I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.
Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
If you like my blog, and would like to help me continue to afford food and prescriptions, or simply enjoy my blogging and writing, and would like to support it --
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 20 sign-ups; 13 cancellations; Total= 7
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
NY TIMES SELECTturns out to make everything freely available with the most incredibly stupidly trivial adjustment imaginable. Really. I wonder how many hours this will last. Could it last a whole day? Could they be this stupid? Obviously they think we're this stupid.
I'll leave it to you to fiddle with the provided URL to make it work (hint: it involves the LinkGenerator, and then tweaking what's provided; if you really find it mystifying, ask me).
Here's today's Krugman, to demonstrate:
By three to one, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black. By an equally large margin, whites disagree.
The truth is that there's no way to know. Maybe President Bush would have been mugging with a guitar the day after the levees broke even if New Orleans had been a mostly white city. Maybe Palm Beach would also have had to wait five days after a hurricane hit before key military units received orders to join rescue operations.
But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.
Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.
And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"
Above all, race-based hostility to the idea of helping the poor created an environment in which a political movement hostile to government aid in general could flourish.
By all accounts Ronald Reagan, who declared in his Inaugural Address that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem," wasn't personally racist. But he repeatedly used a bogus tale about a Cadillac-driving Chicago "welfare queen" to bash big government. And he launched his 1980 campaign with a pro-states'-rights speech in Philadelphia, Miss., a small town whose only claim to fame was the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers.
Under George W. Bush - who, like Mr. Reagan, isn't personally racist but relies on the support of racists - the anti-government right has reached a new pinnacle of power. And the incompetent response to Katrina was the direct result of his political philosophy. When an administration doesn't believe in an agency's mission, the agency quickly loses its ability to perform that mission.
By now everyone knows that the Bush administration treated the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a dumping ground for cronies and political hacks, leaving the agency incapable of dealing with disasters. But FEMA's degradation isn't unique. It reflects a more general decline in the competence of government agencies whose job is to help people in need.
For example, housing for Katrina refugees is one of the most urgent problems now facing the nation. The FEMAvilles springing up across the gulf region could all too easily turn into squalid symbols of national failure. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which should be a source of expertise in tackling this problem, has been reduced to a hollow shell, with eight of its principal staff positions vacant.
But let me not blame the Bush administration for everything. The sad truth is that the only exceptional thing about the neglect of our fellow citizens we saw after Katrina struck is that for once the consequences of that neglect were visible on national TV.
Consider this: in the United States, unlike any other advanced country, many people fail to receive basic health care because they can't afford it. Lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than Katrina and 9/11 combined.
But the health care crisis hasn't had much effect on politics. And one reason is that it isn't yet a crisis among middle-class, white Americans (although it's getting there). Instead, the worst effects are falling on the poor and black, who have third-world levels of infant mortality and life expectancy.
I'd like to believe that Katrina will change everything - that we'll all now realize how important it is to have a government committed to helping those in need, whatever the color of their skin. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Read The Rest Scale:0 out of 5.
ADDENDUM: I continue to be baffled. The blogsphere is beside itself with people complaining they can no longer read the articles on TimesSelect. I don't get it.
Complaining about the principle that something once free is no longer, in theory, free, I understand (how legit your complaint is that you can no longer get something for free, is another matter). But complaining that it's practically impossible to read the pieces? I don't get it.
Look, I'll say it very. Very. Very. Slowly.
Go to the OpEd page (or sports, or whatever). Click on a Select piece you want to read; here is Bob Herbert, for instance. Cut the extraneous crap out of the URL so it's just the URL: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/19/opinion/19herbert.html. Now cut the "select" out. Hit "return." You're there.
Now what frigging ten-year-old can't figure this out? Who wouldn't try the obvious as the very first thing?
I don't get it.
I'm a vaguely smart person, but there are a jillion smart people out there in the blogosphere, and tons are far smarter than me. Endless smart people are complaining they can't read these pieces (again, not about the principle, but about how they can't read the pieces).
I wouldn't be so surprised, but I don't know from computer programming (which this isn't), and I barely know from a few HTML tags, and I'm just not all that smart, compared to plenty of folks. That's why I don't understand why the obvious doesn't seem to be obvious.
WAY LATER: It appears that if everyone reading this post donated a dollar to me, I'd never need another donation again. That won't happen. But if even you, enough of you, read the top of the page, and donated $5, I'd be able to buy prescriptions and food for a couple of years. Of course, past experience over the past five years teaches that only one out of a thousand people, or fewer, will donate, no matter what, but I'm just saying see the top of the page, and thanks. Not assuming that the next reader will do the trick would be wonderful. (Back in reality: it's only the $40-$200 donations that have ever made a major difference; oddly, they're more frequent than those of lesser amounts, although neither way is to say a lot; as could possibly be more clear, I'm pathetically grateful for all donations.) (Response to an e-mail query: No, I was last able to afford regular meds five or more months ago; what a more recent exam than the one over a year ago now would say is another question, and, of course, I have no reason to doubt a doctor who took six whole minutes with me, and then retired, which is pretty much my experience with the med profession, absent med insurance, in the past thirty years, to be sure.)
TUESDAY: Well, that was nice while it lasted. Sorry, but see my first paragraph. No, I don't see anything so obvious as the first way in, although clearly signing up for the 14-day free trial is a useful patch for now. I'll let you know if I see anything beyond that, or have any other news of getting at TimesSelect, and tips from others can be e-mailed to me at the address by the copyright in the left sidebar, thanks.
Thanks again to Digby for linking, and to all for reading this (and to those who donated!); hope you'll check out future stuff, despite my erratic blogging schedule (ill health strikes this morning; check back tomorrow).
9/19/2005 10:37:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | Tweet |
34 comments
Wow. I have trouble imagining the Times web department is foolish enough to leave a hole like that open, but I can't see why they would do it deliberately, either. I predict it won't last.
I get the daily NY Times headlines via e-mail each day. I wondered if someone like me might be grandfathered into the system. Upon opening today's e-mail from the Times, I scrolled down to Paul Krugman and clicked. A friendly message popped up that I needed to "upgrade" to TimesSelect. I then clicked on "What is TimesSelect?" and was told "TimesSelect is a new service."
"I have trouble imagining the Times web department is foolish enough to leave a hole like that open, but I can't see why they would do it deliberately, either."
I have to wonder if there weren't some folks down in the web dept. who got the directive, sighed, and figured they'd instantiate it in a way bypassable by non-morons, figuring that would exclude their bosses, but that's just an airy fantasy.
I'm not sure what a better explanation is for such a bypassable-by-six-year-olds system is.
But this whole thing has me wildly thrown. When pretty much the whole blogosphee reacts as if this is an obstacle that can't be overcome, I start grasping for my "beam out of this universe" button.
Did you ever consider the ethical considerations? Even knowing it's bypassable-by-a-six-year-old, does it make it right to do it? That's what I don't get. You're talking about condoning theft. Don't tell me I'm the only bastid who thinks this way.
"Did you ever consider the ethical considerations? Even knowing it's bypassable-by-a-six-year-old, does it make it right to do it? That's what I don't get. You're talking about condoning theft. Don't tell me I'm the only bastid who thinks this way."
Of course not. I thought the question of bypassing someone's attempt to defend their property rights inherently brought up the ethical question, and that I was merely not engaging with it, but you're quite right that in a larger context that is not at all adequate. Of course it's a first order principle, and something everyone should consider. That I thought that was so obvious as to not bother acknowledging was an error on my part.
"Gary, where *is* that button? I've looked for it and can never find it when I need it."
If it's under your sofa cushions, I'd like to come by to borrow a cup of flour, and then resist my impulse to grab for it, but instead propose a discussion of what we might do with it. Or something.
My own improvisations as an alternative I do not recommend.
It really bugs me all this "theft" talk. Who says it's theft -- you? The New York Times? Various international treaties? Steal it and what happens? It's still there. Somehow dilution of profit became theft. Would it be right if I accused you of robbing me of $15 million dollars, if only you weren't stealing from me by failing to pay it to me. Or maybe you'd just say my profit model is broken?
[Copyright (C) 2005. By reading this message you have agreed to pay the writer of this message $15 million U.S. Any violation of this contract is punishable by the terms outlined by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, or other international treaties.]
Reminder, by the way: to comment under whatever handle you prefer, just click on "comment as other."
Alternatively "registering" your name just requires writing down your name, and only a tad more, and can be done in under twenty seconds. "Anonymous" is not the only alternative, though so long as you provide some handle, it's sufficient. But entering it so you don't have to keep typing it in might be more convenient, you know.
Even knowing it's bypassable-by-a-six-year-old, does it make it right to do it?
The web address is accessible from the web. This implies a right to access it - if you do not want people accessing your stuff, do not put it on the web. If you do not want to make it freely available, stick a wall in the way or verify addresses.
What is being shown is a way of deriving the address of the accessible material from the address of the request for proof of sub screen. This is not copyrighted information.
If you steal a newspaper from a machine, you're a thief. If you peer into a badly designed machine and read through the front cover, you're not.
You can get it free using a library card from many local library on line systems. AND the extra bonus, which really screws the NYT, is that you can see it AD FREE, that's right, you don't have to put up with pop-ups or dancing critters in little boxes.
also, at least for today, truthout had Krugman with Herbert on the same page.
"It really bugs me all this "theft" talk. Who says it's theft -- you? The New York Times? Various international treaties? Steal it and what happens? It's still there."
This is the basic argument about copyright and intellectual property, and not terribly new. Intellectual property actually is property, although I agree that the present US copyright laws are awful. But not everything works by analogy.
"...right, you don't have to put up with pop-ups or dancing critters in little boxes."
Having used pop-up blockers before Firefox, I'd pretty much forgotten that people are still putting up with that sort of thing. I hope that doesn't seem snotty. I simply mean that I'd literally forgotten. It's not as if programs can't prevent that sort of thing.
And I Am Not A Techie. I'm not even a college graduate. Or a programmer. Or "computer guy" in any form.
I'm just someone who picks up a few tips, after many years, on how to cope with this or that. That's all.
If one wants to talk about alternative longer-term dodges, presumably so long as the current system is operative, one can keep signing up for 14-day-free-trials, and then editing one's registry to keep that going forever. I thought that was obvious, but that the Times was likely to put forward programming that defeated that. It's not as if running proprietary systems is new or full of unknown techniques, is it?
One of the more transparent aspects of President Bush's speech from New Orleans was its cynical outreach to African-Americans. Trying to break the stereotype of his administration and his party as modern day Confederates, Bush spoke eloquently of race and poverty in the Katrina disaster. Unfortunately, Bush's makeover as born-again racial healer simply isn’t credible, given his own penchant for racial stereotypes...
Hi, Gary. Just wanted you to know, I left a little something in the tip jar. I've been where you are (not the physical pain, but definitely the financial pain) and I know how it feels.
Hey, I may be there again soon, but for now, I can afford to give this.
I like your blog a lot, and have added it to my blog roll at Liberty Street.
Here's how to get into Salon Premium: Go through their "site pass" adathon. When you get to the link that says "Go to Salon Premium," right click on it, select the option to "copy link." Open up your bookmarks, ad the copied link and you have a bookmark that works.
Given that even Times Select subscribers (I am one by virtue of the fact that I get home delivery of the weekend editions) can't get to the Select content, I can't imagine this is going to work well for them.
Oh, and by the way, if you contact them that even though you're a subscriber and logged in, you can't get to the Select content, they send you a form e-mail about how to log in and what to do about a forgotten password.
That's awesome, Kathy, to be added to "NEWS AND REFERENCE," and not just blogs. If that's a mistake, well, I'll live. :-)
On other fronts, um, all you have to have is a credit card to tip; a PayPal account is not necessary. I take a major hit on the percentage that goes to PayPal for that kind of account, so it would be lovely if people used it. The alternative of using the PayPal-only account would cut vastly back on the percentage they take, but the link is open precisely to allow y'all to donate as you wish. Thanks again.
Sorry, not a lot of spare money these days. How about the barter system instead? Maybe you already know about this but maybe you don't and I figure it won't hurt to offer. Information for information.
With our health care system collapsing, we're going to have to take care of ourselves. I put in an organic garden for the first time this spring. Why pay $7.99/lb for greens when I can grow them myself? It's apple season; trying to eat an apple a day. doctors are mostly guessing anyway, especially when their employer insists on booking them for 6 patients an hour.
And for you, try this site. http://arthritis.about.com/cs/gout/a/foodstoavoid.htm
Oh, geez, Gary! I just noticed that I'd put Amygdala in News and Ref by mistake and moved it to Blogroll. Then I came over here and saw your comment!
Wahhhh! Now I feel terrible!
Hey, at least Amygdala is at the top!
As you'll see, there are NO regular blogs in News and Ref; the only blogs there are aggregators. This makes it easier for me to remember where things are.
I'm especially embarrassed because I moved Amygdala and THEN came here and saw you thanking me for putting it in News and Ref, LOL!
The nytimes.com web people are some of the stupidest and most incompentent people around. It is amazing that their site even works (well their search certainly doesn't work - man get google or something I can never find a damn article on that thing). I am sure it was just their stupidity that created that hole and finally management had to kick their ass into gear and get them to close it off.
It is the web developers that should be in jail not Judith Miller for their crimes against intelligent thought.
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