A strange madness

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Watching the loopy hysteria of the American Right about health care, I’ve been wondering sometimes if I’m hallucinating. Surely an intelligent and progressive country like the US can’t be entirely populated by fanatics? But Paul Krugman is seeing the same thing — as this blog post entitled A strange madness suggests.

Joe Klein reports on a town hall meeting where people think that Obama has larded the government with communists. Bizarre — but I’ve been getting equally bizarre claims in much of my mail. And what’s striking is the intensity.

I’ve mentioned before that my hate mail has reached levels I haven’t seen since 2004 or so. But back then, the hate was in a way understandable. People like me were questioning Bush’s bona fides as the great protector against terrorism, were claiming that he deliberately misled the country into an unnecessary war. Those were strong charges, and in a way you could understand that people who idolized Bush (believe it or not, there used to be a lot of them) were upset.

But now I get spitting, incoherent rage over articles on, um, health care economics or macro modeling. What enrages people so much about these pieces? Usually, it’s impossible to tell — in fact, I often have the sense that the enraged correspondents haven’t read the things at all. But that’s OK — they know that I’m corrupt, a liar, a Nazi, and have been spewing my evil in my writings.

The point is that whatever is driving all this doesn’t have anything to do with the realities of what I, or, much more important of course, Obama say or do. Obama could have come in proposing to pursue an agenda identical to Bush, and he would still be a socialist/Commie/fascist, with those of us who don’t see it that way lying Nazis ourselves.

Something is going very wrong in the heads of a substantial number of Americans.

What is happening to us?

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Wonderful, impassioned Boing Boing post by Cory. I’m reproducing it in full.

The Philadelphia Free Library system is broke, and they’re shutting it down, including cancelling “all branch and regional library programs, programs for children and teens, after school programs, computer classes, and programs for adults”; and “all children programs, programs to support small businesses and job seekers, computer classes and after school programs”; and “all library visits to schools, day care centers, senior centers and other community centers”; and “all community meetings”; and “all GED, ABE and ESL program.”

Just look at that list of all the things libraries do for our communities, all the ways they help the least among us, the vulnerable, the children, the elderly. Think of every wonderful thing that happened to you among the shelves of a library. Think of the millions of lifelong love-affairs with literacy sparked in the collections of those libraries. Think of every person whose life was forever changed for the better in those buildings.

Think of the nobility of libraries and librarianship, the great scar that the Burning of Alexandria gouged in human history. Think of the archivists who barricaded themselves in the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad, slowly starving and freezing to death but refusing to desert their posts for fear that the collections they guarded would become firewood.

Think of the librarians who took a stand during the darkest years of the PATRIOT Act and refused to turn over patron records. Think of the moral unimpeachability of those whose trade is universal access to all human knowledge.

Picture an entire city, a modern, wealthy place, in the richest country in the world, in which the vital services provided by libraries are withdrawn due to political brinksmanship and an unwillingness to spare one banker’s bonus worth of tax-dollars to sustain an entire region’s connection with human culture and knowledge and community.

Think of it and ask yourself what the hell has happened to us.

Amen.

Recession causes, er, hard times in the porn business

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Interesting piece in the Economist.

The adult-film industry is concentrated in the San Fernando Valley—“the Valley” to Angelenos—on the northern edge of Los Angeles, so the slump in porn is yet another factor depressing the local economy. Pornography had been immune to previous recessions, so the current downturn has come as a shock.

Most of the industry consists of small private production companies whose numbers are secret, but Mark Kernes, an editor at Adult Video News, a trade magazine, estimates that the American industry had some $6 billion in revenues in 2007, before the recession, mostly in DVD sales and rentals and some in internet subscriptions. Diane Duke, the director of the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry’s trade group, thinks that revenues have fallen 30-50% during the past year. “One producer told me his revenue was down 80%,” she says.

If the Valley used to make 5,000-6,000 films a year, says Mr Kernes, it now makes perhaps 3,000-4,000. Some firms have shut down, others are consolidating or scraping by. For the 1,200 active performers in the Valley this means less action and more hardship. A young woman without …name-recognition might have charged $1,000 for a straight scene before the crisis, but gets $800 or less now. Men are worse hit. If they averaged $500 for a straight scene in 2007, they are now lucky to get $300. For every performer there are several people in support, from sound-tech to catering and (yes) wardrobe, says Ms Duke, so the overall effect on the Valley economy is large.

The Economist — and the industry — think that piracy is to blame. I wonder: surely the rise of user-generated porn has something to do with it too. At any rate, those stories of ‘amateur’ porn being sold freely in pubs might not all be urban myths. And some of those camcorders being sold by the truckload must be used for, er, creative purposes.

En passant And don’t you just love the irony of the porn industry trade association calling itself “the Free Speech Coalition”? Almost as funny as the Irish alcoholic drinks industry calling itself the “Hospitality Association”.

Microsoft’s next Big Thing: visual search

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From VentureBeat.

Microsoft continues its attempt to unseat Google as the king of search. Today, someone from the team behind its Bing search engine took the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco to announce the latest feature: Visual search.

The most obvious way to use visual search is when you’re shopping for products. So if you want to buy a new handbag, you could look at images of thousands of handbags in Bing, scroll through them quickly, and narrow down your search based on brand, price, and other attributes. Unusually for Microsoft, the user experience is actually quite impressive, with the image results and the transition between search pages providing some nice eye-candy. It’s certainly a much flashier experience than Google Image Search. Bing Visual Search is supposed to be live any second now, so you can see it for yourself.

So, let’s get this straight…

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“So, let me get this straight. Bush inherited a $7 Trillion surplus, turned it into a deficit by funding an illegal war, fought by murderous private contractors, but Obama is the bad guy because he wants healthcare the entire rest of the developed world has had since the early 1950s?”

From a posting on Reddit.com

Yep. That’s called Republican logic.

Darwiniana

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This is the bust of Charles Darwin that used to be in Down House, his home in Kent. (It’s now in Cambridge University Library).

I prefer the profile view, though, because it brings out his essential gentleness as a person (which is most in evident in his anguish over the death of his daughter Annie — and which is a central theme in the recently-released feature film Creation).

Happy Birthday, Blogger!

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This morning’s Observer column.

“When a true genius appears in the world,” wrote Jonathan Swift, “you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” So it was with blogging. It was ridiculed as self-indulgent, lazy vanity publishing; lampooned as the product of obsessives tapping feverishly in their pyjamas; blasted as a parasitic activity, feeding on the blood of hard-working professional journalists; and derided as a doomed fad because there was no ‘business model’ to support it. After all, virtually no one makes money from his or her blog, so the thing clearly didn’t have a future.

And guess what? Blogging is thriving. In virtually every area of human interest, the diversity and quantity of fact and opinion available online dwarfs what was available in the print era. In the old days the News of the World had a ludicrous slogan: “All Human Life Is Here”, a promise on which no publication could ever hope to deliver. The ‘blogosphere’ is the first medium we’ve ever had which could conceivably live up to the slogan…

Erratum: A computer scientist has emailed, objecting to my reference to Tim Berners-Lee as “a physicist working at CERN” when he was, in fact, “a computer scientist employed by CERN in that capacity, who just happened to have a first degree in physics”. He’s right of course. Mea culpa. My only defence is that, as an engineer, I regard physicists much as some people regard Catholics (as in the saying “once a Catholic, always a Catholic…”).