So let's see - what happens when a President gets caught breaking the law, then publicly says he's going to continue breaking the law, all while barely even trying to pretend he didn't break the law? Well, in ages past where serious journalism ruled the day, it meant serious media scrutiny (think Watergate) and investigation.
Hell, even when a president didn't violate the constitution simply lied about his personal sex life, it meant a media-driven impeachment. Today, though, it means just another lazy, dishonest he-said/she-said story, as if reporters don't even think it matters at all.

Here's the interchange between NBC's Katie Couric and Tim Russert from this morning (hat tip to Left in the West):

COURIC: Is this going to be a case of a debate by legal analysts and constitutional scholars versus Americans, who say civil liberties are important, but we don't want another September 11?

RUSSERT: Exactly right.

This is it, baby - the ultimate example of American journalism as state-run propaganda machine. In one fell swoop, one of the largest media organizations in the world used one of its most watched television shows to boil down an extraordinary case of illegal presidential abuse of power into just another petty partisan squabble. And in the process, that media organization claimed without one shred of evidence that the only people who care that the president illegally trampled the constitution are "analysts and scholars," not the American people who "don't want another September 11" - an assertion that also dishonestly portrays respect for the law as standing in direct opposition to national security.

Truly sad.

The Blog | David Sirota: Presidential Crimes as 'He Said, She Said' Infotainment

Ebert Movieguy made a splash in our realm a couple weeks ago suggesting that videogames weren't now art, and couldn't be art because their interactivity disallows firm authorial intent. I don't think that's a particularly strong point, particularly these days where what the author intends with their work is just a single azure twinkle in the manifold Lite-Brite of interpretation.

The conversation these ideas spawned has actually continued on his site in three (3) installments. I find it almost incalculably boring. Every now and then you get a nice turn of phrase, but it's so clear that the entire "conflict" isn't over core issues but over a syntactical clusterfuck like the definition of art. Something tells me that Roger Ebert's letter column isn't going to get to the bottom of that one, but I have been called a cynic.

It is a conversation we have had and re-had with slight alterations any time some mass media know-nothing doesn't give "us" the respect we imagine ourselves entitled to. But we have the conversation about some high-flown extrapolation of the real issue when I think the basic topic is somewhat more terrestrial.

I don't think that all games aspire to be art, just as all movies don't. Now we call comics sequential art, because they've gone through this cultural hazing and come out the other side emblazoned with the imprimatur of civilization. But does the entire Marvel line-up constitute a body of bold works? Probably not, but it doesn't have to. It's disingenuous to refer to the most primitive, arcade exercises when trying to disprove the narrative potential of a medium, but that's what you get when you chat with people who don't know what they're fucking talking about.

Here's what I think the discussion has skipped over: I don't think that engineering, of which I consider game design a subset, is considered an art form by most people. It may be because I am something of a nerd, or it may be that my own work is so meager that I want the definition of art expanded so that it will apply to me. It might also be that I have had strange experiences with well made, almost psychic bits of technology that I found powerful. But I simply accept that the cleverness of inventive language or visual composition or a stirring string movement has some engineering analog.

Look at something like Final Fantasy, which is a single machine - a machine designed to produce amusement - with some traditional expressive elements that no-one would even consider disproving as art. Uematsu is an unbelievable composer, Amano is a powerfully expressive artist - if you were to combine their contributions, do they somehow cease being art? Now, if characters are created to give the art and music context, does our construct lose the potential to communicate meaning? I think that's a hard case to make. But when Sakaguchi introduces rules to govern world behaviors and resolve conflicts, allowing the player to collaborate with the course of events, now the whole thing becomes tawdry, somehow?

Tycho applies his typical wit to this debate.

Penny Arcade! - An Unbelievably Merch Christmas, Part 1

ibenez wrote:

What is the problem here? Can someone tell me what the problem is with beating the f@#$king shit out of people?

As long as they don't dismember or kill the prisoners, they are enemy - treat them as such. I'm sorry but the first HEAD they chopped off threw the Geneva conventions right out the fucking window.

There are many problems here, my bloodthirsty friend.

The first of which is that the Geneva conventions don't apply to loosely bound terrorists with no national affiliation. They *do* apply to signatory nations who agreed to abide by certain rules for some minimal civility in the conduct of military actions. They apply to us, or should, because we believe that certain actions are morally reprehensible and that performing them reduces us to the same base level as the butchers we're fighting. It may be that you belive that the end justifies the means, and that anyone's actions justify an equal, or even more severe, reaction, in which case, feel free to continue believing so... just don't make the assumption that the rest of America agrees with you.

Second, you describe torture as "beating the fucking shit out of people", which I think minimizes the reality of the situation. We're not talking about a beating. We're talking about long term physical and mental anguish. These are not the same, and if a person is not cabable of facing the reality of what we mean when we say "torture" then they're in no position to advocate for it. I don't say that's your situation, mind you... I have no trouble believing you both know and favor exactly the kinds of duress implied by torture. This at least makes you not hypocritical.

The most serious problem, though, with this particular case, is the secrecy of it all. McCain has some knowledge of POW camps, and believes that America should not the kind of place that condones or engages in similar activity. Likewise, I imagine, he feels that the American public agree, and regard torture as a repugnant and immoral activity. We can't really know, of course, because most of the public doesn't bother to face up to the issue. They have some vague notion of what torture is and base an opinion on that knowledge. The administration well knows that the american public, who *ought* to be in charge of this country, wouldn't stand for it if they knew the details, so the details are classified and tacked onto the Army field manual so as to comply with the letter of the law, but completely defeat the spirit of it.

My fundamental belief is that we shouldn't be afraid to be honest about our practices. America is the greatest and strongest nation on earth... if the people of this country support torture, then lets say so, and tell our enemies exactly what they can expect if they're so foolish as to fall into our hands. If the people *don't* support it, then we shouldn't do it. But lets not tuck it away and feed everyone more pabulum about "achieving victory". We were founded on the notion that humans are capable of applying Reason to their own self-governance. Transparency is freedom's best friend... without it we are lost.

I think McCain believes that America should be a nation that leads by example and, as such, doesn't engage in the same horrific activities as it's enemies. To do so requires more strenth and more resolve than acting on animal urges. Meeting torture with torture, hate with hate, and rage with rage ought to be below us. Rather than accepting this, the administration gave McCain a patronizing nod and then subverted his efforts without a blink. *That's* why McCain should be pissed.

RE: New Army Rules May Snarl Talks With McCain on Detainee Issue - New York Times

[Gonzalez] acknowledged that such eavesdropping would be illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But that act, he said, makes an exception for eavesdropping when "otherwise authorized" by statute. That authorizing statute, he argued, was the 2001 resolution, known as the "Authorization to use Military Force."

Well, if that isn't the best reason *ever* for congress to be precise about those things, I don't know what is. There are many reasons a lot of people bitched about the way the authorization was handled, and this ends up being a result. Congress, instead of firmly specifying the scope of this "War", gave Bush a lot of license, and unamerican garbage like this is what happens when you discard checks and balances.

Gonzales Defends Eavesdropping Program

Rattle said :

Bush added: "Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."

I do not see any direct legitimate way this is putting citizens at risk. I am sure al-Qaeda assumes any communications inside the United States could be monitored. Rather, I see this as exposing an abuse of executive powers that are putting citizens civil liberties at risk. There is no system of accountability in place.

Well, after all this, Al Queda will be a little more confident that those wiretaps won't exist, because they'll know the American public won't tolerate it. So starting from that, I guess you could make the connection that lives are at risk.

The fact is, though, that that's not the fucking point. Will greater surveillance reduce the threat of violence from terrorists? Probably. Is it worth the trade? NO. That's what Americans have said since the very beginning... we don't want to live in a country where every move is monitored and scrutinized. Even if it means that we're more vulnerable to certain types of attack, we're willing to take that risk to live in a free society.

At least, that's what I thought. We'll see.

Bush says he signed NSA wiretap order

I just memed this for the headline. Way to go Reuters.

Anti-terrorism Patriot Act blocked in US Senate

Alex Curtis of publicknowledge.org says,

The House Judiciary Committee today introduced a bill (HR 4569) to close the analog hole. The government is proposing that devices (consumer electronics, computers, software) manufactured after a certain date respond to a copy-protection signal or watermark in a digital video stream, and pass along that signal when converting the video to analog. The same goes for analog video streams, to pass on the protection to the digital video outputs.

super.

Boing Boing: Congress:

Mind you, I disagree with some of this. Or, anyway, think he misses the point that Decius has made. That is, that Wikipedia is absolutely NOT an encyclopedia like Brittanica, but rather a medium-term collation of the current universe. I agree. Not being authoritative does, in my mind, mean that the Wikipedia folks are being pretentious in their description of it. That's a far cry from being worthless however. Anyway, my opinion. Here's Tycho's :

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues. As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive.

When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things. Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.

That's okay with me. I wasn't aware they thought they were making a real encyclopedia for big people at the time, and if I had, I'd have sought out one of the many other free solutions. I had seen the unbelievably detailed He-Man and Pokémon entries and assumed - like any rational person would - that Pokémaniacs were largely at the rudder of the institution.

I am almost certain that - while they prune their deep mine of trivia - they believe themselves to be engaged in the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working.

Reponses to criticism of Wikipedia go something like this: the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project's noble fundament. If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet. Hardly anyone does. If they do, it isn't exactly a compliment.

Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions. The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.

The second response is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect. To which I reply: that does not inspire confidence. In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous. What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.

(CW)TB out.

PA weighs in on Wikipedia...

Aside from making the best FTP client for MacOS X (transmit), Panic makes a number of neat T's, which people who know me have probably seen me wear.

Now, they make official (not crappy cafepress) Katamari Damacy shirts, designed by the same complete lunatic who did the game. Shit yeah. That black shirt with the neon pink "Dripping Prince" is teh rad.

p.s. their cart/download interface is also pretty brilliant. drag and drop to the big green arrow. my Web-fu is too weak to know how they do it, but i've never seen anyone else rock that scene. very mac like.

Panic Goods - Nice T-Shirts For You

Damn that's some cool art.

(clever site too)

hello