Apparently you can be prosecuted and fined for posting a photo of you waving a sword on a social networking account.
Current Affairs
Understanding Numbers
I’d hoped that Colleen’s post yesterday would have been the final word on this, but this morning I find The Guardian, of all places, blaming black people for the passage of Proposition 8. Even John Scalzi appears to have given the idea some credence. So let’s look at some numbers, shall we?
According the the Chronicle, 52% of Californians voted for Prop. 8. According to The Guardian, 10% of Californian voters were black, and two thirds of them voted for Prop 8. So how come the passage of the measure is the fault of the 7% of Yes voters that were black, and not of the 45% of Yes voters who were not black?
Now granted, black people turned out in greater numbers this year because of Mr. Obama, but are you going to say that they shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they don’t support the same causes as you do? Isn’t that a bit Rethuglican?
Besides, there is more to it than that.
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Victims of Hate
A press release from COLAGE just appeared in my in box. Here’s an extract:
The morning before the election, COLAGE heard from a parent in our community. Her 7 year old son had approached her, upset, in a concerned voice said, “Mama, I hope Prop 8 doesn’t win.” I agreed with him, and then he said, “Because if it does, you and Mommy will be split up and our family won’t be together.”
While we at COLAGE all identify with the fear and sadness that Emmett expressed, we want to tell him and all the other COLAGErs around the country that nothing and no one can take away or split up your family. We know the truth; Love makes a family. Our families deserve equal respect and rights.
In case you have forgotten, COLAGE is an organization made of up kids who have LGBT parents. They are our future. Your help is appreciated.
Yes
Such a little word, so loaded with emotion.
Yes, the USA has done the supposedly unthinkable and put a black man in the white house, and the symbolic impact of that cannot be underestimated. But as for any further “yes we can”, we will have to wait and see. Mr. Scalzi has already made the necessary points, so all I need say is that Obama is taking charge at a particularly difficult time in his country’s history and he is going to find it hard to live up to his supporters expectations.
Yes, on the other hand, is also what the people of California (well, 52% of them, which is enough) are saying to Proposition 8, and as a result bigotry and hatred will be enshrined in the state’s constitution for many years to come. Several other states are also on their way to passing similar legislation. And this is where it becomes clear that effecting change is hard and slow.
One of the things you don’t get with election results is a breakdown by age band, but all of the polls suggest that if the vote had been left up to people under the age of 30 then Prop. 8 would have sunk without trace. Equally it was clear that one of the things that really motivated the Yes on 8 crowd was a desire to “protect” children, by which they meant stopping kids from growing up with a fair and open mind. It won’t work. In 30 years time, all of this will seem like a bad dream, and the USA will be celebrating the election of its first openly lesbian president.
For now, however, there are around 36,000 people whose marriages will be under threat from religious extremists determined to have those marriages retroactively annulled. Back to the barricades. Can we stop them? Yes, we can.
Update: The Chronicle has exit poll data. They say that 60% of voters under 30 opposed Prop. 8, while 60% of voters over 65 were in favor of it. That’s a demographic trend if ever I saw one.
Update 2: Fixed the typo in Update 1 (thanks Marcia!). Also Kameron Hurley has some wise things to say about why people voted Yes on 8.
Election Coverage
Kevin and I spent much of last night watching the BBC. They were a bit condescending at times, but overall I think they did a decent job. And they didn’t have ad breaks.
One thing I did note was that they proved conclusively what a horrible liberal bias the media has. If you want to make the Republicans look bad, all you have to do is put John Bolton on camera and let him talk. In the interests of political fairness, that man ought to be put back in the padded cell where he belongs.
But of course he wasn’t, and listening to him talk it sounded like the Republicans felt that they had to have the likes of Sarah Palin around because otherwise their own people would not have voted for McCain. That is very reminiscent of the “back to our core values” nonsense that almost destroyed the Conservatives in the UK during the Blair years. The Republicans are fast becoming the party of old, white men, and there’s no way you can win an election relying on just those votes.
In contrast it was a pleasure to have the real John McCain back for his final speech.
One Down, One to Go
It looks like being a good week for people of color. Lewis has done his bit. Mr. Obama, it is all down to you now.
And, um, could you please make it less nail biting?
Sorry, Brazilian friends, your boy was fabulous nonetheless. Maybe next year.
A Message of Hope
We found this wine in our local Safeway and this evening we presented it to Kevin Roche and Andy Trembley in the hope that they will be able to use it to celebrate on Tuesday night.
Tsk, Tsk
The Bay Area Reporter has news of a distributed denial of service attack on the No on Prop 8 web site. The attack was launched from computers in California, Texas, New Jersey and Georgia. The No on 8 site was down for several hours last night (Wed 28th) but is now up and running again. The matter is now in the hands of the FBI and the Secret Service who, one hopes, will catch and prosecute whoever is responsible.
Am I surprised? No. We are, after all, dealing with people who are in the grip of unreasoning hatred, and who are probably scared shitless that the Great Sky Fairy will smite us all dead if Prop 8 fails. I’m mildly surprised that they haven’t done anything worse.
From Today’s Economist
Says it all, really, doesn’t it. (Although of course The Economist has a whole article to go with it.)
Razor and Blunderbuss
Most of you will be familiar with the idea of Occam’s Razor – the philosophical tool that suggests that the most likely explanation is the one that requires the fewest assumptions. Well, that might have done for the 14th Century, but it is clearly inadequate for reasoning in the Internet Age. In view of the coverage of the current American elections I would like to posit an alternative methodology.
Limbaugh’s Blunderbuss suggests that the most likely explanation for anything is the one that requires the largest number of wild and unsupportable assumptions, all presented as incontrovertible fact. If this technique results in multiple, mutually exclusive explanations, all of which are attested concurrently, so much the better.
WTF?
The Times reports on UK government proposals to require people to present a passport before they can buy a mobile phone.
Oh Dear, More US Politics
Ben Jeapes has written a long and thoughtful review of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. It is interesting reading in its own right, but this bit particularly caught my eye:
In Denver back in August, I witnessed an exciting confrontation between an American gent who called the Democrats socialists and an American lady who called the Republicans fascists. As the native of a continent with plenty of experience of both, I was thinking “rank amateurs, the lot of them”, but Americans get like that when they talk politics
Um, yes. Sorry America, but he has a point.
Liberals and Libertarians
Kevin and I were scratching our heads today over why some people are much more worried about loss of civil liberties under Obama than under McCain. Not only is McCain more in favor of “security” theater than Obama, but he also as a VP who is anti-abortion, anti-gay and pro-banning-books. How many more liberties can you lose?
Well obviously quite a few, and there are those for whom the freedom to own guns and shoot things with them trumps all other freedoms. From that point of view, Mrs. Palin is a clear winner.
But it struck me that there might be a clear difference between Liberals and Libertarians here. Liberals are all about preventing discrimination. They are liable to pass laws that stop some groups of people oppressing other groups of people. Libertarians, on the other hand, are all about being free to do what they want, and for many of them that very much includes being free to oppress other people. Libertarians may argue that they want to be free to be racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic if that’s how they feel about the world. So one man’s civil rights is another man’s prison.
Does this make any sense, or am I just talking nonsense here?
Fundamentalist Is As Fundamentalist Does
I occasionally see people like PZ Myers saying how wonderful it must be to live in a country like the UK where belief is religion in relatively low and politicians don’t have to parade their Christian beliefs in order to have a hope of getting elected. Well, that might be the case, but fundamentalists don’t have to be obviously religious. Some of the characteristics of fundamentalists, which generally distinguishes them from more reasonable religious people, are that they have a firm conviction that their beliefs are true, despite all evidence to the contrary, and that they have the right to force those beliefs on everyone else. We have a fair few people like that.
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US Election Quiz Web Site
Via Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem I have discovered Glassbooth, a web site that purports to help me decide who to vote for, if indeed I had a vote in the US Presidential elections. To my surprise it tells me that I should vote for Ralph Nader, which of course would be stupid. However, looking at the numbers, I find myself more generally in agreement with Obama than anyone else. With Nader it is more a case of some positions lining up perfectly and others not much at all. More digging suggests to me that the web site is being kind to Obama on his economic policies, but that level of detail is probably akin to nit-picking the questions on an internet meme so I’ll stop there.
We Interrupt This Program
For some shameless political advertising.
Evil Terrorist Coffee Cups
One of the things that strikes you as a visitor to the Bay Area is that there are no refreshment kiosks on BART. Every other commuter railway system that I am familiar with has stations festooned with take-away coffee and fast food stalls. It brings in money for the railway (because they rent space to the retailers) and it is good for the commuters because they can get breakfast on the go.
But not on BART. Not only are there no refreshment stalls at stations, it is illegal to eat or drink on a BART. You can be fined $250 for doing it. One of BART’s directors, Lynette Sweet, thinks this is silly, and has been trying to get them to change their minds. At a meeting yesterday BART managers explained why this was a bad idea. Terrorists might use coffee cups to sneak liquid explosives onto trains.
Now it isn’t illegal to take drinks into the BART system. You don’t get screened when you go through the turnstiles. The only thing that is against the rules is consuming the drink whilst on BART property. So there is absolutely no logic to this argument. It is, however, a sign of the times. If someone in a management position wants to force people to do something, their first recourse is now to say that the regulation is necessary because of the threat from terrorists. Kudos therefore to BART director Tom Radulovich who told managers:
You know, it’s just fearmongering and you should be ashamed.
If only people said that in Washington.
The Chronicle has more on the story, including a heap more lame excuses from BART managers. None of them hold water, for the very simple reason that the Bay Area has another commuter rail system – CalTrain. That does allow food and drink to be consumed on stations and on trains, and the world hasn’t ended because of it.
FAIL For Real
When all this financial crisis stuff first started hitting the headlines I did a post pointing out that, contrary to what you might be reading elsewhere, banks were not actually failing, and things were nowhere near as bad as they were in the Great Depression. That’s because most Western democracies have something like the FDIC that insures the bank deposits of small customers like you and me, and generally sees to an orderly takeover of banks that get into trouble. So while a number of US and British banks have ended up being sold, no one has actually lost their money.
Until now.
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Just Like Us
Not many of my readers work in derivatives, I suspect, but a lot of you work in computer programming, and I think that this blog post from The Economist may resonate with you. The blogger is talking about how “quants” (people with top skills in esoteric math such as theoretical physicists) devised various complex financial instruments, but were back office staff and were not responsible for how they were used. That job fell to the sales suits in the front office, who didn’t have much idea how these things actually worked. Sound familiar? So now you have a good idea why we are in this mess.
As some of the commenters point out, many of the instruments were not that complex in and of themselves. It was what people did with them that was the problem. In software we have learned by painful experience that new releases need to be tested, often in extreme conditions. Too many banks appear to have had the equivalent of poor testing procedures that were more geared to getting the product out of the door than finding out whether it was bug free.
A Very British Bailout?
For the benefit of my friends across the Pond who may still be reading reviews of last night’s presidential “debate”, here is the news from Europe: we have had a bailout too. In some ways it is very similar to yours, and in some ways it is very different.
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