Somehow I expected a little more glitz in the production of the books, but a sample shows it’s straightforward un-Applfied epub format. I think I like that.
Click on the image below to look at a bigger picture of my Sigil screenshot.
Somehow I expected a little more glitz in the production of the books, but a sample shows it’s straightforward un-Applfied epub format. I think I like that.
Click on the image below to look at a bigger picture of my Sigil screenshot.
Actually there’s a faction that would love to introduce chaos into the elite establishment game. This group of voters is certain that a Palin-West ticket is the only way to beat Obama, and would wear the “unseemly” label with pride. They’re more audacious than the president can afford to be these days, and you have to almost admire that streak of rebelliousness in the abstract.
What is the GOP to do with its naughty Tea Party children?
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>What struck me, though, in reading and watching some of the commentary about it, was that the media’s next question about it is “Should we get out of Afghanistan?” Yes! I think so, but as a society how about asking this question: “Shouldn’t we think about changing the age-old military strategy that calls for training service members to dehumanize the enemy?”
Psychologist David Livingstone Smith came out with “Less Than Human,” a book about just that question last year. Here’s an interview about it.
There’s a short book excerpt on the NPR page.
When we think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the Holocaust, but it wasn’t only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Final Solution were busy implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin’s Red Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of “the smell of Germany’s animal breath,” and described Germans as “two-legged animals who have mastered the technique of war” — “ersatz men” who ought to be annihilated. “The Germans are not human beings,” Ehrenburg wrote, ”... If you kill one German, kill another — there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses.”
Smith says it’s been happening all the way back to Mesopotamia.
Sebastian Junger, author and war correspondent, is good on the present-day American version of the state of mind—a military training tactic, but also a way to live with oneself when you kill people in wars:
But of course they have dehumanized the enemy — otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings. Rather than demonstrate a callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might reveal something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to convince themselves that they haven’t just committed their first murder — that they have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.
Also check out this editorial from the Juneau Empire, following the sentencing of Alaskan Jeremy Morlock.
Despite denials by the military, many veterans claim basic training emphasizes dehumanization. Because it’s easier to kill a person perceived as being less than human, soldiers are encouraged to believe their enemy is a lower form of life instead of a worthy human adversary. But such thinking fosters such deep hatred that it can readily grow to include civilians from the demonized culture.
Finally, here is part of a talk by Paul Chappell for Crossroads of Peace.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>
I’ll add to the list as I run across more reviews. Film and TV reviewers have seen the film, and we can expect more political writers to weigh in after the Washington premiere. Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews have mentioned they’ve already seen it.
Julianne Moore, who plays Palin in Game Change, will be a guest on Morning Joe today.
It debuts Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>
It’s one of those succinct summaries that could become one offering in an organized collection of backgrounders for use in bringing readers up to speed on an issue.
Of course if a reader can take the time to really understand, The Planet Money/This American Life radio program, ”The Giant Pool of Money” is the very best backgrounder to link to on the mortgage mess.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>
Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, co-authors of the Game Change book, gave a 55-minute interview to C-SPAN that aired on Wednesday. The video is not embeddable, so you’ll have to go there. The authors have talked about the book on C-SPAN before, but with the HBO movie premiering in a week, it’s very much back in the news.
If you are mostly interested in the juicy Palin bits, as the screen adapters were, skip to 33:00 or so. The whole interview is good, though, and is supplemented by several clips from the 2008 campaign. I enjoyed the book, and think it made sense for HBO to focus on just one of the storylines from it. If it had been a mini series, that would have been a different matter, but for a two-hour movie, some honing in seems appropriate. Of course Palin fans are outraged that HBO had the nerve to adapt only a part of the book. Apparently that particular creative choice should not be allowed.
Check out Halperin’s new Twitter avatar based on a 2010 Archie comic cover.
Get ready for a packed week of promotion running up to the March 20 debut. Heilemann was on Bill Maher’s panel last night. Howard Kurtz will do a panel about the movie on Sunday.
Update:
How about post-premiere scraps for the internet crowd, HBO? Have you thought about trying something special online—like organizing a watch and chat event? (After the Saturday night debut, please; first-time viewers will want to give it their full attention.) Or how about allowing embeds of selected longer scenes, so bloggers can offer teasers as entertainment, not just your promotional trailers?
HBO can tend to the clumsy and greedy in its social media tactics. A few months ago I tried the “Tweet this” feature from the excellent HBO Go iPad app, and was horrified and embarrassed to see that I’d tweeted not a pointer to the program I was watching but a pitch to my followers to download the app. I’m sure I was expecting to send a friendly GetGlue sort of message like “I’m watching [so and so].” But that’s how brands learn what not to do in social, because they will get loud and instant feedback about missteps. Then there’s that all-Flash site of theirs. And pointers from iOS devices take you to the mobile home page—not to the specific page you were trying to read.
But I adore HBO, generally, as TV, honestly I do. It brought me The Wire (David Simon gave it to me), and that’s impacted my life as much as my passion for Jane Austen and George Eliot books, which is considerable.
You have to wonder if HBO is planning for the inevitable pirating of the movie by people who don’t subscribe but really want to see this movie. I hope they’ll go easy on the thieves, realizing they will be mostly extremely interested viewers and prospective subscribers, not resellers. We can’t all afford premium channels, though a lot of us 99ers scrimp in other ways to compensate for the luxury. Scheduling a free access period while the movie is in heavy rotation would serve the channel’s image best in the long run—far better than meting out punishment, or even considering black avenger countermeasures.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>“President Obama has traded in the hard hat and lunch bucket category of the Democratic Party for the hipster fedora and a double skim latte.”
I wonder who who wrote the line. Maybe this guy? At least Matt Harakal was canny enough not to adopt the Jon Kyl aide’s manner of explaining a Planned Parenthood mis-statment. (Not intended to be factual.)
I love the fedora image and think it’s one of those insults that ought to be embraced and celebrated, merchandised in the online campaign store. Like so:
Baby boomer liberals who have retained their rebel sensibilities have to like the anti-establishment streak in tea partiers. I know I do—I like the zeal while abhorring most of the message. And I keep thinking we should be able to make common cause on cronyism if we’d be willing to (selectively) forget about team colors ...
Improvement:
OK, in case you are rolling your eyes about that hastily chosen old video in the cheesy 80s TV studio setting, here is a live version to show you that fans still like the song. The old one does capture the era, though, doesn’t it?
Remind me sometime to tell my favorite Mellencamp story. (It involves a mock confrontation with him; I was six month’s pregnant.)
See if I like this new “embed Tweet” feature in the Twitter web interface:
Post-MI Republlcan theme song: bit.ly/wlcdSl “Happy to be Stuck with You.”— davidfrum (@davidfrum) February 29, 2012
Alright. I was expecting something more graphical, but that’s probably the best way to handle it.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>
The film society is partnering with PBS on an online film festival.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>
It connects you and your online social network, and looks up your voter registration, lists your elected representatives, and provides ways to hook up with other voters but doesn’t force you to share. Pretty slick. The blog could play a bigger role, it seems to me. Maybe they’ll hire some writers with some of that money. They’re looking for marketers and engineers.
Sean Parker is an investor. He does have an image problem, doesn’t he? I have to admit I was influenced by the portrayal of the Napster founder in The Social Network movie, and I’ll confess that, for me, the slimy residue slides right onto whatever he’s associated with. Really unfair, because I don’t know much about him at all. Will try to remedy that right now. Movies can be so powerful in creating or reinforcing beliefs.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>Just happened to wonder if any campaign had ever considered staging an assassination attempt as a sympathy ploy. I mean, seriously considered it. It must be something that has popped into the head of a desperate staffer or two, don’t you think? Anyway it might be a good sub-theme for a political novel, or the main theme for a political short story.
After all, Bill Clinton was accused of wagging the dog, as I was reminded by the recent bio film on PBS American Experience.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>I hate to pick on Talking Points Memo because I truly admire Josh Marshall and what he did on the U.S. Attorneys issue—and all that he’s accomplished since with his sites.
This is just a little nitpick, but it’s one of my pet peeves. I spent several years in PR, sales and marketing before turning to the internet, and it always puzzled me when marketers—who ought to know all about customer perception—could not seem to turn the tables and recognize when their tactics were too transparently self-serving.
When I saw that TPM was reaching me on Twitter using a tool called MarketMeSuite, I felt ... well, used. It’s a bad product name because it appeals only to the commercial tweeter wanting up rack up page views for advertisers—not to the user who would prefer a softer term like a form of the word “share.”
MarketMe seems to be TPM’s tool of choice for the umbrella brand. Individual writers use Twitter’s own Tweet Button, the sharing tool embedded on the page being linked to.
While Twitter (the company) claims most people use the web interface at Twitter.com to read and tweet, analysts believe third-party tools are used for about half of all tweets. The tool used to issue a tweet is reported and I tend to notice, maybe notice more when I’m using the Twitter’s great iPad app, where the font for the tool mention is more prominent.
It’s kind of ironic that there’s double promotion going on here. TPM is promoting MarketMe, too.
I wonder if the actual name of the third-party tool necessarily has to be exposed in the end-user context, or if the string that appears to users can be configured separately.
This perspective blindness happens in venues outside social media, too. You’ve probably seen product information documents called “sell sheets.” Everybody knows they’re being pitched, all day long, every place they look; nobody likes to feel like prey. Why not call them “product benefit briefs” or something that doesn’t trumpet commercial aggression?
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>Krugman is much more than just a blogger—he’s also a Nobel prize-winning economist, Princeton professor, columnist, textbook author, valiant spokesman for what remains of the New Deal liberal clan, and a personal heartthrob of mine in a geeky old-lady way. But he is what Dave Winer would call a ”natural-born blogger.” (And Dave, as a pioneer of blogging and its tools, should know. A lot of what I know and believe about blogging and the web in general has been influenced by Dave.)
Krugman established a convention of warning non-economist readers when a post’s content gets into the technical weeds by appending ”(wonkish)”, in the headline, in parentheses.
Gillmor—whose columns I haven’t seen on Techcrunch on recent Sundays and hope that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped—also introduced a blogging convention I like. He’s a proponent of what he calls the @Mention Cloud, and reinforces his mission by referring to people by their Twitter handles and sometimes placing the handles at the bottom of blog posts.
I’m going to adopt the practice of listing Twitter handles, and wanted to get wonkish and explain how I automated it in about 15 minutes with my favorite CMS in all the world, Expression Engine. You could probably do something similar in WordPress if you self-host and know your way around templates. Really easy. In fact it will take me longer to write this post than it did to implement the feature.
First, I made five custom fields. This is the first one, the rest are copied from it. Note it’s set to no formatting so EE doesn’t put in P tags.
Then I used conditionals to tell my template to output the handles with links to the Twitter profile pages if I’ve entered any handles in the new fields on my post entry or edit form:
That’s it. Now off to work to wrestle with Sharepoint. I’d much rather live in LAMPland.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>
I watch Keith, though I tend to surf during commercials more than I did when he was on MBNBC, checking in on Ed and even peeking in to see what mischief O’Reilly might be up to, and sometimes get waylaid before I get a chance to discover who is the Worst Person in the World.
I don’t care for Uygur‘s and Granholm‘s shows, and I can’t really put my finger on why. The grunge sets are cool, but leave me feeling gritty. Uygur’s lack of journalism background shows. In introducing a recent guest who is a writer for Reuters, he said the reporter worked for “Reuters magazine,” not appearing to know that it’s an old established wire service, now part of an info conglomerate. Granholm, I just don’t know. I like her, like her politics, like that she was governor of my home state. Maybe she will grow into the host role.
Does Current have a shot at breaking through? The NYTimes Media Decoder column in January reported a bright spot: the channel does attract that elusive younger audience that doesn’t “do TV” much anymore. The young audience likes the net, but Current has a problem there; it can’t post full programs to the web because of its agreements with the cable cartel. I don’t really know the business equation but I’d surmise that from the cable companies’ point of view, the channel is just too small to have the clout to get on the channel lineup at all unless it caves to any and all cartel demands, including forcing viewers to watch on the tube. Squeeze-them-‘til-they-squeal deals like those may be history soon, at least we can hope.
Looks like the flap between Keith and the network over GOP primary coverage is over. If you missed the drama, you can catch up on the Hollywood Reporter site. They seem to enjoy covering him. There’s some charm in that. It seems to show a form of affection.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>
Personal Democracy media, the site’s parent, which also organizes the Personal Democracy Forum, is promoting a premium service for tech/government junkies that I hadn’t heard about either.
Glad I stopped by this morning after such a long absence, and bookmarked a group of videos from a December event on Occupy and the Tea Party. I’ve been seeking more input on the juxtaposition of the two movements.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>Check out the video of the silent protest. It’s chilling.
The Right uses Facebook to rally the troops, too. American Grizzlies United, a pro-Sarah Palin group, (tries to) supplement its push to recruit GOP national convention delegates on its Facebook page.
Palinistas seem to have a tight Venn diagram of overlapping fan circles which helps the network effect, but each of the circles are relatively small. The synergy sounds loud right in the eye of the storm but its influence never reaches much of the electorate that has long made up its mind about Palin. That’s not to say the groups don’t have a large presence online; it’s just that blogs may be the medium of choice. The Conservatives4Palin website, founded by a blogger who later worked as a communications aide for Palin, enjoys a flood of traffic and an active, lively, passionate and committed community of commenters.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>