Scripting News

Christmas comes early for President Obama

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:44:48 GMT

NY Times: "During one of the most difficult periods in the presidency of Bill Clinton, he addressed a group of clerics at an annual prayer breakfast in September 1998 just as the Starr report outlining his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky was about to be published."

My name is Dave and I'm a racist

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:20:59 GMT

Hello!

I wrote a comment on a post on Phil Windley's blog earlier today which I ended saying perhaps we should all just disclaim up front that we're racists, and then go ahead and say what we have to say about race.

It should save a lot of time, and get a lot of formerly private and hush-hush stuff out in the open.

Ironically, it's possible because we got, through Rev Wright's at-first shocking sermons out and in the discussion. So much for black people not being racists. He could attend our nation's 12-step meeting and introduce himself as I did.

Hello, my name is Jeremiah Wright and I'm a racist.

Hello Jeremiah!

In his speech on Tuesday morning, Obama said the same thing.

It's like what Jerry said about his life.

It's even worse than it appears.

Fact, if you've lived in the United States as long as I have, 52 years, you have opinions about race, and to some that makes you a racist. The problem -- only our closest friends and family know our opinions about race. There may be blacks who first heard that there is white resentment from Geraldine Ferraro, or from Barack Obama. But it's no secret to me.

We may eventually get rid of racism, but it isn't going to happen by keeping it hidden.

On Tuesday before Obama's speech I saw a panel on race, on CNN, moderated by a black newsman, with two blacks as panelists. No whites. That's the old style pre-Obama panel on race. The new modern way is to balance it, and let whites speak about race too. Let us make generalizations about blacks and whites the way blacks always have. For a change, let the blacks listen, and appreciate that we have opinions too, show us that you get that we're not silly, naive, trivial.

In all my years, I've only heard two images of whites from blacks. 1. The man. We control everything. We're privileged. The oppressor. We coordinate to keep blacks out, to keep blacks down. 2. The silly do-good liberal. We look for approval. We want to be hip. But we're naive and shallow. There is no third view of whites in black folklore. And you wonder why we never connect.

Right now I'm not trying to be your friend. I never was your oppressor. I do believe in the fierce urgency of now, so what I want is to work together to get us some good government. I certainly don't mind, if along the way, the lot of black people improves. In fact I like that. And it doesn't make me silly or naive. I argue, and I think Obama agrees, that makes me an American, which I most certainly am.

Once we feel heard, then we might be better able to listen to what you have to say. Just a thought.

One more thing before I sit down. By disclaiming my racism, you can't get me by calling me a racist. Just admitting that one simple and obvious fact makes it possible for the air to start to clear on this formerly taboo subject.

I'll sit down now, having said my piece, for now.

Perfect purple

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:22:56 GMT

What's wrong with Wikipedia

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:07:47 GMT

First, I point to Wikipedia pages often here on Scripting News and on Twitter. I also find it a useful personal resource. For example, I'm working my way through Battlestar Galactica and I find it helpful to read the summary of each episode after I've watched it. It's great that they have a common format. And they fill in blanks you might not have noticed but don't spoil the plot of upcoming episodes. I've been investing in ETFs lately, and Wikipedia has helped me learn how they work. So I don't question its value. It has value.

Wikipedia is therefore a puzzle to me. Because while it's helpful, it also hurts me, because my biography there is more of a vendetta, by anonymous people, who seem self-centered and immature, but it's impossible to tell what axes they have to grind, because they're largely anonymous.

Same is true for various activities I've participated in. You may argue that I didn't invent this or that, but surely I had something to do with RSS, blogging and podcasting? Yet depending on when you look, I'm often not mentioned on these pages. This makes it hard for me to claim my work in professional dealings because people consider Wikipedia authoritative. What it says is considered by many to be the truth. So this has hurt my career, and my ability to do creative work that builds on past work.

This is where Andrew Keen could have and should have, imho, written his book. This is where the Cult of the Amateur really does do damage, by usurping authority, and replacing it with anonymity and giving power to those who who tear down creativity, to remove the incentive to share, unless you're completely selfless and don't mind if others take credit for your accomplishments. That's not the nature of creativity, btw, creative people fiercely insist on credit, fight for it, imho, rightly.

Eventually, if it hasn't already happened, there will be consultants you can pay to make sure your point of view dominates a Wikipedia page. It has already come out that a gift to the Wikipedia Foundation will assure that your point of view dominates your profile page. How much of this can Wikipedia stand before it is reformed? It seems time to have this discussion, and not in the confines of Wikipedia where it can be controlled and gamed by insiders, but outside where everyone's opinion can be heard without being edited out and when it's clear who's saying what.

That said, here's how I think Wikipedia should evolve to fix this problem.

Based on the principle that one has the right to confront his accusers, Wikipedia pages on living people, or covering active creative areas, should be limited to pages of pointers of attributed accounts. Editors work to validate that the people are who they say they are. If they can't be validated, they either don't get linked, or get linked to from an area specially marked as not being validated. (I prefer the former.)

Further, in areas important enough to be controversial, meaning that people disagree on what happened, we should try to get as many people who were involved in the event or activity to write first-person narratives. In areas where they all agree, that should eventually be considered fact and presented as such, but the first-person narratives must stay linked. This would prevent the kinds of disasters that happen when people (for example) edit their own profile pages, meanwhile giving people the formal right to tell their own story, which clearly, many people covered by Wikipedia want.

I hope an interesting discussion ensues. Of course I expect to hear from the people who edit my profile pages to keep my name in the dirt, and I don't expect them to use their actual names. Can't speak for everyone else, but I'm much more interested, always, in hearing opinions from people who have the conviction and courage to put their personal authority behind their words, as I do.

Update after Obama's race speech

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:48:04 GMT

I had so many thoughts after Obama's speech yesterday, but none of them were organized enough to write. Today maybe a few are.

1. I don't think it's going to change anyone's mind. If you supported Obama before, you probably still do, if you didn't you still don't.

2. It should now be clear to everyone with a reasonably open mind who listened to the speech, what he means by change. There were so many shortcuts he could have taken. If he were Bush or Clinton, he would have taken them. After having Presidents who openly lie for so long, the change is this: Obama doesn't. He told the truth, maybe not all of it, but orders of magnitude more than politicians of our age do.

2a. Yes, Virginia, Obama is a politician. And that's not a dirty word. We have politics to make decisions as groups of people, at a local, state, country, even a global level. If we ever elect someone to the Presidency who says he or she is not a politician, they are lying, bigtime.

3. Sometimes things get so bad that only the truth will do. We usually like bedtime stories from our politicians, tales that give us a good night's sleep. Obama certainly has a good bedside manner. And while race isn't the top item on our national to-do list, it is on the list and has been there, as he said, since before the founding of the country.

The Wright videos have brought race to the front, have started a discourse here and elsewhere, that has enormous potential for improving communication. And while the problems may be unsolvable (none of us are going to change how we feel or what we believe) we must not let them stand in the way of working together and getting stuff done. You don't have the time to change me, and I don't have the time to change you. Our first order of business is to get Obama elected, and after that, we have a lot more work to do.

I think this is how historic problems are properly dealt with. You side-step the personal issues, and just start assuming the problem has been solved, and then one day you look up and things are a lot better. Not perfect, they never are, but better. (This is why the "fierce urgency of now" is something to seize and embrace, to not pass up. We can use it to get past the attitudes and beliefs that are in our way.)

4. Obama is not Howard Dean, and the Wright videos are not the Dean Scream, because Obama has the delegate and popular vote lead, and we're deep into the primary season. He makes the decision whether his candidacy is viable, not Hardballs, 350, The Saturation Room, Space The Nation not even Cowntown and certainly not Tim Russert. (Sorry, the first was a typo, then I had fun with the others.)

5. Maybe the delay in choosing a candidate is not such a bad thing for the Democratic Party. Maybe the time can be used to figure out wtf the Democratic Party is in 2008. Maybe we can participate in that decision this time, maybe it isn't just the insiders and fatcats (love that word!) who get to call the shots. Maybe we should organize a BloggerCon for May to discuss the future of the Democratic Party. I bet some interesting ideas would come from such a meetup.

Update: Huffington cross-post.

Today's Clinton conference call

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:19:00 GMT

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/03/19/call1.mp3

Berkeley anti-war demo

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:22:32 GMT

Obama's race speech

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:01:16 GMT

Presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech today about race.

Here's an MP3 of Obama's speech.

Video of the speech.

Links for 03/18/2008

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:15:37 GMT

NYT: Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage.

Today's Clinton conference call

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:37:07 GMT

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/03/18/call1.mp3

Today's Obama conf call MP3

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:14:17 GMT

http://sundaygang.com/obama/2008/03/17/call1.mp3

Today's Clinton conf call MP3

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:25:38 GMT

http://sundaygang.com/clinton/2008/03/17/call1.mp3

Race in 2008

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:05:21 GMT

Last week race became the issue in the election of 2008.

Of course some people would say, and they're probably right, that it was always the issue, but it came to the surface last week. I won't try to speak for them, I'll just speak for myself.

I am white, male, 52 years old, and like everyone else (sorry) I feel that people always find a way to push me to the side, to objectify me, to react to my body as opposed to my ideas, and to use me as a screen to project their fears and doubts on.

I went into yesterday's podcast thinking we'd have an interesting discussion on race, that I was prepared for whatever would happen, but I was not prepared. You can hear that in the 50 minutes. You should listen all the way to the end before you form a judgment. And also watch your own responses and reactions and see how your racism works.

In the US, it seems no one is without it. If you think you are, perhaps it's because you've kept it tucked away, and don't challenge it, so it's invisible to you. But you have no trouble seeing it in others.

For example, there's no missing Geraldine Ferraro's racism, I don't know if she sees it or not. But it's clearly untrue that her nomination for VP in 1984 is comparable to Obama's leadership in the Democratic nomination process in 2008. She was chosen because of her gender. But that does not imply that Obama is leading because of his race. There is no correlation.

I understand her point of view because it's familiar to me, people close to me see it the same way as Ferraro. I don't think they can or will or want to change, they will always believe that Obama had an advantage.

In the comments in response to yesterday's podcast, Herb, a black man tells a story of attending a conference as a speaker, and having other participants treat him as if he were a waiter. I honestly had no idea that that happens. I knew that stuff like that happened in New Orleans when I was a student there in the early 70s.

I think blacks are racist too, btw. I've experienced it this way. According to them, all my experiences are invalid. They tend to talk about white males the same way Republicans talk about liberals, as if we're silly, naive, trivial people. Can you imagine I don't like that any more than the speaker who was asked to fetch a Coke. We're always lectured, no matter how old we are, no matter how much life experience we have, no matter how curious, or intelligent we are, the same way, as if we need an education. Black people actually put it that way. No not all. But remember, not all white people asked for the Coke, either.

BTW, that also comes with age. As you get older a curious thing happens. In some contexts you're assumed to be smarter, but in most you're that trivial, naive and silly stereotype I described above. It happens more frequently as my beard gets more gray and my hairline recedes.

I listened to Face The Nation on my walk yesterday, and heard Bob Schieffer ask Deval Patrick if black people are going to be angry if Obama is denied the nomination by superdelegates even though he has a majority of the elected delegates, and a majority of the votes. Wait a minute, what about non-black people who support Obama? Doesn't our opinion matter? Apparently not. What just slipped out there? Schieffer seems like a good guy, high integrity.

Then this raises another question for me. Okay there's a lot of unprocessed anger over race in the US, and a lot of it will come out in the next few months, but what if Obama is elected? This is where my head starts spinning. I tried to raise the question in yesterday's podcast -- will blacks look at the world differently now that a black man is President? I think he said no. I can't believe that. Something will have to give. But haven't they thought about that at all? (I'm very sure something will shift because, being around Silicon Valley for so long, I've seen lots of people achieve wealth very quickly. This usually causes an eruption of huge emotion as the normal feeling of worthlessness is contradicted by the new worth in the person's bank account. People often get very depressed when this happens.)

Then the question comes up -- will there be retribution? I couldn't believe I was thinking about this, but the Jeremiah Wright speeches that came out last week put it front and center. There was a time that I remember when blacks talked about taking power in the US in ways designed at least in part to scare white people. Obama is the perfect black candidate for not raising the fears of whites, unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. I'm still supporting him, but now I have new questions, that I probably would eventually have had even if Wright's speeches hadn't become an issue.

Yeah, I'm a middle-aged white male, and my opinion matters not one bit. I've heard that so many times. But of course I don't buy it.

I want to believe what Obama says, because I know that what he says is what we have to do. I want to find people whose politics are as far from mine as possible and find the bond that connects us as Americans. I think if we all do that we can hold on to our beliefs, and not worry about convincing others that we have it worst (that's not going to happen) but rather look for ways we can give each other what we want. That's why I want to know what people want, not the kind of victory wartime presidents say they want. Sometimes you can define victory, but most times there is no victory. We just get to do more with our lives with less suffering, and after all that's pretty good.

PS: I'm not voting for Clinton, under any circumstances. I would be happy to vote for a woman for President, but send us someone better than Hillary, who doesn't deceive so much, who actually has the experience that she is claiming. And even if she doesn't agree with Ferraro, she tried to use it, and that's inexcusable.

Update: This piece is cross-posted at Huffington.

Links for 03/17/2008

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:10:06 GMT

Negative review of iPhone dev program.

Sunday Gang #3 -- Race in 2008

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:37:42 GMT

This has got to be the heaviest podcast I've ever done. It almost melted down, but it had a happy ending.

http://sundaygang.com/003.mp3

Our guest this week is Chris Rabb, a blogger from Philadelphia. It was a three-way conversation with Nicco Mele in the middle, the real fireworks are between Chris and myself.

The lesson from this election cycle imho, is that race, which has always been everywhere in US politics, is so close to the surface this time that we get a chance to hash out our differences, and if we want, find what we have in common. As always, when change happens, no pain no gain. But in the end, you hope it comes out the way this 50-minute podcast did, with an agreement to continue the conversation.

Interview with Marshall Kirkpatrick

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:02:09 GMT

I did a 20-minute interview this morning with ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick about FriendFeed and related tools.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/kirkpatrickInterview.mp3

You can receive these MP3s in your podcatcher by subscribing to the RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for this weblog.

Update: Bret Taylor, a founder of FriendFeed, checks in.

Must-read piece

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:50:34 GMT

Orlando Lima: "[Geraldine Ferraro] theorized that a self-made black guy with a Muslim name has a political advantage over a white woman who is the wife of a two-term President."

I was reading along until I came to this bit.

"When liberals need black votes they come into our communities and act like they're down."

Okay, that may be prejudice, not racism, but no matter what it isn't cool.

I am a liberal, and I feel disempowered too, and I feel that the pols come around and ask for my vote and money and that's the end of that. Even Obama has yet to prove he's any different.

We desperately need to look for things we have in common, and we all have barriers inside ourselves that we can't see. I'll listen when you say I have a barrier, but you have to do the same.

If you make being a liberal equivalent with being shallow and silly, you're buying into a Republican frame of reference, and you make it impossible for us to be powerful. And that's not something I'm going to support.

The lesson of Reverend Wright is that blacks have bad racial attitudes that balance those held by whites. Yes the whites started it, but that isn't going to help anyone (my ancestors were in Eastern Europe while that was hapening). There were reasons we were scared of blacks when I was growing up in NYC, they may not have had anything to do with reality, or maybe there was some reality to it. Remember there were riots then, and the cities were burning. MLK and Malcolm X were assassinated, but so were some white people. (To be fair, white people did most of the assassinating.)

Obama is definitely a leader in league with MLK, I watched him yesterday on TV carefully explaining what was happening, but not using words that would give the press guys any new issues to hang on him. What he's doing is hard, and great. Without Obama we wouldn't have had a reason to listen to Orlando Lima's story, above, and he probably wouldn't have had a reason to tell it.

If Obama wins, we'll be going through a lot more of it, but going through it is a lot better than living with it. At some point we're going to have to get the racism out in the open and deal with it, all of us, it's just one of many items on our national to-do list that we have been so totally neglecting.

MP3 of Sun-Times meeting with Obama

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 06:20:38 GMT

Obama had a "extensive 80-minute interview" with the Chicago Sun-Times (I think earlier today) to answer all their questions about his relationship with Tony Rezko. Following is an MP3 of the meeting, provided by the Sun-Times.

http://www.suntimes.com/images/cds/MP3/031408obama.mp3

You can receive these MP3s in your podcatcher by subscribing to the RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for this weblog.

PS: He did a similar interview with the Chicago Tribune.

Northeast-style racism

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:23:00 GMT

I grew up in the northeast, not far from where Geraldine Ferraro lives, and I recognize the racism of the northeast, where people nod knowingly that blacks who are competing with whites have been given some kind of advantage that makes it possible for an inferior person to compete with a superior one.

It's easy to trigger this kind of logic in a northeastern white supremicist, just say that a black guy wouldn't be there if he weren't black.

You can say "It's True," in a tone that says that disagreement is naive. "Of course," you are supposed to say.

I've seen Jews and Catholics do this, two types of people who have themselves been victimized by stereotypes.

But it's all lunacy, and definitely not true when you're talking about the leader for the Democratic Party nomination for President.

It's lunacy but it's lunacy that works. All around the northeast, esp in Pennsylvania, people are talking around the kitchen table, saying of course he wouldn't be there if he weren't black, and identifying with Hillary Clinton, a white person who's about to lose her job (one she was never elected to) to a black person, unfairly.

Someday America will grow out of this lunacy, and will stop judging people based on their race. That Obama is a very serious candidate for President says a lot about him, but it says even more about us, that the racism of Ferraro and the northeasterners who reason as she does, is falling into the background.

How Internet news should work

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:06:38 GMT

By the mid-90s I became accustomed to reading news on the web. So much so that I cancelled subscriptions to the NY Times and Wall Street Journal because most days I'd never take the papers out of the plastic bags they were delivered in.

Getting news on the web was so much more efficient. I'd read the TImes and local papers and News.com, Infoworld, MacWeek, and a bunch of other industry publications. This was before blogging, before RSS.

How I'd do it -- I'd go to a site, News.com for example, and scan for articles that interested me. I'd do this every hour or so, I'd rely on memory and link color to determine if an article was new or not. Being a software developer, every time I thought of better ways to do this, if only...

Then in 1999 something great happened, a bunch of tech industry publications, working with Netscape, started publishing titles, descriptions and links to stories in RSS. I immediately put together a web application that scanned these "feeds" periodically, and put the new stories at the top of the page, pushing down the older ones. Then, to do my hourly news trawl, I'd just have to start at the top of the page, and read down until I came to something I had seen before. I thought of this as "automated web surfing." It took the labor out of the hunting and pecking I had been doing before.

This is, imho, the way news should work on the Internet. I've had this argument many times with people at the NY Times and other big news organizations who feel that part of what they do is to prioritize and organize the news into a front page backed by sections. They feel the Internet versions of their news should work this way, as their print versions do.

But you see them break out of this model sometimes when news happens in the middle of the day. When William F Buckley died last week, there was an item at the top of the home page, in red letters, with the news of Buckley's death. What if two or three big events had happened that day? What would they do then?

We've already seen news organizations when the rush of news is too great, adopt the blogging style of news -- the New Orleans Times-Picayune didn't allow tradition to get in the way of reporting Katrina, they turned their news flow into a blog.

I think every newspaper on the web should at least offer the reader a choice of a reverse-chronological view of the news. I think they would find most readers would use this view, most editors would too.

I was inspired to write this today because Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has come to basically the same conclusion. I think we may finally be coming to the tipping point for news publishing on the web. I hope so.