You know in an ideal world I could spend all my time criticizing the Obama administration’s economic policies. I would call them out as being way too weak, too little, wishy-washy, unpredictable, and dangerous. I’d argue that this idea of public/private partnerships is quite an oddly backwards run around way to prop up failing banks with pure cash infusions just with another weird name. I’d argue that there’s almost no way in hell these mortgage backed securities and troubled assets are ever going to pay off and earn the tax payer money. I’d rage about how the regulation proposed by Timothy Geitner, although a good start, misses many of the real substantive causes of the economic crises. The economic imbalances between the US and other nations of the world, the docile acceptance of bubble economics, the US’s wild monetary expenditures backed by military force, etc. 

I would spend all my time arguing about all that but I feel there’s something far more insidious and dangerous I have to refute first.  And that’s the absolutely deranged alternative course of action put out by so many of the President’s critics and gaining a ridiculous amount of momentum and support in public circles.

That theory is, to put it simply, the do nothing approach to economics.   Do nothingism usually starts with this ridiculous premise that many Americans have sadly had drilled absurdly into their brains since their early youth.

The premise is this:  Everything the government does or even touches is always automatically BAD.

So then these do nothingists build the obvious conclusions from this premise. Basically they say that the way out of this economic crises is to stop spending any money. No bailouts, no stimulus. Eliminate the Federal Reserve. Get rid of the FDIC.  Heck who even needs a treasury department? 

In particular cut programs and services until the budget is balanced. At the same time cut taxes and let private investment handle everything.

And don’t you dare put any regulation on anything. In fact all institutions that regulate any business whatsoever should just close their doors and step away. We don’t need these audits, taxes, regulations. No unions. No accountability BS.

Now anyone who has half a brain would realize that the immediate result of this would be stocks of major banks crashing and these banks and other financial institutions going out of business. Many many home owners would be foreclosed upon and out of a home and/or forced into bankruptcy. Of course these same do nothing advocates reject any proposal to make bankruptcy more helpful for homeowners or anyone else. The advocate a “no escape” policy for people facing economic bad times. You just suffer and take what you get. Even if that means being put out on the street.

What a wonderful theory!

If it stopped there, maybe it could be salvaged, but of course not to the liking of the do-nothingists. I might well argue that rejecting bailouts and letting financial institutions and other large institutions fail. There actually is a way that could work. But the sheer irony of it is, the only way letting these institutions fail could actually work is if the Government steps in more not less.

You see, lending must occur. Somebody has to distribute wealth to individuals to engage in large projects or make large purchases. Otherwise nobody buys a car and then automobile industries fail. Nobody buys a house and so the entire housing industry fails. Nobody starts a new business or buys new property for their business. And so everything fails.

So if you let the banks fail, there will be a period in which somebody must lend. Oh who oh who would that be?  Why THE GOVERNMENT of course! Gee what a surprise. 

It’s not like the government can’t take over. It can very easily become the bank of the nation. It can do the loaning and financial processing needed to keep the economy rolling. In fact it’d probably be substantially cheaper for the government to do that then to pay for bailouts.

But, that idea is anathema to the do-nothingists. A big central government bank!?!? NO WAY!! They would argue that instead the government should…. you guessed it…  DO NOTHING.  Presumably do nothingists don’t mind a little bitty ten year plus depression taking place until private individuals find a way to found their own banks using money from their fairy god mothers to get the economy rolling again.

And I can’t stress how immeasurably horrible a future this will be. If you think this current recession is bad, you have no clue what a do-nothingist policy would yield. A run on the banks. No deposit insurance. Money stored under your matress. You won’t have a great depression. You’d have a GREATEST Depression.You better have a gun at hand cuz I wouldn’t be surprised if the United States devolves to state reminiscent of Afghanistan.

But let’s say the do nothingists’ theory actually works and private enterprise does find a way out of the morass of chaos with the government just sitting on its heels twiddling its thumbs smiling at their zero deficits or whatever.  What happens then?

Well we end up with bubble economy 2.0.  Why? Because there is no regulation! It was BAD remember? Government has to get out of our way! So sure maybe people will remember the derivatives scam and be too clever to fall for that particular scam, but somebody will quickly find a way to pull another one in a different market. Or heck maybe the same one. People’s memories are remarkably short. And people love their booms. They’re all getting rich. Of course you have the exact same crash all over again. Another ten years of depression at least and misery all around.

And all along during this sickening boom and bust cycle you have actual real possessions and services being collected amongst the few wealthiest. The wealth disparity will increase and increase where the cleverest and most ruthless and most willing to cheat the system gain all the power. And the rest of us become eventual serfs forced into their servitude. In the meantime there would be no organization big enough or incentivized enough to engage in any kind of universally beneficial activity for society. Don’t expect new roads and infrastructure to be built. Global warming will just be allowed to rage rampant, and worse environmental destruction to the food supply will go unchecked. Major diseases will go uncured and untreated. And you can forget about space exploration, space travel will be confined to the very wealthy taking pointless trips straight up and down to look around.

This the do nothingist’s future. Does it sound so great to you?

Listen, for this particular banking/credit crises there are two extreme solutions. One is for the Government to BECOME the bank of choice and give out new loans to people to buy new houses after they are foreclosed upon. That could actually work. It’s one that assumes that we will simply let the banks fail since they are already effectively insolvent.  This is the government just letting markets go their way but refusing to let the economy suffer in the meantime. Presumably banks would try to survive and the government wouldn’t interfere with their restructuring under bankruptcy but since the government can offer loans cheaper and more easily to consummers there’d be no good reason for these banks to even bother trying to stay in business. Presumably later on, once the economy is stable, the government could, if it chose to, carefully create new banks and financial institutions and sell them off to competent leadership in the private sector. Or they can just be the bank forever.

The other extreme is for the government to simply BUY all the banks. Stock prices are low so it’s not that expensive and probably ultimately way cheaper than the government trying to prop up these stock prices through bailouts. The idea though here is to keep the banks in business. It’s just that the government will have majority share in them. The government would then appoint new boards of directors for these financial institutions who in turn would appoint new CEO’s. The government could then dictate how these banks are run and ensure that they are loaning out to a sufficient amount to preserve the economic order. Existing shareholders effectively are out of luck as they get bought out at bargain prices for institutions that are effecitvely not worth anything.  The government then takes the troubles assets from these institutions and puts them into a separate institutions whose job it is to manage them and get as high a return as possible for the sake of the tax payers. But this would clean these instruments out of the banks making the banks themselves financially more stable institutions.

After a reasonable amount of time, the government can then sell back these institutions to the private sector and would almost certainly do so. If they didn’t intend to why did they bother in the first place? It would make more sense to simply BE the bank itself and follow the first strategy. In any case to assauge fears that the government might own these banks indefinitely, a time limit could even be written right into the law that authorized the purchasing of these banks. Once they are profitable well run institutions, the private sector would jump at the opportunity to own these toxic-asset free money making institutions.

These are the two rational extremes. What President Obama is doing is somewhere inbetween these two. He’s not fully buying the banks but he’s not fully supplanting them either. Instead he’s trying to use private money to induce others to buy the toxic assets, effectively “buying” them in disguise by putting gargantuan guarantees on every purchase. In the mean time in case this doesn’t work the Obama administration is also doing what it can to directly alleviate economic burdens on the economy by directly giving out loans, renegotiating mortgages, etc.

If it works, the Obama administrations plan is Genius. It managed to save the government money by getting private institutions to put up the risk and on top of that it would have deflected the ownership of toxic assets into the private sector not saddling the government with that burden. At the same time it forestalls a stock market collapse and keeps shares in banks reasonably high, keeps people in jobs, and buys the economy lots of time to fix its fundamental systemic problems.

If it doesn’t work, the Obama administration will have skyrocketed the deficit, wasted tons of money and only lost precious time needed to seriously make headway into one of the other two extreme strategies which have to be done first before real headway can be made in restructuring our economic fundamentals.

But please take note, none of these plans involve doing NOTHING!  The government in all three scenarios does a great deal. And it’s *probably* the case that the Obama administration’s plan, so often criticized as being massive expansion of government, is probably the least government involved and most privately involved plan possible.  Indeed the Obama administration risks alienating itself from its international allies many of whom clamor for a more interventionist approach.

Do nothingists have it all entirely backwards. They think government is and always will be the problem when all evidence speaks to the fact that in recent years it’s lack of government oversight that has gotten us into this mess. There’s no doubt there is a point where government intervention becomes onerous and dangerous, nobody is arguing against that. But now is decidedly not that time.

The idea that the government is always wrong always should have been absurd on the surface. Governments are just people working towards an ends, doing their job. Yes they’ll make mistakes. Everybody does. So do, btw, people working in private industry. There’s no reason whatsoever to believe that there’s some special characteristic of having the label “government” assigned to people which automatically makes them suddenly inefficient, lazy, incapable, etc. Certainly there’s nothing that makes everything the government does an automatic failure. Sure we all have horror stories of government inefficients and absurdities, but don’t we have just as many for numerous fo the companies we interact with? I sure do. (ugh, Comcast!)  And can’t we also poitn to things the government has done right? Like building schools. Building roads. Defending our nation from attacks. If ANYONE ever tries to sell you the idea that the government or any other institution is inherently a failure inducing institution you should quickly start to question their motives. As well as their grip on reality.

Do nothingists have no plan except for wishful thinking. We cannot and should not listen to them no matter how much they manifest and feed upon our discontent. If our rage and digust at massive bailouts and huge bonuses leads us into the hands of these insane theorists, we are in for a load of trouble.

 

Found this on a forum. It pretty much perfectly sums up why I no longer watch Heroes.

I’ve been thinking… I don’t really buy into that description nonsense in stories and literature. 

I realized this the other day when I was reading a work of fiction and came to the awareness  that I wasn’t really reading the descriptions.  No, I don’t mean that I was skipping over the descriptions, not at all. My eyes processed every word and my brain acknowledged their meaning. However, I wasn’t really reading them. My mind wasn’t taking in the data of the words and using them to formulate a picture of what was going on in the story. Rather the words were sort of just bouncing off my consciousness. I didn’t *care* about the description. It was wholly irrelevant to me in terms of my ability to enjoy the story.

Instead I realized my mind was filtering out action words and phrases. Such and such did this. So and so decided that. etc. etc.  That and the dialogue were what I used to formulate the story. In my mind that was the story. It was that which I read for. What were people saying to each other. What were people doing. What were people thinking.  I didn’t care what the damn garden looked like or what posters were on the wall. I ignored that garbage.

It’s always been that way for me actually. The only time I’d even remember a particular description was when it became relevant to the plot later on. Which most of the time for most of the descriptions was never.

But how do you form an image of the story you wonder? Honestly, I always just made it up on my own. What the characters looked like, what they were wearing, where they lived, all those were images in my own head. Usually pretty vague and blurry and changeable images, but they were only the slightest bit loosely associated with the descriptions in the actual books. Often I would consciously and knowingly forge images in my mind that contradicted the descriptions the authors so painstakingly inscribed. Like for example I might think of a particular hero or heroine as black or asian or hispanic even when the writer clearly intended the culture to be more of a medieval European setting and the characters to be white. Once I even swapped a character’s gender in my mind because I felt the story was somewhat lacking in female representation.  Odd I know.

Mostly though I just don’t have any particular images. I see the characters as if I am looking out from their eyes and not seeing their faces. I see the terrain as if I was looking down from a great distance with no particular details. When a description becomes relevant late in a book all of a sudden that feature might pop into existence in my mind’s eye’s view of the world. And the whole thing might shift and twist in my head over time as I decide that I like the world looking this way better than that way or whatever.

This doesn’t mean I can’t really appreciate a good description. I just don’t CARE that much. Much like I can appreciate a beautiful painting or an extraordinary landscape. For about three minutes. Then I’m already bored and ready to move on.  So when people point to great passages of brilliant description in literature I look and nod and say “that’s nice” while at the same time trying to keep myself from falling asleep. The images don’t MATTER to me.

It’s the same, ironically when I read comics and manga too. And those actually have pictures. But I don’t dwell on the pictures. My eyes pass right over them to get to the dialogue except during the key action sequences where you HAVE to look at the pictures to understand what’s going on. In a lot of manga I don’t pay enough attention to the images to even be able to tell the characters apart until a character mentions a character by name. Then I know and I’m able to match up the character representation with my mental image.

Really I think this is because I’m naturally not very visual a person. I never pay any attention to sights in the real world. I don’t pick up or notice details. I get lost insanely easily even in video games and even with maps. I just don’t see things very well.  I can’t, no matter how hard I try, pick up the subtle details that people use as clues to understand what’s going on. Visually I don’t get it much. I don’t experience it much.

However audial things I grasp much better. This works with regards to reading too. A descriptive passage won’t even interest me in the slightest in terms of the power of the word choice or the clarity of the image presented, but the rhythem of the words, the patterns in the way the language flows THAT I find fascinating. A particularly lyrical turn of phrase can entrance me for hours and I will take great joy in reading such a passage over and over again.

Perhaps this is why in writing I find the prescription of “show don’t tell” to be a nearly impossible precept to follow. As much as I know other people like having their concrete descriptions of what’s going on, I don’t HAVE any to share. And the specific descriptions are, by and large, utterly irrelevant to the stories I want to tell anyway.

So I wonder, are there a lot of other readers out there like me?  Or should I focus all my efforts in trying to modify my writing style so as to be able to delivery the descriptive passages MOST readers need in order to experience a story properly even if I myself have no interest in it?

“The universe is a cold and dark place. Snap your fingers and create a little light.”

“Funny how I never learned how to snap my fingers.”

“If you can save one life then you can save ten thousand.”

“And if you can save ten thousand, you probably can’t save one. And then the ten thousand get pissed at you and beat you to death for your failure.”

“So cynical! Even if you can’t succeed you can find peace in the striving right? Life depends on striving, hard work, due diligence and the likes.”

“You do realize a hole to nowhere dug quickly and efficiently still leads nowhere?”

“Doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve a purpose.”

“Sure. You can always bury yourself in it.”

“You know there’s plenty of blame to go around.”

“Yup. 99.999% belongs to me and the other 0.001% split equally amongst all other parties involved is undoubtedly sufficient to make them happy.”

“When you write, you have to write with your heart. Everything else is just words on paper.”

“pfft. I haven’t used *paper* for any serious writing since I was 16. I use a computer and I don’t print it out.”

“You know what I mean. Lights on a screen if you’d like. What I mean is emotions are the key to meaningful writing. Analytical drivel is forgotten ten minutes after it is read. Real writing actually means something to someone.”

“Look using your heart is like using a processing program that returns 1 and 0 with equal probability and no equation that can predict which is going to turn up next. I don’t need a heart. I have a CPU.”

In a recent speech President Obama asserted with confidence that the bickering about who is to blame for AIG Bonuses and the economic meltdown and all that might as well just stop. “I’ll take responsibility.” He asserted. Presumably because he’s the President.  That means that in the end even if his will didn’t cause the problems being critiqued, even if he didn’t even know about them or couldn’t predict them, he’s still the one in charge so it’s his responsibility. If he didn’t know, he should have known. If he didn’t do enough, he shoudl have done enough.

How unique a contrast is it that the current President bluntly, openly, and unapologetically takes the blame for the consequences of his administration’s policies or lack thereof when compared to years of coverup, hiding, and stubborn refusal to admit fault in the previous administration? It’s just words true, but surely these words speak volumes in favor of President Obama’s much maligned character.

And the irony of it of course is that the very statement in its emphasis gives light to the absurdity of the lies being spread to malign the President’s endeavors and place the entire blame the entire economic meltdown upon his feet. And of course, consequently erasing the history of malfeasance in previous administrations and Congresses.

Some people seem to be attacking President Obama as if he personally and willfully caused every single economic hardship the country is facing. No matter that he’s only been President 59 days. And the cynicism inherent in the evidence oft provoked in these arguments is enough to make me sick. To blame provisions in the President’s Stimulus package which hasn’t been around long enough to do much of ANYTHING substantial, or to blame the President’s budget proposals which have barely even been debated let alone implemented strikes me as a sick and twisted kind of hate mongering. It’s beyond reason to cite THOSE things as evidence of Obama’s destructive policies when we don’t even know what impacts they will have, be they positive OR negative.

Now the things that the Obama administration has done that have had an impact tend to be things that don’t have an immediate or obvious impact on the economy. Things like closing quantanamo bay, outlawing torture, releasing hidden documents, removing abstinence based restrictions on foreign aid, opening the door for negotiations with Iran, starting the withdrawal process for troops in Iraq, and re-enabling embryonic stem-cell research. Those are hardly clearly economic mission critical. Now I can understand why some dislike those decisions and it certainly makes sense for people to criticize them on their own merits.

So the only thing remaining of course and for which Obama can be directly blamed for with respect to the economic, is the decision to put Geitner in charge and continue with almost an identical bailout policy of the Bush administration. 

Even I, of course, am very skeptical of these policies. I’m glad Geitner has redirected money to help home owners, a desperately needed act. And likewise the decision to help auto part makers seems helpful in protecting real jobs. These are changes in direction from the first tarp which was solely bank oriented.  And I like some of the changes Geitner has stated that he will be making in terms of demanding accountability and disclosure, but overall we haven’t seen much of that in practice yet. But the overall strategy of Geitner and the Fed does seem overly conservative and extremely dangerous. Why not just take over and break apart themse banks? Why do we engage in policies fundamentally different from what we’ve done in the past and what we encourage other nations to do when faced with a banking failure like ours? It seems like these kinds of actions might yet lead us to economic ruin.

But even should it do so, it’s rather disingenous to say that this is all because we screwed up and made Obama our President. Obama is doing exactly the same thing as Bush was doing. Presumably both were convinced by the same arguments. There’s no reason to believe that McCain wouldn’t have done precisely the same, given his equally vocal support for the initial TARP plan.

No doubt if the economy continue to decline, Obama will deserve more and more of the blame for not finding and engaging in an alternative course of action. But likewise Obama will deserve more and more of the credit if the people find themselves more economically secure in the face of this recession than we otherwise would have been or even if, however unlikely it seems, we find ourselves pulled out of this crazy downward spiral.

But how much do you want to bet he won’t get that credit? Not from the majority of the loud mouthed critics criticizing him now. Because many of these are the precise same people who cheered and defended Bush’s banking policies and now find them unacceptable when wielded by a Democratic President. It’s highly likely those people would be cranking up the anti-Obama rhetoric no matter what actually had happened and no matter what will happen. They desire Obama to fail simply because he’s not on their team. In their mind he’s a Democrat and a liberal and therefore fundamentally evil.

Surely rational people can critique carefully the policies of the President while still giving him a reasonable chance to see what he can do. Surely that makes more sense than judging him a failure after a mere 59 days in office. If over time he CAN’T turn things around and things don’t get better for the majority of the American people or get WORSE, no doubt we WILL hold him responsible. Democrats and Republicans alike. And judging from President Obama’s words, he’s the kind of person who will accept that responsibility with grace and poise as any good leader should.

Here’s a quote from quite possibly the brightest and sharpest commentators on television today.

“These guys at these companies were on a sherman’s march through their companies financed by our 401K’s and all the incentives of their companies were for short term profit. And they burned the fucking house down with our money and walked away rich as hell. And you guys knew that that was going on.”

And where does this commentator show up? Not on any network television channel during their prime time news programs or their round table discussion groups. Not on CNN or Fox News and CNBC or even NPR. Nope. He has a late night comedy show on Comedy Central. His name, of course, is Jon Stewart.

The quote in question comes from an astounding interview of Jim Cramer by Jon Stewart last Thursday night.  Stewart and his show’s writers did an astounding job in this interview and all the segments leading up to it. He really cuts straight to the heart of the financial crises and what it means for real people.

Here are the videos of that encounter and the controversy leading up to it:

In case you didn’t feel like watching them all here are a few more really poignant quotes from the interview.

“It is this idea that the financial news networks are not just guilty of a sin of ommision but a sin of commission. They are actually in bed with them. … This thing was ten years in the making, and it’s not going to get fixed tomorrow. But the idea that you could have on the guys from Baer Sterns and Meryll Lynch, the guys that had leveraged 35 to one and then blame mortgage holders, I mean that’s insanity.”

“There are two markets. One that has been sold to us as long term. Put your money in 401Ks, put your money in pensions. And just leave it there, don’t worry about it. It will all be fine. And then there’s this other market, this real market that’s occurring in the back room. Where giant piles of money are going in and out and people are trading them and it’s transactional and it’s fast. But it’s dangerous. It’s ethically dubious. And it hurts that long term market.”

“It feels like we are capitalizing your adventure. By our pensions. And that it’s a game that you know, that you know is going on, but that you go television as a financial network and pretend isn’t happening.”

“You knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months. The entire network was. And so that now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy once in a life time Tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenous at best and criminal at worst.”

I honestly don’t know what we would do if we didn’t have the Daily Show. I am desperately grateful for its existence.

Just cuz I’m bored I figured I’d post what I actually think about all these topics.

Should Xanga’s Front Page Focus More on Featured or Top Blogs?

Featured. However the select process for Featured should be more open. It’s currently an editorial process and like all editorial pages in all newspapers and magazines in this country, no matter how hard they try to be otherwise, they are biased. That’s not to say they aren’t trying to be otherwise, no doubt the Xanga Team does its best, but it’s impossible for them not to bring their own natural biases and inclinations to bear when picking content.

Everyone is biased, that’s natural. The problem is that for a website that is supposed to be open and attractive to everyone, being open to the criticism of bias is dangerous and distracting. Further, I think the whole business of picking out featured entries distracts the Xanga Team from the business of making Xanga itself better.

I think you can kill two birds with one stone by making the Xanga community choose the Featured Content through a sort of rotating editor-ship. Where groups of Xangans are given voting privilege for short periods of times to select the Featured Content out of featured submissions and high scorers in votes and recommendations. It would work sort of like Slashdot works. That removes any sense of bias provided the editors are chosen at random and it gets the act of selecting Featured Content out of the hadns of the Xanga Team.  You also have to have some sort of VETO process so that Xanga Team can reject entries that conflict with the wishes of their advertisers or their desire to be a Family Friendly site. But I think that, 1. that should be open, and 2. the person who wrote the entry should be given an opportunity to alter or censor their work and resubmit it to be featured.

With regards to Top Blogs I think it works fine right now except I think it should be in the central part of the main page as another Tab. Featured would still display FIRST, but you can just click one click to pull up Top Blogs. 

I also agree with theTheologiansCafe’s comments about putting more content in the rotating banner at the top.

Topic: Should Timestamping Be Allowed?

Yes. Timestamping is of dubious morality but you can’t really stop people from doing it. Not by a social crusade. Even if you convinced most people not to timestamp, the few people who did would have an inherent advantage creating a free rider problem. 

To remove Timestamping is to take away a feature of Xanga which will undoubtedly annoy people. Many people use these time manipulation features for beneficial purposes.  Further to remove timestamping would likely push people into the arms of other features of dubious morality like tagging and mass messaging or reposting.

The solution of course is to alter the way the subscription browser and universal inbox work so as to make timestamping less annoying or visible to people. If I can mark an entry as READ, timestamping would be irrelevant to me.

TheTheologiansCafe: Overrated or Genius?

Neither as far as I know. He’s  a good blogger and popular. I have no idea what his IQ is.

Are trolls good for xanga?

Does it matter?

The answer is of course not. If they were there’d be no reason to call them “trolls”. By definition a Troll is a being who disrupts the flow of discussion in a community, intentionally. Certainly the term arose because of a behavior that people found unacceptable.

However, let me just say that a LOT of what people call Trolling isn’t actually Trolling and IS Good for Xanga.  Like basic disagreement, even FORCEFUL disagreement. That’s not trolling but many people see it as such. The fact that people can’t agree about what constitutes trolling means that there’s little or no point in trying to police trolling. You really can’t do anything about Trolling hence the question is rather pointless.

I’ve written plenty on trolling before so I’ll stop there.

The case for or against featuring pics and videos on the xanga front page.

eh. I think I’m against but I don’t feel that passionate about it.  I think you should just be able to post a Blog Entry that is just a picture or just a video and that can be featured on the front page if it’s good enough. Same standards as other blog entries. It’s also possible I think to bifurcate the Xanga Home Page into a Video Centric or a Picture Centric site.

Are eprops and credits beneficial to xanga?

Credits are. Eprops are pointless.

Eprops don’t appreciably differ from unique poster count which is proportional to overall comment count in which is a sufficient statistical measure of popularity. Outliers, (mostly flame war caused) can be excluded in other ways.

Credits however allow Xanga to price features creating an economy. That’s Good. Even if Xanga doesn’t have any good use for it, one day they might. Credits give a lot of flexibility for encouraging or discouraging features without having to charge people actual money for them.

Should we be allowed to Mass Message with such ease?

Yes. Really it isn’t THAT easy right now. I don’t get a lot of Spam on Xanga. I get almost none.

Honestly though in principle you can’t stop Spam. It’s virtually impossible. Email is still useful in spite of Spam. Xanga messages can be too.  The fear is that if you start restricting messages you limit the usefulness. Open systems are superior to closed systems. We wouldn’t have the modern internet were it not for them.

However, I have no problem with making an option to opt out of messages sent to “all subscribers” and “all friends”. Make the people who want to spam enter in all the addresses themselves.

ARE CLIQUES HARMFUL TO XANGA?

A little but not really.

It’s hard to say cuz nobody really knows what a Clique is.

With a broad definition Cliques are just groups. In that case trying to stop Cliques from forming is like trying to stand on the beach and keep the sand from receding with the waves.  Human beings group up. It’s natural. And that’s actually a good thing over all. Joining Xanga and feeling isolated and alone is the greatest risk. I’ve felt that myself when I joined.  People need to find subscribers and friends. If you get a group of friends on Xanga you open yourself up right away to being accused of being a Clique, by a broad definition.

But a more restrictive definiton associates Cliques with mini-Xanga Gangs. Or maybe like Fraternities or Sororities. In these cases danger can arise. If these kinds of Cliques start to dominate people can feel alienated and excluded.  Further harms can arise as gang behaviors tend to lead to war and terrorization. Initiation might also be cruel or disparaging.

Two things are important to take into account here. One is that Cliques by the stronger definition aren’t inherently evil either. A “Gang” that engages primarily in community works ought to be encouraged not discouraged just because of the gang-style organization. For this reason, it’s silly to try and eliminate or destroy Cliques. Rather the goal should be identify harmful Clique behavior and prevent THAT.

The second is that Cliques represent only a small subsection of the overall community. What THAT means is that Xanga itself has to be very careful not to associate itself as an institution with *any* Cliques. It ought not even associate itself with any particular users. If Xanga Team were to, say, join a Clique then anyone who does not agree with or get along with the members of said Clique would feel put out and be likely to leave Xanga. They would perceive Xanga Team’s behavior as favoritism. Xanga needs to keep as close as possible  to at least the illusion of impartiality to maximize their ability to recruit users of all stripes and sizes.

Trust me, I’m not much of an economic Conservative at all, and I think the Stimulus bill makes a lot of sense even though it could have been better. So far I think the Obama administration has been doing an ok job on the economy, far from great but not as bad as during the last months of the Bush administration. Will it work? I have no idea.

But anyway sometimes the US just disturbs me in its attitude toward the rest of the world and in this the Obama administration is no different. News reports show that when the US meets with the G20 they’re main point is going to be pushing the other nations to use more money to stimulate their economies. We’re going to be lecturing them about how they aren’t doing as much as us.  And ironically in the news just now I heard the justification for this policy is that the Obama administration thinks the American people will get pissed off if we feel we’re doing our fair share to help but other countries aren’t.

Whether it’s our administration or our people, that’s just unbearably ARROGANT. We CREATED the crises. We did. Just us. It’s entirely unarguably our fault. And yet we want to claim the high ground? Ridiculous!

We want other countries to spend proportionally as much as we do, but… does that make sense? Surely we should spend considerably *more* to help get the global economy back on track if only out of a sense of guilt and responsibility.

Moreover, it’s considerably easier for some countries to give than others. And in particular, the US in its position as having the reserve currency has it easiest of all economically. We can borrow with impunity. Maybe we shouldn’t, that’s another debate, but certianly we can.  Other countries, however, that’s not necessarily the case. Some are rich enough that they can pay outright for stimulus through surpluses they’ve kept in the past, but those who don’t have that kind of ready cash on hand can’t really borrow like we can. They don’t have the dollar. Nor do they necessarily consider it a good idea.

And here’s the other thing, if we really think stimulation is the best investment of our money for the long term, surely we should laugh when other nations unwisely refuse to stimulate their economies. Yes we’re all connected but we’ll come out ahead in the end if monetary stimulation really is the best policy. The fact that we are so adamant could mean either that we’re really altruistic or we aren’t that confident in our own strategy and want other nations to take an equal risk.

Of course the other nations are actually making a good amount of sense. Yes stimulus is an important part of the agenda, but what’s REALLY important is redesigning the system from the ground up. To create a more balanced world where these kinds of economic catastrophes are less likely to happen. That in itself will help stimulate the economy by making investers more confident in the system itself.  The reason that’s not important to Americans of course is that it likely will mean a lesser role for the United States in driving the direction of the World Economy. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll still have a huge role, but it might be one of first amongst equals rather than the sole super power economy like we are now.

Other countries really should contribute a lot to getting us out of this economic crises. Some need to do more than they are doing now, including the US. But more importantly, the United States needs to get off its high horse first. Nobody wants to hear us lecture to them about what’s the right thing to do. Nor should they. Nobody will listen to us at all until we do that.

*bumped because the movie just came out and I recently saw it*

I just read the classic comic book series known as Watchmen. It’s a masterpiece. Probably one of the best comic books I’ve ever read. Soon it will be made into a blockbuster movie and almost certainly ruined.

But I don’t recommend it.

Why? Because, if you’re like me, you will find it dark, disturbing and depressing.  If you want to just be entertained you shouldn’t read Watchmen. Go read yourself some X-Men or pickup a manga. Oh sure there are fun and entertaining parts of Watchmen too, but the overarching message is a serious one and a dark one. It’s not a very nice story.

And it’s a message that is very relevant. I don’t recommend it, but it’s definitely worth reading.

The main theme of Watchmen is exactly what it’s title implies. It’s about the question of accountability. It’s about the question of what happens when you have ultimate power and think you know what’s best for the world? It’s about our responsibility. And it’s about the people being controlled by forces beyond their control and treated like playthings. It’s about that question, if someone purports to protect you, to watch over you and stop the bad guys at your door, who keeps them in check? What happens when their power and control corrupts them? Blinds them? They might not be bad people. They may always mean well. But it’s so easy to give in to the power and choose the easiest course no matter the consequences.

Sound familiar?

In international politics our nation, the United States government is the Watchmen. All the leading economic powers are like the superheroes in Watchmen. We are the ones who in the interest of making a better world do whatever it takes to make people better, behind their backs, without consent and without accountability. Our strength as a nation has given us that right we assume. We think that we know best. And when things get hard, when something terrible happens we are also the ones who compromise our ideals in a moment’s notice. One nation’s monsters we let live, sometimes even praise, while another one we bring to justice. Expedience more than morality governs our actions. Our fundamentalism, false unquestioned principles, are used to justify all our decisions and we purport to always know the right.

And the people are like ants before the eyes of our government. Their words and thoughts ignored. Our leaders aren’t bad people. Not really. They’ve just been operating on such a large scale that they’ve lost the ability to see us, to understand our lives. It’s almost like they’re living on Mars or maybe they’ve made their secret base in the ice cold isolation of Antarctica. Wherever they are, they aren’t here. They aren’t seeing our pain.

So of course they shrug when the whole world cries out in horror rejecting a unilateral invasion of a sovereign nation by the world’s greatest super power. Who cares? Our nation ignores the outcry and we do what we want anyway. We had to stop the terrorists and dictators of course.

And never mind that the people have become enraged at the behavior of major institutions on Wall Street, the Government chooses in its infinite wisdom to prop them up anyway.  It doesn’t matter that we don’t want our money spent to save an economic system that doesn’t serve our interests and creates disproportionate wealth and is destroying the world as we know it. It doesn’t matter to them that we cry out in horror at the world we are heading toward. They don’t see our pain and even if they did they might spend a moment gasping in horror before wholly ignoring us and doing things the same way they always have.

Why?

Because THEY know better than us. They’re watching out for us after all. They’re the superheroes. I mean where would be without them? At the mercy of our own excesses, no doubt, and the unscrupulous men and women, monsters and terrorists and criminals willing to exploit our naivete.  They’re the Watchmen.

But who watches the Watchmen?

Legend has it, it was a turning point in the affairs of the world of humankind. On the 28th Day of the 3rd Month of the 9th Year of the 3rd Millennium, in a small city in the heartland of Indiana they gathered.

The Ocean Queen filled with Inane Insanity called them. The Sorcerer with the odd name summoned them forth. And they came from the four corners of the World, each bringing their own powers and skills to bare. To Indianapolis they came, armed with naught but pen and laptop, wit and whim and the will to party. They were the Masters of Xanga.

And the world would never be the same again…