Rational Points on a Napkin

Bringing in 2008

Just a quick post to share a beautiful New Year's message sent to me from a dear friend:

"I wish 2008 will find you with a sharp sword in your hands and facing overwhelming insurmountable challenges that you will never overcome...unless you die and are born again."

No Snow for December

Some news from today's Democracy Now!. This was the first December since 1877 where there was no snow in Central Park.

To add to that, 2007 is expected to be the warmest year on record.

BotNets and Political Change

In a world where months of rioting in Paris produced no major policy changes and disappeared from many peoples' (Americans') concerns before they had even finished, how can one produce large-scale change?

How does power change hands? How have the large-scale social changes happened throughout history? The barricading of Athens during the Peloponesian War. The storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution. Organizing and violence in the streets in the 60s and 70s in multiple countries through the world? And now? What can we learn from the past and what can no longer be applied?

I read an article in Wired's Nov 2006 issue about bots/botnets, programs that install themselves on Net-connected computers, respond to external commands, and execute coordinated attacks, often overloading servers with requests so valid computers cannot make and receive requests.

According to the article, some attackers claim that they can build a large enough network of bots to take out Google. The article goes into detail about how one spammer took out a spam-blocking company called Blue Security. The company had a tool called Blue Frog which allowed e-mail users to opt up from span and sending an e-mail to spammers. This worked fine, overloading spammers with e-mail, until one spammer from Russian decided to fight back. He used a bot to overload the Blue Security server and eventually caused the company to close.

As a read, I asked myself if this was going to be the way of producing social change in the future: overthrowing the powers-that-be via the internet. One difference I noticed between this form of attack and the ones from the past is the bot attacks can be perpetrated by one individual while previously a large impact on the status quo took a network of socially-organized individuals.

So perhaps it is not useful to think of botnets as anything but an extreme measure. Maybe it is useful to think of it as terrorism. I am using terrorism or extremism here as violence or disruption from an individual or small group of "insignificant" individuals. Social change movements are violence or disruption of the status quo by a "significant" number of individuals.

But perhaps the powers-that-be should listen to how terrorism moves. If certain forms of disruption become the main source of a "significant" number of people to take care of their concerns, then what was once terrorism, and didn't need to be listened to, will change.

I'm not sure what significance means here and what it takes for a group to move from terrorist to extremist to a social movement.

Hurray for the ACLU

Hoping the courts don't overrule this.

Read this article from at Lycos News.

You can read Judge Taylor's ruling here.

The Immigration Issue

So, I was listening to Fox News tonight (listening meaning being in another room while a roommate watched the TV) and what other issue was on but the Illegal Immigration Bill. There was a woman on the TV who was pro kicking out illegal immigrants. Her story went something like this, "We cannot sit by while people come into the United States on their own terms. We have laws and it is not okay to sit by as these people disregard them all...that is not what America is about . America is a country where immigrants come into the country, integrate themselves into the culture and learn to speak the language..."

And as this was being said my muscles tensed and the following conversation happened: "Lady, really you don't care about the illegality or legality of people coming into the US or about people following the rules. Sure you spout it vehemently but who cares. You don't. That is just a politically correct, boring story to hide a more vile one. What is the much more interesting story for you and what triggers you is the story of "invasion." And by "invasion," I mean a large group of people coming into a culture and making changes to the way of life, the culture, the language. It is the same fucking story as with the Irish immigrants and Italians immigrants: `those bloody Catholics coming in and polluting our religion and over-populating with their large families. They live in burroughs and don't integrate and how in God's name will we preserve our WASP way of life?' It is the same racism, driven by the fear of losing one's culture or what is comfortable."

"But now, the conservatives have a nice twist--legality--which hides and, at the same time, makes more present, their racism. `We are doing it for the greater good of the country, saving it from people that have not got a right to be here,' is a much tastier story for conservatives to swallow than, `I, a person with strong racist inclinations, don't want dirty people from below the border to bring their filthy, non-English-speaking bodies here.'"

Let's get some word printed out there about what is really happening, people's anger and racism boiling underneath all of this and driving it every bit of the way.

And, I think almost every American has this story. Hey, I have recognized it in me at times. In my lifetime, 1/4 of the people in the US will be Latinos. And that story has every so often scared me since high school or early college. But I recognize it as a bullshit story that can trap me into a rigid and intolerant way of being. I think liberals should be more aware of that story in them and conservatives that live in it should stop trying to hide it. They should think about the stories driving their concerns versus the bullshit stories of legality, and see if those are the stories they want America to bring proudly forth into the future.