Now, give me a minute to defend myself. For some reason I can’t keep myself from using overly bold and inciteful titles. The point I’m trying to make is that we (and when I say we I mean the whole American populace) are all too willing to trade liberty for safety. I’m sure I’ve written about this in past posts, but I’m going to write about it now regardless, and I reserve the right to write about it again.
I was reminded of how little trust I have in the public by a television advertisement for News 12. That’s right. News 12 aired an advertisement for their doppler radar system and it reignited a feeling of worry in me so strong that it is now moving to me write this entry. Now, don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t just an advertisement for their weather report. To the untrained eye, or should I say to a less paranoid eye, that is all it was. But to me it speaks volumes about how frightened we are as a society. News 12 has recently added a second doppler radar to their fleet of weather predicting tools. As evidenced by the commercial this gives them the ability to, I don’t know, read the mind of the sun god and thereby predict the weather six months in advance. Regardless of what it actually does, they claimed that this doppler-duo is a (and I quote) “Umbrella of Safety”. Alright. Now, let that seep in a little bit. The commercial claimed that these meteorological-mates somehow combine to form an “Umbrella of Safety”. Now, the commercial wasn’t just born out of some advertising womb. There was, at some point, a group of people sitting around a table and one of them said something along the lines of, “You know what? The American public is so freaking scared that if we just tell them that we have something that makes them a little bit safer they’ll wet themselves in excitement.” Everyone else at the conference table agreed, either because they really liked the idea or their skull is so empty that it flaps in the wind. The sad part of the story isn’t that this pioneering ad executive probably got a sack full of cash and a BJ behind the copy machine for his brilliant realization. The sad part is that he is right.
Ever since September 11th (and probably for a while before then) we have been comatose with fear. It really isn’t that hard to notice, you just have to pay attention. It’s amazing how it permeates most of culture. You can overhear it in conversations. You can sense it in people’s voices when they talk about the war. Part of me thinks that fear might be what separates doves from hawks. If you fell scared enough, backed far enough into a corner, you can’t help but want to shoot everything that moves. You can sense this fear in our media also. It’s in movies, it’s in books, but most of all it’s on television news shows. We’re so pumped full of fear, it’s amazing that we carry on. It’s amazing that we get out of bed or leave the house.
FDR said it best when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Now I’m sure he was talking about how we shouldn’t be afraid to kill a few dark skinned people in some far off land or something like that. But, it fits well in my argument anyway. The real problem isn’t that we’re afraid, but that we’ll do most anything to get rid of the fear. There are few things that we wouldn’t give up for the chance to feel a little bit safer. Now, there really isn’t anything to be afraid of. If you live in the United States or Europe or some other civilized part of the world and you’re afraid of getting attacked by terrorists, you’ve missed the boat. You should be much more scared of cancer. No really, there is basically no chance that you’ll ever die in a terrorist attack.
But even I’m scared that we’ll see another terrorist attack on our shores in the not so distant future. However, I’m not afraid of losing my life, and my biggest worry isn’t the possible loss of thousands of lives. Now, don’t get me wrong. Any life lost is a horrible thing. However, I don’t think that the loss of life compares to the loss of our freedom. I’m slightly surprised that we retained the amount of freedoms that we did after September 11th. However, I feel that after another terrorist attack, we would be in a much different place. Noam Chomsky came to Stony Brook and gave a talk a few years after September 11th. I heard him say that in his eyes, if another terrorist attack were to occur in the US, that we would likely slip into a police state. He may have been exaggerating a little bit, but not very much. And if that were to come true, we would have no one to blame but ourselves. We wouldn’t even be able to blame the government, ’cause remember, we’re the ones that gives the government its power. That’s what a democracy is after all.
Now, if we really value our freedom so much. I mean, we must, that’s what we’re bringing to Iraq. Pretty soon freedom will be our biggest export. Anyway, if we value it so much, why do we want to throw it away so badly? Maybe I’m just a paranoid bastard, but I think someone has to worry about these things.

Now onto other things:

Lawrence Lessig, a board member over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, made reference to an interesting book in his blog. The book is called Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. It seems to be a refreshing look at patents, trademarks, the DMCA and a bunch of other well-intentioned ideas gone awry. I read the introduction and its both informative, hilarious, and sad. The book is available under a creative commons license as a PDF.

I really like the shows that NOVA puts on PBS every now and then. They recently aired a series called “The Elegant Universe”. It’s all about string theory and how the universe works. I missed it when it was aired on real TV, but I found out that NOVA has most of their shows available for streaming. I watched all three hours of the series this morning. It was very informative and I like to think that I understood most of it. I strongly recommend it.

Today was the first day that I sent a patch in to Coaster. I fixed bug #166788. It basically adds drag and drop support to Coaster. So now it’s possible to create a CD by dragging the files from your desktop or a nautilus window into the Coaster window. I spoke with the maintainer of Coaster, Bryan Forbes, on IRC about the patch and he said it’ll likely get into the next release of Coaster. Awesome! Now I won’t feel as much like a loser at Guadec. I want to try and do as much work as possible on Coaster over the coming months. I would really like to get it into Gnome 2.12. We need a good CD burning program. We’ll see.

This post was much longer than it probably should have been. My apologies. I just had so much to say. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re a real friend. Here we go, for fun, if you’ve gotten down this far, leave a comment that includes the word “fuzzy”. That’ll be our password. If you put it in a comment I’ll know that you really read the whole post and that you’re not just a poser. If anyone leaves a comment without the word “fuzzy” we’ll know that they didn’t read the whole post and that they’re a poser and we can laugh at them together. It’ll be fun I promise.

My blogging is following a similar pattern to all of the other times that I have tried to keep a blog. I have a few days where I’m really into it and I’m writing a lot. Then, I get to the point where I have a whole bunch of things to write about, but I never find the time to actually go ahead and write it out. This is the phase I’m in now. After this I’ll have a small resurgence in the frequency of my posts, and then it’ll all die out for a few months. It’s pretty sad actually. You’d think that I’d be able to write on some kind of a consistent basis.
I’m entirely addicted to the olympics. I’ll watch freaking anything. My favorite events are indoor volleyball, ping pong, long jump, high jump, and gymnastics in general. There’s something about volleyball that is really special. I played volleyball throughout most of high school. I think there are few sports that require as much teamwork as volleyball. It’s really impossible to get much of anything done by yourself in a volleyball game. Basketball, hockey, baseball, and soccer all make it atleast marginally possible to do something amazing entirely on your own. The only thing in volleyball that doesn’t depend on teamwork is the serve. Weight-lifting is on the olympics right now. These guys are lifting something like 530 pounds up over their heads. That’s just disturbing.
This post is only going to get longer. Now that I’m writing, I feel like I should write everything that I’ve been meaning to write. There are some people at work who have different political views than I do. That is to be expected. And, for the most part I can understand where they’re coming from. I just tend to disagree. One idea that I find it really hard to relate to is that the United States can’t do wrong. Now, in orer to make a judgement on anything, it is very important to maintain an air of impartiality. That is to say that you have to try and not see what it is your judging from any one side of the argument. If you can’t think about an action from an unbiased position, you should be wise enough to not draw any conclusions regarding its justness. Now, all of this is well and good, but it isn’t human nature. It’s in our nature to say, “Hey, whatever we do is good by virtue of us having done it.” In other words, “We wouldn’t do anything that isn’t right and just.” I think we all know that this isn’t the truth, but we’re only good at deciding that way after the fact. We can look back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and think, “Maybe we shouldn’t have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens while they were on their way to work and otherwise going about their daily lives. Maybe that wasn’t entirely necessary. And, even if it was what was required to stop the second world war, was stopping the second world war worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens?” We find it very hard to criticize actions that we take as a country while they are happening. I guess what I’m getting at here is that the situation that we find ourselves in right now is a whole lot more complicated than ‘good guys vs. bad guys’. I don’t want to come off as sympathizing with terrorists or anything like that. I want terrorists to be brought to justice just as much as the next guy, but I don’t think we should be entirely haphazard about actions that we take in the middle east. Going over there and waging wars could do more harm than good. I also don’t think we should be comparing our actions to the actions taken by our enemies. Do I think that the American citizens who were beheaded by terrorists would have much rather worn panties on their heads than been beheaded? Yeah. But, that doesn’t mean that we should be putting panties on people’s heads.
I really wish I started writing these things earlier in the night, or could just stick to one topic and finish it coherently without running into rants. It’s 1:30 and I have to get up at 7:00. I’m done writing for now.