The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated October 24:
Modern capitalism seems to be losing a lot of the advantages that it had over Soviet style Communism, and the Net and computers seem to be at the root of this decay.
It's as if the capitalists don't care anymore. They don't care if their product works or not, they don't care if they rip you off or not, they won't give you a refund, they sometimes won't even give you the product after you buy it, they have eliminated customer service, and, most insane of all, sometimes they even make it almost impossible to even buy their product.
They said the Net and computers were going to make our lives better, but I don't see how they have. If it has anything to do with the Net, it seems like it sucks. What has the Net done for workers? Nothing. It's allowed people in India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe to compete with Americans by outsourcing work. Great!
Some examples:
There's plenty of work out there writing junk copy for websites that only exist to somehow make money (not sure how). You're just writing filler. A lot of it is in porn. I got approached by someone the other day about writing this junk copy, but the pay was $10/hour, so I said forget it. That's junk for writing prose on the Net. I told him to walk.
Turned out I was competing with writers of "English" from Eastern Europe, India and the Philippines. They were mostly working for $5/hour or even less. So even writers now are getting screwed down in a race for the bottom. Who's next?
There's a lot more ways the Net has helped create World O' Crap. Look at how many ways a brick and mortar store is better than e-commerce. The main problem with e-commerce is that it sucks.
E-commerce merchants have a right to bitch about it, but they have created this Shitworld of e-commerce. In their mad insistence that the Net not be regulated, the world of e-commerce is full of more sleazeballs and slimers than you could count for the rest of your life.
It's so easy to rip people off over the Net. I have purchased several things off the Net, including website memberships, that were total ripoffs. Quite a few software programs sold over the Net are absolute crap.
There are more problems. In a good number of cases, you try to buy something off the Net and the e-commerce site fucks it up. It will only let you order 3 packages, not 10. After you order, it gives you a database failure page implying the transaction failed, then sends you a mail congratulating you on the sale.
I bought a spyware killer program that it turned out I did not even need from a ripoff website. They quickly took my $30, but then they tried to bill it to my address as my name - for instance, "Thank you for your purchase, Mr. 35889 West Jones Street." There was no way to go back and change my name from my street address to Robert Lindsay. No way would that happen in a brick and mortar.
Then I could not even download the program. I kept trying over and over for two days, and they kept sending me links that didn't work.
Can you imagine that happening in a brick and mortar? First they take your money, then they tell you to come back in an hour to pick up the product. You come back in an hour and it's not there. They give you a new address to pick it up at. You go there and it's not there. This goes on for two days, you running all over town to pick up your product, but it's never there.
One great thing about brick and mortars is I can always get a refund. And I can always speak to a human being. Try getting a refund off the Net via e-commerce. Almost impossible. The worst thing about e-commerce is that they have managed to get rid of human beings altogether.
A lot of times, online stores do let you order by phone, but when you dial the number, no one is ever there. When you can't deal with humans via phone, it's hard to get anything done. They do often end up emailing you back and forth, but that doesn't work very well.
I bought a software program from a large company that refused to install on my system. I'm so discouraged by this Shit E-Commerce World that I haven't even bothered to call the company up to complain. I just wasted the $30. At a brick and mortar, if something doesn't work or its a rip-off, you just take it back. I've never had a problem yet.
Customer service is just one more thing that has been destroyed by the Internet and computers.
A lot of website memberships are just ripoffs. Quite a few software programs just don't work. One more thing wrecked by computers and the Net - product quality.
Capitalists at least used to be able to say that customer service was pretty good under their system. Customer service was often bad under Soviet style Communism. You went into a restaurant in Russia, and the help was rude. If you complained, you got a shrugging shoulder. There was no way to fire anyone.
Now capitalism, along with all its other disadvantages, increasingly has customer service as shitty or nonexistent as it was under Communism.
One more thing you could always say about capitalism was that product quality was often good. If not, if you had the money, you could buy something worthwhile. There was cheap crap, but for a bit more money, you could get something decent.
Under Soviet style Communism, it is true that there were often crappy products. Now it seems that capitalism is even losing this advantage. Product quality is declining under capitalism to where we cannot anymore say that capitalism at least produces good products.
Another advantage of capitalism is that the products are always available. No lines, no shortages, plenty of stuff on the shelves. Shortages and lines have long been the bane of Soviet-style Communism. But under capitalism now, at least on the Internet, there are quite a few e-commerce sites whose stores are so broken it is almost impossible to buy their product. I never thought that I would see that under capitalism.
As we can see, in addition to all of the negatives that capitalism has in relation to socialism (read any socialist critique of capitalism to learn what those are), modern capitalism is even starting to lose some systemic advantages that it has often had recently.
And computers and the Net are at the core of a lot of this system decay in the quality of the modern capitalist system.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Showing posts with label World O' Crap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World O' Crap. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
More on Minority Tongues
Ploni Almoni, a really smart Jewish Israeli who is also a fairly sensible sort of White nationalist, asks about the Migration and Language Policy post:
And you will find many "common sense" folks advocating for getting rid of all the small languages and everyone just speaking English or whatever. The idea being that all these small tongues just hinder communication anyway and a lot are not even very useful in the modern world. My Mom says, "Why should we keep all these small languages alive just so linguists can study them?" That attitude is quite common.
Those who do care (and the nonlinguist types actually exist). It's probable that you may be correct. The death of a language often does signal something larger - the death of a culture and in that sense, the death of a people itself. It's one more step on the way to Multinational Idiocracy World.
And even in a nonlinguist sense, I find these little nations (especially ones that still live traditional lives) to be fascinating. I love the customs, the dress, the hats, the architecture, the trades, the clocks.
Here in the US, we don't seem to have any traditions in the sense of clothing, architecture, style, dialect, trades, or much of fucking anything. You can go all over the country and I swear all the buildings look alike.
Compare that to photos of Trieste, the Dolomites, Sciacca in Sicily, Lucca in Trento, the Dalmation coast, the Greek Islands.
These are places steeped in history, culture and architecture. There are old castles, clocks, buildings, cobblestone streets, and churches. The buildings are very close together and the stone streets wind here and there without much sense.
Everyone is out in the streets, or hanging out their windows, or standing in the doorways. The socializing is continuous. People are walking in and out of friends and neighbors places all day long. To me, this is real community.
They look at One World Multinational Idiocracy and spit in its face.
In the White US neighborhoods I've lived in, people jump in their cars alone and head to work alone, work all day, then drive home alone. Everyone goes into their homes and apartments and seems to hide in there. You would almost think the neighborhood is deserted.
I wonder if that is any kind of a community at all. A community of atomized individualists - this is what capitalism wants? It's great for business, great for capitalist culture. Sure, I guess so. Set every man against himself, a fight of all against all, and watch all social solidarity vanish in a flash.
An Esperantist notes, commenting on The Record of Communist Language Policy post:
I've never met anyone in my life who ever spoke Esperanto.
The language is nice, and there is now good evidence that learning Esperanto before learning a second language helps you learn the L2 sooner and better. Esperanto is one of those great ideas that never really worked out. It's a great social engineering project that ran up against various walls of human nature. Truth is that English is becoming the de facto Esperanto of the world anyway.
But there remain many good arguments for Esperanto or another constructed language.
A question, which you may have already addressed in other postings on the subject: Why should we care? That's not a cynical or smart-ass question. What's so important about a language?I'm not really sure why we should care. I'm a linguist, and linguists do care for obvious reasons. The opinion is split on whether people care or not. Within a large nation, even majorities often say the Hell with all small tongues and everyone should speak the national language.
Seems to me, we care about languages mostly as proxies for something really important: nations, in the original sense of the word (ethnoi).
But it's a truism of political science that language is a poor proxy for nationhood. The Irish are a nation even though their mother tongue is English. The Jews are a nation even though they've got dozens of mother tongues, and most Jews probably don't speak Hebrew. I do care a lot about the survival of the nation--my nation, that is, not all those funny other ones.
Why do people care about all those funny nations and languages not their own? My guess is, for the same reason they care about those funny species like the snail-darter or whatever. It's kind of sad when something that's existed for a long time goes out of existence, even something that was never worth paying any attention to when it was around.
This is very different from our attitude towards biological death. There's a sense of nostalgia, of loss. An aesthetic thing, which I can appreciate. But that's just my guess.
And you will find many "common sense" folks advocating for getting rid of all the small languages and everyone just speaking English or whatever. The idea being that all these small tongues just hinder communication anyway and a lot are not even very useful in the modern world. My Mom says, "Why should we keep all these small languages alive just so linguists can study them?" That attitude is quite common.
Those who do care (and the nonlinguist types actually exist). It's probable that you may be correct. The death of a language often does signal something larger - the death of a culture and in that sense, the death of a people itself. It's one more step on the way to Multinational Idiocracy World.
And even in a nonlinguist sense, I find these little nations (especially ones that still live traditional lives) to be fascinating. I love the customs, the dress, the hats, the architecture, the trades, the clocks.
Here in the US, we don't seem to have any traditions in the sense of clothing, architecture, style, dialect, trades, or much of fucking anything. You can go all over the country and I swear all the buildings look alike.
Compare that to photos of Trieste, the Dolomites, Sciacca in Sicily, Lucca in Trento, the Dalmation coast, the Greek Islands.
These are places steeped in history, culture and architecture. There are old castles, clocks, buildings, cobblestone streets, and churches. The buildings are very close together and the stone streets wind here and there without much sense.
Everyone is out in the streets, or hanging out their windows, or standing in the doorways. The socializing is continuous. People are walking in and out of friends and neighbors places all day long. To me, this is real community.
They look at One World Multinational Idiocracy and spit in its face.
In the White US neighborhoods I've lived in, people jump in their cars alone and head to work alone, work all day, then drive home alone. Everyone goes into their homes and apartments and seems to hide in there. You would almost think the neighborhood is deserted.
I wonder if that is any kind of a community at all. A community of atomized individualists - this is what capitalism wants? It's great for business, great for capitalist culture. Sure, I guess so. Set every man against himself, a fight of all against all, and watch all social solidarity vanish in a flash.
An Esperantist notes, commenting on The Record of Communist Language Policy post:
It seems to me that a partial solution to the survival of the smaller languages lies in that neglected international tongue Esperanto. At present the speaker of Welsh, Breton, Friulian and so on has to make use of a powerful neighboring language when accessing services outside his/her immediate community, for shopping, for contacts with the tax office and so on.Problem is that Esperanto has not really gone anywhere. It has 2 million speakers, and 10 million people have some knowledge of it, but I think the Esperanto fad was bigger a few decades ago. Anyway, it's already being eclipsed by Interlingua. There are 100,000 articles on Esperanto Wikipedia, and the Esperanto community on the web is a big deal.
These contacts serve to strengthen the more widely spoken language and weaken the minority one.
Imagine a situation in which everyone spoke an international auxiliary language - Esperanto- in addition to their local, regional or state language. They would then not be necessarily compelled to speak the language of their neighbours, and could use the auxiliary language for those wider contacts.
I've never met anyone in my life who ever spoke Esperanto.
The language is nice, and there is now good evidence that learning Esperanto before learning a second language helps you learn the L2 sooner and better. Esperanto is one of those great ideas that never really worked out. It's a great social engineering project that ran up against various walls of human nature. Truth is that English is becoming the de facto Esperanto of the world anyway.
But there remain many good arguments for Esperanto or another constructed language.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
E-Commerce is a World of Shit
I really feel that e-commerce has shot itself in the foot. I would much rather buy about any product at a brick and mortar store any day of the week. My experiences with e-commerce have typically been horrible.
I just got a spyware infection from a site that sells fake spyware apps to consumers. Why are these sites even legal?
First they try to load trojans (in this case, one called Zlob) on your site, then they install malware on your computer without even asking for it, then it runs and "finds" all this fake spyware on your system that doesn't even exist, then tries to make you buy the program to fix the nonexistent spyware problems.
Then they make it impossible to remove it from your system, and I'm a computer expert. Now I have a popup all the time in my tray and no way to get rid of it.
The program was uninstalled via Add Remove Programs and I deleted some Registry entries and went through and found more crap afterwards, and deleted it from Registry and Programs. Despite all my deleting, I still have rogue processes going that I can't even find or kill or anything.
It also outrageously installs a fake program giving you a fake Windows Kernel Fault screen that requires a computer reboot. Someone tell why this shit is not illegal?
The program is called AntiSpyCheck and you get it from AntiSpyCheck.com. I did not download this program on purpose. Instead, I clicked on a video codec and it installed installed itself without even asking. AntiSpyCheck is a rogue antispy program. These programs run on your computer and tell you that you have all sorts of spyware infections that you do not even have.
Then they try to get you to buy the rogue antispyware program. If you do buy it, then you just wasted money on a fake program. In addition, many of these sites are phishing sites that are designed to steal your credit card information. As if that were not bad enough, the fake antispyware itself is often a criminal program that installs a Trojan and tries to steal any valuable data on your computer.
All of these Zlob programs seem to be originating from Russian Organized Crime, in this case, often in the Ukraine. Even if you don't buy the evil program, they often have an annoying popup that never ends until you buy the program. One is tempted to purchase the evil program just to make the popup go away. In no case should you purchase such a program!
Overview.
Then I shelled out for some complete garbage spyware software called Spy Hunter. Spy Hunter charges your credit card after six months to renew your subscription, but it sends you an email warning you first and lets you opt out. Why is that even legal? There was no choice about whether or not to allow them to slam your credit card every 6 months.
Update: I fixed the AntiSpyCheck infection via this site. You run MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware program and it gets rid of it perfectly. The trial run is free, but if you want realtime protection, you need to shell out. The product is excellent and I may just buy it.
Typically, these Internet shit e-commerce joints have no humans at the other end. There's a tech support email, but who knows if they answer it. The general rule in e-commerce is no customer service whatsoever. There's typically no phone # to call and no human to talk to. Often you can resolve things with emails, but not always. It's still a pain in the butt.
The fuck customer service thing is the latest wonderful trend in US capitalism. It's all about cutting costs. It's even spreading to credit cards.
Credit cards used to have decent customer service, but my last card was with "Juniper" which it turns out is actually owned by the British Barclays Bank.
There's no brick and mortar joint to pay your card,as the bank is in the UK! They deviously (Why is this legal?) allowed me to run my card over the limit and then started pounding me with monthly overlimit fees. I could not afford to pay down the over-limit draft.
Banks will now outrageously allow you to overdraw on your account at the ATM with very few warnings. Instead of a loan, which it is, you are immediately hammered with an overlimit fee as you overdraft. Why is this shit even legal? Then you have to put it all back in before the beginning of the month or they will close your account! Now you will have a big black mark on your credit rating.
Now, just tonight I tried to buy SpyHunter. Of course there's no humans on the other end, and they don't even have a physical presence. First of all, it did not let me look over the purchase before I bought it, so my autofill program filled in my name and last name with my address and I was not able to change that.
The thing would not even let me download the program. It kept asking me for a username and password. It gave me two different ones in the email and I tried both of them. Both failed over and over.
Earlier, I purchased a product called Stuffit for $30 so I could unzip files. I had a previous version on there, so this new one never would install because it said I had to remove the old one first. Although I uninstalled through the traditional way, it still claimed the old program was still there! I searched the whole computer for anything related to the old program and never could get all of it off. So my $30 program never got installed.
I could call the company, but customer service with even huge software companies is so horrible I have not even bothered.
I have a cam with a software program that requires a code to make it work. The code has been lost, so I can't install my cam software. I guess I could call Intel, but I bet their support is garbage too. Another problem is that a lot of these programs get abandoned (abandonware), so they might not even be able to give you a code even if they wanted to.
There is a product I like to purchase called Tamer. It kills the acid in coffee. None of the phone numbers ever work. You buy the product online and the first thing it tells you is that there has been a database error. So you assume that the sale did not go through. But that really means you bought it!
I've had them mail the product to me a few times, and every time, it seems like something screws up. It gets shipped back to them, but they don't notify me that the product came back. They only tell me that when I email them and bitch (No way to talk to the company on the phone, remember?).
Software is probably the only product in the world like this. It's the only product that refuses to work with competing products. It's the only product that installs itself and makes it so you can't get rid of it. It's the only product whereby you could have a perfect working copy of it sitting around but you can't make it work because you can't punch in some "make it work code".
It's the only product that tries to force you to buy their product. With most everything else, you still have a choice. You can buy product A, B, C or D. Name one other product you are more or less forced to buy like Windows or Word. Name one other product where the old product doesn't work anymore and you have to keep on shelling out for new versions all the time.
Software has been all about fuck the consumer from day one, unless you are a big corporate customer, in which case I guess you get some service. As a natural monopoly like water, power, phone or cable, software probably needs to be regulated by the state like any other natural monopoly.
It is the disgust and rage of computer users with the world of shit that software and its evil twin, e-commerce, have wrought, that has brought about open source and free products like Firefox, Open Office, Linux, etc. With these products, the model has no reason to fuck the consumer at all, so it just doesn't happen.
It's sad that America idolizes a punk like Bill Gates. He's been fucking over consumers from his first day on the job. He's violated every contract he's ever signed, and he's stolen just about every bit of competing code he could find. He's a liar, a thief, a traitor and a snake. In the real world, when people act like that, they are called sociopaths. They get their asses kicked, they get killed or they go to jail or prison, or all of the above.
In Corporate World, you act the same way that gets your ass kicked or gets you tossed in prison in the real world and you turn into the Businessman Hero of the World.
The point is that this shit Internet industry is to blame for all of this. They are the ones that have been screaming loud and clear from day one about "no regulation of the Internet" and "no taxing of the Internet".
So the Internet is the Wild West with no sheriffs or posses that do anything. There's rustlers, crooks and robbers everywhere, and you go the sheriff or the posse and they shrug their shoulders and say so what. They wanted an unregulated Internet and that's what they got. Internet e-commerce - the most consumer-hostile industry around.
I like the brick and mortar world. In general, the workers help you and show you where things are. There's usually someone to talk to. If something doesn't work, you can always bring it back. The clerks and aisle help go out of their way to be as nice and friendly as possible.
It's the mirror opposite of E-Commerce World.
There's actually a lot more to this story about the Internet being a haven for every criminal, thief, liar, scammer, and fraudulent dog on Earth, but I'll save it for another post.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
I just got a spyware infection from a site that sells fake spyware apps to consumers. Why are these sites even legal?
First they try to load trojans (in this case, one called Zlob) on your site, then they install malware on your computer without even asking for it, then it runs and "finds" all this fake spyware on your system that doesn't even exist, then tries to make you buy the program to fix the nonexistent spyware problems.
Then they make it impossible to remove it from your system, and I'm a computer expert. Now I have a popup all the time in my tray and no way to get rid of it.
The program was uninstalled via Add Remove Programs and I deleted some Registry entries and went through and found more crap afterwards, and deleted it from Registry and Programs. Despite all my deleting, I still have rogue processes going that I can't even find or kill or anything.
It also outrageously installs a fake program giving you a fake Windows Kernel Fault screen that requires a computer reboot. Someone tell why this shit is not illegal?
The program is called AntiSpyCheck and you get it from AntiSpyCheck.com. I did not download this program on purpose. Instead, I clicked on a video codec and it installed installed itself without even asking. AntiSpyCheck is a rogue antispy program. These programs run on your computer and tell you that you have all sorts of spyware infections that you do not even have.
Then they try to get you to buy the rogue antispyware program. If you do buy it, then you just wasted money on a fake program. In addition, many of these sites are phishing sites that are designed to steal your credit card information. As if that were not bad enough, the fake antispyware itself is often a criminal program that installs a Trojan and tries to steal any valuable data on your computer.
All of these Zlob programs seem to be originating from Russian Organized Crime, in this case, often in the Ukraine. Even if you don't buy the evil program, they often have an annoying popup that never ends until you buy the program. One is tempted to purchase the evil program just to make the popup go away. In no case should you purchase such a program!
Overview.
Then I shelled out for some complete garbage spyware software called Spy Hunter. Spy Hunter charges your credit card after six months to renew your subscription, but it sends you an email warning you first and lets you opt out. Why is that even legal? There was no choice about whether or not to allow them to slam your credit card every 6 months.
Update: I fixed the AntiSpyCheck infection via this site. You run MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware program and it gets rid of it perfectly. The trial run is free, but if you want realtime protection, you need to shell out. The product is excellent and I may just buy it.
Typically, these Internet shit e-commerce joints have no humans at the other end. There's a tech support email, but who knows if they answer it. The general rule in e-commerce is no customer service whatsoever. There's typically no phone # to call and no human to talk to. Often you can resolve things with emails, but not always. It's still a pain in the butt.
The fuck customer service thing is the latest wonderful trend in US capitalism. It's all about cutting costs. It's even spreading to credit cards.
Credit cards used to have decent customer service, but my last card was with "Juniper" which it turns out is actually owned by the British Barclays Bank.
There's no brick and mortar joint to pay your card,as the bank is in the UK! They deviously (Why is this legal?) allowed me to run my card over the limit and then started pounding me with monthly overlimit fees. I could not afford to pay down the over-limit draft.
Banks will now outrageously allow you to overdraw on your account at the ATM with very few warnings. Instead of a loan, which it is, you are immediately hammered with an overlimit fee as you overdraft. Why is this shit even legal? Then you have to put it all back in before the beginning of the month or they will close your account! Now you will have a big black mark on your credit rating.
Now, just tonight I tried to buy SpyHunter. Of course there's no humans on the other end, and they don't even have a physical presence. First of all, it did not let me look over the purchase before I bought it, so my autofill program filled in my name and last name with my address and I was not able to change that.
The thing would not even let me download the program. It kept asking me for a username and password. It gave me two different ones in the email and I tried both of them. Both failed over and over.
Earlier, I purchased a product called Stuffit for $30 so I could unzip files. I had a previous version on there, so this new one never would install because it said I had to remove the old one first. Although I uninstalled through the traditional way, it still claimed the old program was still there! I searched the whole computer for anything related to the old program and never could get all of it off. So my $30 program never got installed.
I could call the company, but customer service with even huge software companies is so horrible I have not even bothered.
I have a cam with a software program that requires a code to make it work. The code has been lost, so I can't install my cam software. I guess I could call Intel, but I bet their support is garbage too. Another problem is that a lot of these programs get abandoned (abandonware), so they might not even be able to give you a code even if they wanted to.
There is a product I like to purchase called Tamer. It kills the acid in coffee. None of the phone numbers ever work. You buy the product online and the first thing it tells you is that there has been a database error. So you assume that the sale did not go through. But that really means you bought it!
I've had them mail the product to me a few times, and every time, it seems like something screws up. It gets shipped back to them, but they don't notify me that the product came back. They only tell me that when I email them and bitch (No way to talk to the company on the phone, remember?).
Software is probably the only product in the world like this. It's the only product that refuses to work with competing products. It's the only product that installs itself and makes it so you can't get rid of it. It's the only product whereby you could have a perfect working copy of it sitting around but you can't make it work because you can't punch in some "make it work code".
It's the only product that tries to force you to buy their product. With most everything else, you still have a choice. You can buy product A, B, C or D. Name one other product you are more or less forced to buy like Windows or Word. Name one other product where the old product doesn't work anymore and you have to keep on shelling out for new versions all the time.
Software has been all about fuck the consumer from day one, unless you are a big corporate customer, in which case I guess you get some service. As a natural monopoly like water, power, phone or cable, software probably needs to be regulated by the state like any other natural monopoly.
It is the disgust and rage of computer users with the world of shit that software and its evil twin, e-commerce, have wrought, that has brought about open source and free products like Firefox, Open Office, Linux, etc. With these products, the model has no reason to fuck the consumer at all, so it just doesn't happen.
It's sad that America idolizes a punk like Bill Gates. He's been fucking over consumers from his first day on the job. He's violated every contract he's ever signed, and he's stolen just about every bit of competing code he could find. He's a liar, a thief, a traitor and a snake. In the real world, when people act like that, they are called sociopaths. They get their asses kicked, they get killed or they go to jail or prison, or all of the above.
In Corporate World, you act the same way that gets your ass kicked or gets you tossed in prison in the real world and you turn into the Businessman Hero of the World.
The point is that this shit Internet industry is to blame for all of this. They are the ones that have been screaming loud and clear from day one about "no regulation of the Internet" and "no taxing of the Internet".
So the Internet is the Wild West with no sheriffs or posses that do anything. There's rustlers, crooks and robbers everywhere, and you go the sheriff or the posse and they shrug their shoulders and say so what. They wanted an unregulated Internet and that's what they got. Internet e-commerce - the most consumer-hostile industry around.
I like the brick and mortar world. In general, the workers help you and show you where things are. There's usually someone to talk to. If something doesn't work, you can always bring it back. The clerks and aisle help go out of their way to be as nice and friendly as possible.
It's the mirror opposite of E-Commerce World.
There's actually a lot more to this story about the Internet being a haven for every criminal, thief, liar, scammer, and fraudulent dog on Earth, but I'll save it for another post.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
World O' Crap, Meet World O' Lies
Super-commenter James Schipper responds to the Problems of Democracy Under Capitalism post with this insightful comment. My comments follow:
Here the Republican Party is playing into the anti-intellectual nature of US populism. We have never been a European-style cafe society, and probably never will be.
Also Republicans are taking an increasingly popular critique of their own sure elitism into a critique of fake elitists called "limousine liberals". Problem with limousine liberals being, I guess, that they are hypocrites. Similar diatribes have been launched against something similar called the "Hollywood Left".
This point is superbly made by Philip Agre in a seminal 2004 essay, What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? As Agre succinctly and immaculately:
Starbucks comes into a town, sells at a loss to drive all competition out of town and then jacks up prices. Walmart comes into town, sells at a loss to drive everyone out of business, and then keeps on selling at low cost. However, Walmart mostly sells crap. Here Walmart is violating the monopoly principle of driving up prices while adhering to the monopoly principle of selling crap.
We are now having higher-end stores opening up that charge a lot more than Walmart but at least do not sell crap. As long as there is competition in a market, prices and quality are typically relatively good.
However, the government now operates in the interest of monopoly capital, and, insanely, "free market" economics is opposed to all antitrust regulation. Traditionally, there was bipartisan support for antitrust legislation.
The new bipartisan opposition to antitrust legislation is one of the legacies of Milton Friedman's "Chicago School of Lies" free market fundamentalism snake oil that has created a Gramscian cultural hegemony in US economic thought in the past 35 years.
The Friedmanites published all sorts of nonsense, lies and BS. They went down to Chile, used it as a testing ground for their insane theories, blew up the economy, and then covered their tracks and lie about it to this very day.
They published papers and books on antitrust that overturned nearly 3/4 of a century of perfectly valid economic and legal scholarship that showed unequivocally that prices rise and the quality of services and goods nosedives as markets become more consolidated. These works made up a bunch of fancy-sounding crap that made a dishonest case that all of this proven science was not true.
Monopolies do not produce high prices and crap service and goods. Everything we know is wrong. Instead, reality is inverted and monopolies cause low prices, great products and superb services.
What we are seeing in the US is the move to more and more consolidated markets and more and more monopoly-type markets. The moves by Yahoo and Google and Microsoft on the Internet foretell an Internet that is increasingly monopolistic.
The one good thing about capitalism is competition.
Capitalists love to talk about how much they love competition, but the truth is that they hate it. Competition only benefits the consumer. All businessmen secretly want to be monopolists. All of those businesses dishonestly taking Microsoft to court for being a monopoly actually want to be monopolies themselves.
There are natural monopolies. In the US, those include phone, cable, power, water and some others. Those natural monopolies must be regulated by the state, other wise they will turn into natural unregulated monopolies, which are disastrous for consumers and society.
It's highly dubious that corporations compete for the best workers anymore in the US, except at the highest levels. Corporations and business are perfectly happy to replace good workers with illegal aliens and H-1B and H-2B guest workers from other lands.
Both types of workers are usually much inferior to native US workers, but business no longer cares about quality in the US. Computer companies and homebuilders are perfectly happy to produce crap code and homes that fall apart in a few years. No one really cares about quality anymore in the US, and no one cares about workers either.
The whole culture is centered around getting rich, and that usually means being an employer and hiring labor. To be a worker is to be a schmuck, soon to be taken out by illegal aliens, machinery, a computer program or guest workers from India or Ecuador.
Fordism is progressive type of capitalism named after Henry Ford.
Ford found out his own workers could not even afford to buy his cars, and he was outraged. He resolved to pay his workers enough to buy his cars. This became a progressive strain in capitalism - to pay workers enough so that they would be well-heeled consumers able to buy plenty of products, while at the same time preserving high profits for business. Fordism is done and gone; it's history.
Everything is now globalized, and no one worries about whether or not people can afford to buy your stuff. If labor in one place costs too much, just outsource, move the plant overseas, hire illegals or bring guest worker scabs from India. If workers in one land can't afford your stuff, ship it to some rich people overseas. As long as enough people somewhere can afford your stuff, there's no need to pay workers enough to buy your stuff.
Furthermore, James misinterprets the degree to which Rush Limbaugh is a reactionary. I believe he does extol high corporate salaries. You now have the phenomenon of the low income, working class or middle class, White, usually younger, male, who will defend plutocracy and the politics of the rich to the hilt, despite the fact that it is against his interest.
In this way, the plutocrats have actually been honest about their project and have created a Gramscian cultural hegemony of "plutocracy is good" whereby tens of millions of suckers swallow this crap whole and spout it right back at you without thinking. They did this by saturating the media with pro-plutocrat messages and making it seem reasonable.
They also did it by creating a Lottery mindset, which was unfortunately always a part of US culture (see the Horatio Alger books). Your average White male working stiff will tell you that he too is going to become rich one day. Anywhere from 25-50% of Americans say that they will be millionaires one day. Fully 25% of Americans already describe themselves as "rich". Almost all of these people are White.
The problem with James' media model - that media outlets must compete for readers - is that there is no competition.
There is no Left alternative to Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report. On TV, there is the ultraright Fox News and MSNBC and the rightwing CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. All of these are corporate-owned and spout one pro-corporate line.
It is true that CNN now has Lou Dobbs, who spouts a sort-of progressive populist line. It really is against CNN's interests to keep Dobbs on there, but I guess he is there because enough folks want to hear the message.
What you get instead is a pro-corporate message increasingly draped in fake populist clothing. On Fox News today, they went on and on with a fake populist message about lowering gas prices. Incredibly, they denounced speculation in oil prices, but of course, they did not offer the reasonable thing to do to remedy this - regulation of commodity markets.
Instead, they argued for massively increasing domestic oil production - in the ANWR, in the oil shale of the US Rockies and in offshore deposits. They said that the increased production would so glut the oil market (!) with new supply that this would force the commodity market to drive oil prices downwards, and this would "beat the speculators".
What is interesting is that Fox News was forced to admit that the problem in oil prices is almost entirely due to speculation. What they left out is that increased oil supply probably would not do anything to drive down prices, because the price is not being set by supply-demand anyway. So here you see the fake populism of the Republican Party - sell a fake populist but actually wildly pro-corporate message - "Open up the oil fields!"
Even if this project passed and we able to drill in all these new deposits, it would not put a dent in oil prices. But the US public is so stupid that they would have forgotten about that long ago. If a bunch of Republicans got into office on this fake promise, this is all that matters.
The US public is like a kid with ADD - no attention span. Politicians are never held accountable to promises or projects because no one ever follows promises through for years to see if they come through or not. Politicians get elected on a pile of bull, and then no one is ever there to call them on it later on.
Bush has substantially caused these oil prices by failing to regulate commodity markets (and they will never regulate those markets), but the Repubs are going to stick Obama with it. Bush caused the Iraq mess, but Obama will be stuck with that too. And both of those things are catch-22's with few non-painful ways out.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
James Schipper: There are two serious restraint on capitalism: competition and the need to make a profit.Robert Lindsay: James makes some excellent points above, especially about how "pointy-headed intellectuals who can't even park their bicycles straight", as George Wallace famously put it, into a sort of populist enemy by the Republican Party, and also about how conservatism is always, by its very nature and necessarily, dishonest.
Competition between capitalists insures that the power of capital over consumers and labor is limited. Capitalists have a common interests in the preservation of the capitalist system, but at the same time, capitalists compete against other for the favors of the consumer and to get the best employees.
Always remember that what makes capitalism work is not so much private property but competition. Private property without competition combines the worst of socialism and capitalism.
The need to make a profit sets a limit on what the corporate media can do. Newspapers have to find readers and radio and TV stations have to find listeners and viewers. This implies that they can't be too overtly propagandistic, otherwise the readers, listeners and viewers will stay away.
Commentators like Rush Limbaugh have a large following but only because they primarily discuss non-economic issues. If they spent most of their time defending business, their popularity would quickly plummet. Imagine the reaction of Limbaugh's fan's if he started to extol CEO's who make stratospheric incomes while their companies lay off workers. It is far safer to extol the uniformed heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Plutocracy is a cause that can't be truthful about its aims. That's why the Republicans want ordinary working Americans to worry about college professors who have an elitist lifestyle rather than about executives and capitalists who have an elitist income.
It is ridiculous to suppose that latte-drinking, opera-watching, Volvo-driving eggheads who read foreign novels and watch foreign films are somehow a danger to working stiffs. A party that represents the rich has to be deceitful or else condemn itself to insignificance. The Republicans are such a party.
Here the Republican Party is playing into the anti-intellectual nature of US populism. We have never been a European-style cafe society, and probably never will be.
Also Republicans are taking an increasingly popular critique of their own sure elitism into a critique of fake elitists called "limousine liberals". Problem with limousine liberals being, I guess, that they are hypocrites. Similar diatribes have been launched against something similar called the "Hollywood Left".
This point is superbly made by Philip Agre in a seminal 2004 essay, What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? As Agre succinctly and immaculately:
Q: What is conservatism?Increasingly here we have what are more or less monopolies, James. We have cable and telephone monopolies that were supposed to be regulated, but the government has basically given up regulating them. We have computer monopolies in the form of Intel on chips and Microsoft in apps and OS's.
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
Starbucks comes into a town, sells at a loss to drive all competition out of town and then jacks up prices. Walmart comes into town, sells at a loss to drive everyone out of business, and then keeps on selling at low cost. However, Walmart mostly sells crap. Here Walmart is violating the monopoly principle of driving up prices while adhering to the monopoly principle of selling crap.
We are now having higher-end stores opening up that charge a lot more than Walmart but at least do not sell crap. As long as there is competition in a market, prices and quality are typically relatively good.
However, the government now operates in the interest of monopoly capital, and, insanely, "free market" economics is opposed to all antitrust regulation. Traditionally, there was bipartisan support for antitrust legislation.
The new bipartisan opposition to antitrust legislation is one of the legacies of Milton Friedman's "Chicago School of Lies" free market fundamentalism snake oil that has created a Gramscian cultural hegemony in US economic thought in the past 35 years.
The Friedmanites published all sorts of nonsense, lies and BS. They went down to Chile, used it as a testing ground for their insane theories, blew up the economy, and then covered their tracks and lie about it to this very day.
They published papers and books on antitrust that overturned nearly 3/4 of a century of perfectly valid economic and legal scholarship that showed unequivocally that prices rise and the quality of services and goods nosedives as markets become more consolidated. These works made up a bunch of fancy-sounding crap that made a dishonest case that all of this proven science was not true.
Monopolies do not produce high prices and crap service and goods. Everything we know is wrong. Instead, reality is inverted and monopolies cause low prices, great products and superb services.
What we are seeing in the US is the move to more and more consolidated markets and more and more monopoly-type markets. The moves by Yahoo and Google and Microsoft on the Internet foretell an Internet that is increasingly monopolistic.
The one good thing about capitalism is competition.
Capitalists love to talk about how much they love competition, but the truth is that they hate it. Competition only benefits the consumer. All businessmen secretly want to be monopolists. All of those businesses dishonestly taking Microsoft to court for being a monopoly actually want to be monopolies themselves.
There are natural monopolies. In the US, those include phone, cable, power, water and some others. Those natural monopolies must be regulated by the state, other wise they will turn into natural unregulated monopolies, which are disastrous for consumers and society.
It's highly dubious that corporations compete for the best workers anymore in the US, except at the highest levels. Corporations and business are perfectly happy to replace good workers with illegal aliens and H-1B and H-2B guest workers from other lands.
Both types of workers are usually much inferior to native US workers, but business no longer cares about quality in the US. Computer companies and homebuilders are perfectly happy to produce crap code and homes that fall apart in a few years. No one really cares about quality anymore in the US, and no one cares about workers either.
The whole culture is centered around getting rich, and that usually means being an employer and hiring labor. To be a worker is to be a schmuck, soon to be taken out by illegal aliens, machinery, a computer program or guest workers from India or Ecuador.
Fordism is progressive type of capitalism named after Henry Ford.
Ford found out his own workers could not even afford to buy his cars, and he was outraged. He resolved to pay his workers enough to buy his cars. This became a progressive strain in capitalism - to pay workers enough so that they would be well-heeled consumers able to buy plenty of products, while at the same time preserving high profits for business. Fordism is done and gone; it's history.
Everything is now globalized, and no one worries about whether or not people can afford to buy your stuff. If labor in one place costs too much, just outsource, move the plant overseas, hire illegals or bring guest worker scabs from India. If workers in one land can't afford your stuff, ship it to some rich people overseas. As long as enough people somewhere can afford your stuff, there's no need to pay workers enough to buy your stuff.
Furthermore, James misinterprets the degree to which Rush Limbaugh is a reactionary. I believe he does extol high corporate salaries. You now have the phenomenon of the low income, working class or middle class, White, usually younger, male, who will defend plutocracy and the politics of the rich to the hilt, despite the fact that it is against his interest.
In this way, the plutocrats have actually been honest about their project and have created a Gramscian cultural hegemony of "plutocracy is good" whereby tens of millions of suckers swallow this crap whole and spout it right back at you without thinking. They did this by saturating the media with pro-plutocrat messages and making it seem reasonable.
They also did it by creating a Lottery mindset, which was unfortunately always a part of US culture (see the Horatio Alger books). Your average White male working stiff will tell you that he too is going to become rich one day. Anywhere from 25-50% of Americans say that they will be millionaires one day. Fully 25% of Americans already describe themselves as "rich". Almost all of these people are White.
The problem with James' media model - that media outlets must compete for readers - is that there is no competition.
There is no Left alternative to Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report. On TV, there is the ultraright Fox News and MSNBC and the rightwing CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. All of these are corporate-owned and spout one pro-corporate line.
It is true that CNN now has Lou Dobbs, who spouts a sort-of progressive populist line. It really is against CNN's interests to keep Dobbs on there, but I guess he is there because enough folks want to hear the message.
What you get instead is a pro-corporate message increasingly draped in fake populist clothing. On Fox News today, they went on and on with a fake populist message about lowering gas prices. Incredibly, they denounced speculation in oil prices, but of course, they did not offer the reasonable thing to do to remedy this - regulation of commodity markets.
Instead, they argued for massively increasing domestic oil production - in the ANWR, in the oil shale of the US Rockies and in offshore deposits. They said that the increased production would so glut the oil market (!) with new supply that this would force the commodity market to drive oil prices downwards, and this would "beat the speculators".
What is interesting is that Fox News was forced to admit that the problem in oil prices is almost entirely due to speculation. What they left out is that increased oil supply probably would not do anything to drive down prices, because the price is not being set by supply-demand anyway. So here you see the fake populism of the Republican Party - sell a fake populist but actually wildly pro-corporate message - "Open up the oil fields!"
Even if this project passed and we able to drill in all these new deposits, it would not put a dent in oil prices. But the US public is so stupid that they would have forgotten about that long ago. If a bunch of Republicans got into office on this fake promise, this is all that matters.
The US public is like a kid with ADD - no attention span. Politicians are never held accountable to promises or projects because no one ever follows promises through for years to see if they come through or not. Politicians get elected on a pile of bull, and then no one is ever there to call them on it later on.
Bush has substantially caused these oil prices by failing to regulate commodity markets (and they will never regulate those markets), but the Repubs are going to stick Obama with it. Bush caused the Iraq mess, but Obama will be stuck with that too. And both of those things are catch-22's with few non-painful ways out.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Permission to Quote
We journalists are supposed to operate under something called ethics. They actually have courses on this stuff. It was with great dismay that I heard that a British paper had quoted a Clinton staffer as making some unflattering remarks about someone or other a while back. I forget the details, but it was pretty inflammatory and the woman got fired.
The staffer protested that she had not given permission to publish those remarks. The wicked reporter countered that she had never said not to publish them either.
Actually she had made the remarks, and then afterward said, hey, wait a minute, don't quote me on this, that and whatnot. Quote me on all the rest. But etc etc etc is off the record. The scumbag journalist said, "Too bad, you needed to say off the record before you made the remarks, not afterward."
As a journalist, I get emails from folks in the news. I do phone interviews with folks in the news. If I had my act together a bit more, I'd be doing face to face interviews with newsworthy folks.
It's a principle of journalism that the interviewee has total control over their quotes. You go over the quotes, even show them a copy, and ask if it's ok. Often they will try to rephrase this or that, or ask you to rewrite something, but that's their prerogative. If you don't own your own words or thoughts, what do you own?
An interviewee need not state prior that some quote is off the record. They can say it at any time, even after publication. I've had folks ask me to remove quotes after publication and I have actually done so. This is really a moral matter, and it's important to live morally. It's simply immoral to quote someone when they don't want to be quoted. Real simple.
There may be some exceptions. If someone confesses to a crime or says something really inflammatory or admits that they did something that they really did in life, there's not much harm in a confession. Depends on the newsworthiness of it.
If I heard John McCain say he didn't vote for Bush at a party in 2000 and then he called me up afterward and asked me to retract, I probably would not. It was a party, not an interview and he's quite a public figure. Whether he voted for Bush or not is a factual matter of his life, not some private thoughts of his that belong to his mind alone.
As you can see, things get tricky.
What I thought was horrible about the Clinton staffer incident above was that apparently the entire US media gleefully said that the journoslime had done the right thing. Saying afterward, "Hey, don't quote me on that," is too little too late, crowed the cavorting media goblins.
Man, that's not the journalistic ethics I learned in school.
This shows why the media has popularity lower than the government or corporations. We don't deserve any better. It's amazing that 15% of the population doesn't want to throttle us on sight.
The reasons? The increasingly competitive and corporate-driven nature of the media. The media has become more and more corporate and consolidated lately and family-owned firms have gone public starting in the 1970's with increasing regularity. A family owned newspaper or book publishing business used to be satisfied with 4% margin. It had been 4% for decades and that was plenty to get them good and rich.
As firms went public, they became vehicles of shareholders and more importantly Wall Street investment houses. Wall Street in the past 25 years or so has started demanding higher and higher profits from publishing firms. 4% is for pikers. We want 15%. Not only that, but we demand 15% growth in profits every single year. For how long? For eternity.
This puts a lot of pressure on firms. The result has been a shedding of many to most decent titles at book publishing firms in favor of shlock, murder mysteries, romances, crappy ghosted bios, and other forms of book junk food. Editors have been fired in huge waves. Result? Books are more and more often poorly written and there are many more errors and typos than their used to be.
It's the Wallmartization of books. Books, the last refuge of the intellectual, have been infected by the crapification of our corporatized modern world.
Newspapers are no exception. They're getting crappier and crappier too. In most towns, there's only one paper left, so why compete? A pile of fish wrapper called USA Today is now the model of the daily broadsheet. It's modeled on terminal 15 year old's with the attention span of a shrew on the forest floor.
In such a nasty, money-based world, getting the scoop is what it's all about. There still is some competition left somehow in the biz, and you have to beat the other journoslime rags to the punch. Hence, "journalism ethics" becomes an oxymoron and reporters rank barely above serial killers in popularity.
On a related note, I am a member of a list that deals with Evolutionary Psychology. A particularly unhinged and ultra-reactionary member of the list (a very model for the increasingly fanatical and insane modern conservative movement) recently posted the contents of private emails between him and me to the list.
I wrote those mails to him with the unstated understanding that it was just between him and me. To publish or publicly publicize the contents of private mails is a violation of Netiquette, a violation of privacy and an immoral act. His viciousness exemplifies the viciousness of a conservative movement run amok with rightwing muggers and hitmen, incivility as a motif, and an underlying template of narcissism and sociopathy.
This post by the great blog Orcinus, The Political and the Personal, sums it up well.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
The staffer protested that she had not given permission to publish those remarks. The wicked reporter countered that she had never said not to publish them either.
Actually she had made the remarks, and then afterward said, hey, wait a minute, don't quote me on this, that and whatnot. Quote me on all the rest. But etc etc etc is off the record. The scumbag journalist said, "Too bad, you needed to say off the record before you made the remarks, not afterward."
As a journalist, I get emails from folks in the news. I do phone interviews with folks in the news. If I had my act together a bit more, I'd be doing face to face interviews with newsworthy folks.
It's a principle of journalism that the interviewee has total control over their quotes. You go over the quotes, even show them a copy, and ask if it's ok. Often they will try to rephrase this or that, or ask you to rewrite something, but that's their prerogative. If you don't own your own words or thoughts, what do you own?
An interviewee need not state prior that some quote is off the record. They can say it at any time, even after publication. I've had folks ask me to remove quotes after publication and I have actually done so. This is really a moral matter, and it's important to live morally. It's simply immoral to quote someone when they don't want to be quoted. Real simple.
There may be some exceptions. If someone confesses to a crime or says something really inflammatory or admits that they did something that they really did in life, there's not much harm in a confession. Depends on the newsworthiness of it.
If I heard John McCain say he didn't vote for Bush at a party in 2000 and then he called me up afterward and asked me to retract, I probably would not. It was a party, not an interview and he's quite a public figure. Whether he voted for Bush or not is a factual matter of his life, not some private thoughts of his that belong to his mind alone.
As you can see, things get tricky.
What I thought was horrible about the Clinton staffer incident above was that apparently the entire US media gleefully said that the journoslime had done the right thing. Saying afterward, "Hey, don't quote me on that," is too little too late, crowed the cavorting media goblins.
Man, that's not the journalistic ethics I learned in school.
This shows why the media has popularity lower than the government or corporations. We don't deserve any better. It's amazing that 15% of the population doesn't want to throttle us on sight.
The reasons? The increasingly competitive and corporate-driven nature of the media. The media has become more and more corporate and consolidated lately and family-owned firms have gone public starting in the 1970's with increasing regularity. A family owned newspaper or book publishing business used to be satisfied with 4% margin. It had been 4% for decades and that was plenty to get them good and rich.
As firms went public, they became vehicles of shareholders and more importantly Wall Street investment houses. Wall Street in the past 25 years or so has started demanding higher and higher profits from publishing firms. 4% is for pikers. We want 15%. Not only that, but we demand 15% growth in profits every single year. For how long? For eternity.
This puts a lot of pressure on firms. The result has been a shedding of many to most decent titles at book publishing firms in favor of shlock, murder mysteries, romances, crappy ghosted bios, and other forms of book junk food. Editors have been fired in huge waves. Result? Books are more and more often poorly written and there are many more errors and typos than their used to be.
It's the Wallmartization of books. Books, the last refuge of the intellectual, have been infected by the crapification of our corporatized modern world.
Newspapers are no exception. They're getting crappier and crappier too. In most towns, there's only one paper left, so why compete? A pile of fish wrapper called USA Today is now the model of the daily broadsheet. It's modeled on terminal 15 year old's with the attention span of a shrew on the forest floor.
In such a nasty, money-based world, getting the scoop is what it's all about. There still is some competition left somehow in the biz, and you have to beat the other journoslime rags to the punch. Hence, "journalism ethics" becomes an oxymoron and reporters rank barely above serial killers in popularity.
On a related note, I am a member of a list that deals with Evolutionary Psychology. A particularly unhinged and ultra-reactionary member of the list (a very model for the increasingly fanatical and insane modern conservative movement) recently posted the contents of private emails between him and me to the list.
I wrote those mails to him with the unstated understanding that it was just between him and me. To publish or publicly publicize the contents of private mails is a violation of Netiquette, a violation of privacy and an immoral act. His viciousness exemplifies the viciousness of a conservative movement run amok with rightwing muggers and hitmen, incivility as a motif, and an underlying template of narcissism and sociopathy.
This post by the great blog Orcinus, The Political and the Personal, sums it up well.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
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