Slate "Likes" Irony On Privacy

Slate magazine has this good article on safeguarding your children's online privacy. The article focuses on how Facebook works to tie your real life to your online identity, is building facial recognition databases, behavioral databases and social connection databases that extend well beyond your Facebook friends list. This should give you pause not just for your children's privacy of course.

The irony? You can't post to Slate unless you have an account on one of the big social networking sites: Facebook, Yahoo, Google or Twitter. Of course, I have to have a Google account to use Blogger. But I try to diversify. I rarely post elsewhere using this account. I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to connect the dots, and Google knows a disturbingly large amount about me, but I work to limit it.

I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts. The first because Facebook is simply nothing but a giant data collection engine and because I find Twitter to be the intellectual equivalent of a lobotomy. I also won't sign in on Yahoo or Google to outside services because I don't want to cross-link all that info.

Many sites suck up your entire contact list when you sign on with Google or Yahoo, plus they all cross-pollinate with tracking cookies, and then link that info back to your social networking identities even on third-party sites. See that little "like" button on your favorite site? Facebook knows you were there, even if you didn't click "like." If the site doesn't have a "like" button, they're probably serving ads from a major ad agency, and the fact that you viewed the ad is purchaseable info. All they have to do is link the ad cookie with your Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr cookies and they can add that info into the massive online profile of Everything You've Ever Done On the Internet. That exploratory foray into broccoli-fetish.com? That Google search for "hot sexy livestock?" Oh, yeah, they know about all that. And they can tie it to you. Individually. Probably to your real name.

What all that means is, at Slate, and many sites, unless you're willing to buy into the whole privacy-robbing social networking industrial complex, they don't want to hear from you. In fact, the sites that don't tie into one of the major social networking sites or one of the commenting service giants like Disqus or Livefyre, are getting few and far between.

You can try to obfuscate, but unless you're willing to live the life of a serious privacy wonk, using Tor and anti-tracking software, you're probably failing.

So: write articles about protecting your privacy. Require you to sacrifice all your privacy to comment.

Nice.

Attacking Syria: Why Us?

The ambivalence of many Congressmen mirrors my own. You can't wage war by bureaucracy and with pre-defined limits (and bombing another country is making war, no matter how you try to "nuance" it). If you establish to the world beforehand that your military actions will be narrowly defined and follow a pre-established script, you fundamentally undercut one of the prime fears of your enemy -- that he doesn't know how far you are willing to go in pursuit of your goals. We saw this demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq once the wars there were put on timetables. Afghanistan suddenly got a lot more dangerous for our troops, and in Iraq whatever good we had done for the country swiftly unraveled.

I reject the notion that the chemical weapons represent any more threat to U.S. interests than the conventional weapons both sides are using. The reality is that the U.S. is acting as morality cop for a conflict it has little interest in, otherwise. And why? Obama and the anti-war left have repeatedly chastised the U.S, for its interventionist arrogance, claiming that this arrogance has soured the world's opinion of the U.S. Fair enough, if that's what they think, let's follow that to its logical conclusion. We have here a situation where no major nation but France seems to feel that the situation warrants intervention. So why do we presume that it falls on us? If this is such an important humanitarian disaster, why is it *our* job to do something about it when the U.K., Germany, Australia, Canada, India, Canada, Israel and every other supposedly free western nation with money or an army feels like it's not worth stepping in?

If the chemical weapons are so bad, let the oh-so-civilized, nuanced EU do something about it. Let Sweden, whose Nobel Peace Prize Committee is so willing to engage in frivolous anti-Americanism pony up some blood and money instead of mere words.

The more things change...

From Power Line:

"Greece is collapsing, the Iranians are getting aggressive, and Rome is in disarray. Welcome back to 430 BC."

Killing With Beautiful Kindness

I'm in Midway Airport today on a business trip and I happened to notice the cover of Town & Country Magazine:

Plan to End World Hunger? Really? I'm all ears! No, actually I'm sadly skeptical, and the predictably conventional efforts of the two lovely ladies just leave me sad.

Earth Angels: Claire Courtin-Clarins, the French artist who has captivated the fashion set, and Lauren Bush Lauren, the philanthropic trailblazer, have formed a charitable—and highly glamorous—alliance"

The core of their efforts appears to be generating funds for the "United Nations World Food Programme" -- a tired exercise in killing the patient by treating the sympton while ignoring the disease.

The program excitedly reports how much food it ships to hungry people every year, never noting that the people it feeds are still hungry the next day. And the next. You don't end world hunger with free food -- free food that drives local producers out of business, because who can compete with free? Free food that empowers the despots who control its distribution and use it to reward supporters and punish enemies.

Those lovely ladies, glamorously pictured throughout the article, are throwing money toward one of the most insidious perpetuators of hunger and evil on the planet.

But they have the best of intentions, so I guess that makes it all better.

Did they never think to wonder what it is about their lives that makes them different than the hungry people they "feed?" It's the gobs and gobs of money. No, seriously. These young ladies are the beneficiaries of generations of successful capitalism -- good business decisions, hard work, making things that people want and selling them. But they are so many generations removed from the original hardscrabble entrepreneurialism responsible for their fabulous wealth that I don't think they understand its importance.

Those people don't need more hand-outs. They need commerce.

Unfortunately, many of the countries that receive extensive U.N. "aid" have been so devastated by the decades of free handouts and the corruption involved in competing for them that there is almost nothing left in the way of free market economies. Only painfully weaning those countries from aid, replacing it with meaningful work for meaningful pay, can save them. I don't pretend to know how to do that without millions of people starving. That's the "plan to end world hunger" I want to hear about. It wasn't forthcoming in that article.

Support Obama-Mocking Rodeo Clown Tuffy Gessling

Rodeo clowning is hard, dirty, dangerous work. To do the job, you have to have great athletic ability and nerves of steel.

The bottom line is that a regular working guy, who puts his body on the line every time he steps in the ring, made fun of the most powerful man in the world, and for doing so, lost at least a part of his livelihood.

As Reynolds said, if the most powerful man in the world, was a classy guy, he wouldn't stand for that. If he really cared about "the little man" the "regular American" he'd care about that guy.

He'd know that some poor, hard-working rodeo clown, who daily faces dangers Obama, with his massive security team, can't even imagine, doesn't deserve to suffer for one second because he dared to mock the most powerful man in the world.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/support-tuffy-gessling/Q0NsMggz

Child-Raising Train Wreck In Progress

So, over on thefrisky, a site I usually avoid because pretty much anything you read there is guaranteed to be hip, vapid and leftist, there's an article up:

Mommie Dearest: Let’s Talk About The Difference Between ‘Sex’ & ‘Gender’

Need I point out the irony of calling a column discussing parenting issues "Mommie Dearest?"

Anyway, the author spends the majority of the article whining about people asking the baby's gender (Heh, I'm deliberately using the term wrong just to piss off anyone who actually cares). Then goes on to complain about people pointing out her clothing choices for her children.

This seemed odd to me, because I've raised five kids and I don't think anyone has ever mentioned that it was odd to me that one of my little boys was wearing yellow or pink or a girl was wearing blue or whatever -- and believe me it happened, because A) We cloth our kids almost completely from the thrift store until they reach an age when they're not growing out of everything every five minutes and B) I am utterly haphazard about dressing my kids. Sure, honey, you can wear your princess dress and rain boots to the grocery store on a sunny day in July. Whatever.

Then, I reached this part:

What I can’t stand, though, is when people confuse “sex” and “gender” – as in “We found out the baby’s gender!” or hosting “gender reveal parties.” It may sound nit-picky, but to someone who’s son — now six-and-a-half — is constantly told that he “looks like a girl” because he dares to step outside these traditional gender norms, it’s a pretty big deal.

Oh, good lord, Mommie Dearest indeed. I see years of therapy in this poor kid's future, because his Mommie is using him as a tool to further her ideology. Seriously. Six-year-old kids have no sense. If your boy wants to go to school with pink ribbons in his hair or baby-doll t-shirts, you just tell him no. Because you're the adult and that's what you do if you want to try to help your kid have a pleasant school experience and not get mercilessly teased. You stick him in jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt with a currently-popular boys-oriented logo and you don't worry about changing the world through your kid's gender expression!

Six-year-olds don't "dare to step outside these traditional gender norms." They carry their home experience to school. And this heinous bitch has set her little boy up for 13+ years of torment at the hands of gender-normative neanderthals. Way to use your kid to make a point, bitch.

Update: I feel like I need to clarify the apparent contradiction between my stated haphazard approach to dressing my kids and my criticism of her for her clothing choices. There's one key thing that I didn't explain: I'm haphazard when they're around the house or going to be going out just with me, or someplace where they'll probably only interact with adults in a casual fashion. All that goes right out the window in two situations.

First, formal situations. Fortunately we don't do a lot of these, but I like my kids to look like decent little pre-adults if they're in a place or situation where you're supposed to show some respect in your mode of dress (weddings, funerals, fancy restaurants, etc.).

Second, and most important, anytime they're going to be around a lot of strange kids. Kids are the most vicious, feral creatures on the planet. Especially in packs. You don't toss your beloved in the middle of them with a big "Kick Me" sign on his or her back.

Heinlein On "Bad Luck"

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Robert Heinlein