-Funded 'Velvet Revolution'
- 'This is What Losing Your Kidneys Looks Like'
- Burger King Franchises Call Global Warming 'Baloney'
- It's Time to Cut Short Summer Vacation
I'm trying some new things with the site, including a stripped-down design that was inspired by how Google News displays wire stories from AP and AFP. I also decided not to accept comments.
Because the Kos license permits redistribution "unless otherwise specified," when a diary indicates that it should not be redistributed or contains a copyright statement, I honor that. I also would stop republishing anybody who told me to stop, of course. Some concerns were raised by Kos users when one found his work on the site, but for the most part the community supports reuse. Site founder Markos Moulitsas made this comment:
To be clear this is perfectly cool and within site rules. If anyone has a problem with it, which is perfectly understandable, slap a copyright notice at the bottom of your diaries ...
I'm a content anarchist, so I don't try to hoard and control what's written on this site (even the stuff I myself write). But I've got no problems with people disagreeing and wanting to control their own material.
Although Kos has RSS feeds for the front page and user diaries, so much is posted there that the feeds don't contain all of it. I wrote a Java application that parses the links on the front page and diary page. The Apache HTTP Client Java library makes it easy to retrieve web documents.
In the next phase of the project, I'll be adding the ability to republish Creative Commons-licensed content.
Andrew Sullivan, Iran News Sites Under Denial of Service Attack
The political weblogger Andrew Sullivan, who has been covering the protests in Iran around the clock for several days, reported early Monday that his site appears to be suffering a denial of service (DOS) attack intended to knock it offline:
The Atlantic magazine is struggling to keep the site up despite what seems to be a digital attack. Please be persistent in trying to reload.
Sullivan's site, which has been passing along updates from the election protests in both English and Farsi, has been unusually slow to load throughout the day Monday. Although it's possible that enormous demand is overloading the servers at The Atlantic, as a longtime reader of his blog I can't recall it ever having problems despite huge demand in the final days of the American presidential election. His site served 23 million visits in October 2008.
The RSS feed for Sullivan's site, which is hosted by the Google service FeedBurner, can still be accessed normally.
Another American site that has been reporting on the election, TehranBureau.Com, has been completely offline since Sunday. The publisher of the site used its Twitter feed to report that they're flooded with requests from Iranian government computers.
problem w/ site pinpointed: webmaster says the Iranian govt is overloading us with requests to disable our site: "denial of service attack"
The site's changing servers, but in the meantime is offering updates on the Twitter account TehranBureau. Sullivan has a Twitter account at DailyDish.
A denial of service attack, sometimes described as a distributed denial of service (DDOS), is an attempt to make an Internet resource unavailable by overloading it with requests. The attacks take many forms, but can be as simple as running a script that requests every page on a web site hundreds of times per second.
Credit: The photo of Andrew Sullivan was taken by Trey Ratcliff and is available under a Creative Commons license.
Conservative Blogs Doing Better Under Obama
Blogger Simon Owens is tracking the traffic of the 20 largest liberal and conservative blogs to see how they've fared since the election. The blogs have collectively dropped 109 million unique visitors from October 2008 to May 2009:
Right of center blogs weathered the post-election season a little better, falling only 37%, while blogs that were left-of-center fell by 64%.
Some blogs did better than others. Instapundit, for instance, was the only blog to show a slight increase in page views between the two months. Hot Air and Ann Althouse also saw a much less significant drop compared to all other blogs. Out of all the blogs surveyed, MyDD saw the most significant drop, with a decrease of 80% in pageviews.
There's always a slump after a presidential election as people who have been consumed with politics rediscover the rest of their lives, but Owens has found a dramatic difference in how liberal and conservative blogs have fared since the election. Partisan media tends to do better when its side is out of power, because that fuels more activism and passion than being in charge. Readership of The Nation doubled after the election of President Bush in 2000.
The Drudge Retort has dropped from 2.8 million unique visitors last October to 1.8 million last month. I was surprised to learn that the Retort has lost less of its audience than any other liberal blog tracked by Owens. The Retort's 36% drop is close to the average drop of conservative blogs.
I'm not sure why the Retort has suffered less of a post-election slump than Daily Kos, Washington Monthly and other liberal-leaning sites. One possible reason is that the Retort actively encourages conservatives and libertarians to contribute dissenting views, so some of those folks have stuck around to express opposition to President Obama and the Democratic-led Congress. I get bored with echo chambers, so I've tried to cultivate a more ideologically diverse audience than most political blogs.
Andrew Breitbart's Mad About Hollywood (Or Just Mad)
Andrew Breitbart's a right-wing journalist in Los Angeles who coauthored the Drudge Report for years without getting any credit. He now runs Breitbart.Com and Big Hollywood and writes columns for the Washington Times. Breitbart.Com, which consists primarily of wire content, receives 1.7 million unique visitors a month, an audience he built by linking to the site frequently while working for Drudge.
All external indicators would suggest that Breitbart has a lot to be happy about, but I've followed his work for years and he operates in a constant state of anger at the perceived mistreatment of conservatives, particularly in Hollywood. Since he's around my age, he's lived during an era in which the right wing was ascendant in American politics. I'm not sure he could have survived the '60s and '70s, back when conservatism was the marginalized ideology of Barry Goldwater and washed-up B-movie actors.
After the blog Gawker ran an item Thursday criticizing Matt Drudge's coverage of the Holocaust Museum shooting, Breitbart left the writer an irate voicemail complaining about the use of "right-wing extremist" to describe shooting suspect James von Brunn:
I'm basically fuming and I'm reading your ---- at Gawker right now saying that this guy is a right-wing extremist and it's such a ------- slander on people like me.
This guy went after, this guy was after neocons like me who are conservative. He had the address to Weekly Standard there. Conservatives believe in individual liberty. They don't believe in groups' rights. This guy's a multiculturalist just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses. This guy was a 9/11 Truther. This guy's hardly a right-winger. This guy's political philosophy is more akin to the drivel that you hear on a college campus that delineates us by group -- not by individuality. It's the exact opposite of my political philosophy.
It's deeply offensive that you would use this for political gain. I could care less how you describe me in regards to Drudge or anything, but for you to put on me this -------- crime against humanity -- so ---- you beyond the pale.
I don't pay much attention to attempts by liberals and conservatives to score points by branding the latest homicidal nutjob as a member of the other team. When you go far enough to the extremes, the right and left wing meet. But I love Breitbart's logic in calling anybody who maligns an entire race or religion a liberal because he's treating people as a group instead of individuals. So all racists are multiculturalists! Up is down. Cogito ergo stupidum.
Last month, Breitbart devoted his Times column to an apology to some protesters he flipped off in a rage as they marched past Shutters, a Santa Monica restaurant where he had taken his wife on a date:
... when one dude raised his fist like runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, I could not hold myself back. I jumped from my seat and bolted to the center of the balcony, where the American flag waved furiously in a now-harsh wind. Positioned next to Old Glory, I countered the young punk and reached out my right arm directing my middle finger in his direction.
As soon as my finger was raised, a phalanx of photographers began snapping away at the white middle-aged man wearing a white LaCoste shirt next to the old red, white and blue. Cognizant of the power of imagery, I owned the moment and refused to back down. The fist wielder immediately dropped his arm. I clearly had won and envisioned photos of the anti-antiwar protester making the front pages of the Los Angeles Times.
It turned out that the protesters were not marching against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as he originally surmised, but against the abduction of children to fight wars in Uganda and the Congo. Though Breitbart's apology was gracious, he makes clear that he would have no problems ruining dinner for his wife and other restaurant patrons if those other antiwar activists needed to be put in their place.
In a piece last year for New York Observer, writer Spencer Morgan managed to make Breitbart look crazy simply by following him around a few conservative social gatherings and quoting him at length. After Breitbart went on for hundreds of words about how "uninteresting" Hollywood is, and he declared that sex with Maggie Gyllenhaal would "almost disgust me," Morgan described him this way:
Mr. Breitbart grew up in Los Angeles. His father owned a restaurant, mom was a bank executive. At Brentwood High School he watched administration types socialize with certain parents in the entertainment industry. He got C's, played baseball, was a class clown, but hung out with the smart kids. He always suspected that school had been against him, a conspiracy theory that was eventually confirmed by a friend's mom who confessed to him that the principal had called her into his office to turn her against the young Breitbart. This, he says, was the beginning of a lifelong crusade against bullies.
I'm guessing that principal was a liberal, and perhaps even a black lesbian multiculturalist.
Leo Laporte is Bleeping Sick of Michael Arrington's Bleep
There was some unexpected drama this weekend when Leo Laporte, a longtime technology journalist well known for his work on TechTV, flipped out during a live Internet broadcast after his integrity was questioned by TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington.
Laporte has a reputation for being genial and non-confrontational, making it all the more amusing to see him drop a bunch of F bombs and kick the entire Gillmor Gang show off the air. After Arrington apologized the two mended fences, but I'm posting the video here to ask a broader question about how people react when they're the target of a tirade like this.
When someone you think of as a friend unloads on you in a moment of anger, itemizing the accumulated list of things that bleeping bleep them the bleep off motherbleeper, in most cases you probably make nice-nice with them later. Water under the bridge. Let bygones be bygones. Peace in our time.
But it's not like you forget the things that were said when the rage knob was dialed up to 11. So as you go forward in the relationship, do you really write off the comments as the product of a fit of anger? I think that most people go through life being nice to a bunch of people they don't like, because the cost of being candid is usually higher than the benefit of telling them off. This is particularly true at a workplace or another professional environment.
As nice as Laporte is reputed to be, if I'm Arrington I would not let the guy take me fishing out on Lake Tahoe.
P.s. If you're reading this and we're not strangers, do not interpret this blog post to mean that I'm hiding the fact that I do not like you. We're totally BFFs.
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