A minor skirmish has broken out in Bloglandia between the left purists and the “netroots”. The opening salvo was fired by our good friend Max Sawicky, with this bit:

The “Internet Left” is a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party.

Congratulations are first due to Max: in a world that lives on and for catchy one-liners, he can justifiably claim to have moved us farther, with this clever aphorism, irrespective of its validity. Second, is it just me, is Max looking pretty slick in that picture (for contrast see the wiser gent on Crooks and Liars)?

The “purists” are the old guard, the textbook leftists, the big thinkers who understand the systemic rot, the root cause dudes who will fix the problem not the symptoms. The “netroots” are a gaggle of bloggers who gained popularity and prominence after the 2004 Dean debacle. Some are just wide-ranging commentators (much as we here at PB are, albeit with a readership that is non-trivial) but for our exercise we can limit the group to a couple of biggies: DailyKos, the mothership of the movement, and MyDD one of whose writers (Matt Stoller) figures in the very first sentences of Max’s assault on the virtual roots.

What is Max’s beef against the young Turks? I am guessing he is unhappy with their apparent attitude that they have the whole leftist enterprise covered (from activism to theory). Instead old Max finds that they are ill-read if at all (and extends that point to suggest that they have little coherent theoretical understanding and analysis of their positions and the things they, or rather the Left, should work against or for), and they are not very left at that (as attested by the unbridled enthusiasm for Democrats — which seems to exceed that of a Democratic convention speaker, Al Sharpton, who memorably quipped: we want to see how far this donkey can take us — and election politics and activism). Further evidence is not hard to come by, ranging from Kos’ attitude towards marches and the activists involved (”boring”, “obsolete”) to Duncan Black on Chomsky (Google it. I refuse to link to random blather!). The “netroots” wants the old Left (the 60s left in particular?) out of their way in a hurry, but as Max outlines, what is the alternative they offer to the many facets of old style organising and activism?

The purists, usually from the Church of Marx, have nothing but disdain for party politics, electoral victories, crackpot realism. It’s all ephemeral, these meagre and meaningless victories … a mistaken identification of the roots with the trees and the trees for the forest. The Democratic Party is the buffer, a parasite that lives off the malcontent of the left, bleeding away its anger while offering no real progress. The destruction of the DP is the first step towards the inevitable and necessary confrontation with the real powers that keep us down! Even the extended discussion of elections, potential candidates and results, is not mere waste of time but a dangerous distraction (aided by the “netroots” which offer the fora and gravitas for such chatter).

Theoretical analysis and such elaborate arias can also be seen as a luxury of those who can afford them. Every bit of change can mean something significant for someone else — the return of Democrats might return funding to medical services in poor nations, alleviate conditions in Iraq (the 2006 GOP electoral humiliation, in itself, has generated a significant number of defections into the camp that questions the Iraqi strategy), a bit more safety for immigrants at risk of landing in Guantanamo, increase in minimum wage, and so on. If a coherent argument is available to demonstrate that these incremental steps have a net negative effect (and a large one at that), I am yet to hear it put forth without resort to magic language.

Another little matter nags: I do not vote on MyDD straw-polls because I believe I am furthering the grand leftist agenda, but because I have nothing better to do. The problem lies in the mistaken idea that the purists and the “netroots” are battling over scarce eyeballs and limited time. I can eyeball both of them and still have enough time to write this silly blog. My problem is not too little time but too little opportunity.

And on that question of opportunity, I return to consider Max’s original point regarding the “Internet Left”, and his own conclusion:

The real Internet left is the Internet of leftists who use the Internet.

Sometime in 1990 or 1991 I was introduced to the term “user”. It seemed an elegantly apt way to describe those who were interested in consumption and not participation (elegant because “user” is also the term to designate a non-technical human using a computer). These were the sort of people who made posts to newsgroups or mailing lists with the preface: please respond to me at my email address, since I do not read this list. I bring this up for a reason. Max is wrong. The real Internet Left is not the leftists who use the net, but the people who contribute to making it what it is. If you need a name, that name would be Richard Stallman. Behind all this noise that they enable is a dedicated community of developers, documenters, testers, bug reporters, and volunteers for all kinds of other roles, who work using the simple philosophy of from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs. The best unsolicited advice that I can offer anyone that faces the problem I bring up above, of the lack of opportunity, is to forget about theoretical frameworks or blog activism, but rather get involved in this thriving actual community (that is by the way, among other things, enabling communities in the so-called Third World), which exists despite (and perhaps because of) the disimissal of it as a serious and important force and phenomenon. Forget the Marxist thesis and the Technorati rank, or rather along with that, write some code, help out with answering questions, get your hands dirty.

A random list of efforts that you could involve yourself in today, directly related to what you are doing now:

• WordPress — open source blogging software and service
• Mozilla — open source web browser and email software with ad/spam blocking
• GNU — extensive suite of tools from the Free Software Foundation

New York Times reports on a scientific forum at the Salk Institute titled “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival”, consisting of the usual suspects such as Weinberg and Dawkins repeating their angry young scientist polemics, described aptly by one of the conference speakers:

A Free-for-All on Science and Religion - New York Times

[…]

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

[…]

I wonder how it is that we (assuming there are at least a few non-scientistic atheists other than me) permit someone like Dawkins to presume to speak for us or the general position of atheism. Perhaps it is a good thing that a majority (if true) of scientists want to now make this an all out war (I assume they are now comfortable enough in their self-sufficiency to take this step). It may be a good thing since it forces the general population to have to choose some position and path, not necessarily religion or scientism.

[ Link ]

[via BoingBoing]

The Dead Sea Scrolls it seems contain specifications for construction of latrines:

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Toilet evidence links Dead Sea Scrolls to sect

[…]

The Essenes are one of the few ancient groups whose toiletry practices were documented. The first century Jewish historian Josephus noted that members of the group normally went outside the city and dug a hole, where they buried their waste.

Two of the Dead Sea Scrolls note that the latrines should be situated northwest of the settlement, at a distance of 1,000 to 3,000 cubits — about 450 to 1,350 yards — and out of sight of the settlement.

Tabor and Joe Zias of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert on ancient latrines, went to the site and took samples.

Zias sent samples to anthropologist Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue of the CNRS Laboratory for Anthropology in Marseilles, France, who found preserved eggs and other remnants of roundworms, tapeworms and pinworms, all human intestinal parasites.

Samples from the surrounding areas contained no parasites. Had the waste been dumped on the surface, as is the practice of Bedouins in the area, the parasites quickly would have been killed by sunlight. Buried, they could persist for a year or longer, infecting anyone who walked through the soil.

The situation was made worse by the Essenes having to pass through an immersion cistern, or Miqvot, before returning to the settlement. The water would have served as a major breeding ground for the parasites.

“The graveyard at Qumran is the unhealthiest group I have ever studied in over 30 years,” Zias said. Fewer than 6 percent of the men buried there survived to age 40, he said. In contrast, cemeteries from the same period excavated at Jericho show that half the males lived beyond age 40.

What impressed me about this bit of news was that the Bedouins will probably have a hard time explaining the reasons behind their practices, but even back at the relevant time, the Essenes probably had elaborate and sophisticated explanations for the superiority of their system as compared to the illiterate practices of the nomads.

My point? There are parallels to this sort of thing in the patronising dismissal of “primitivism” by the scientistic, but often, the lack of an explanation no more disqualifies a practice than the presence of an elaborate, detailed and systematic explanation (in itself) underwrites another.

[ Link ]

Vint Cerf is making noises that IDN is a huge technical challenge:

“One of the most important aspects is for the user to make unambiguous references to every registered domain name.

“Historically this has been through a small subset of Latin characters.”

[…]

Mr Cerf said that in order for other scripts to be introduced into the domain name system, there needed to be rigorous testing to ensure that users could be certain they will reach their online destination no matter which script they used.

“Domain names are not general natural language expressions. They are simply identifiers,” he said. “They must be unique. Names registered today must be able to work into their distant future no matter what characters are added.”

He warned: “A miss-step could easily and permanently break the internet into non-interoperable components.”

I respect Cerf but this seems like fear-mongering (perhaps to counter international pressures particularly on ICANN, which is today controlled by the USA) rather than a technical argument. Uniqueness of names can be guaranteed in IDN, and talk of “permanent” break of the Internet into non-interoperable components, is a bit irresponsible. Also, phishing/spoofing attacks (the concern brought up above regarding the certainty of users in accessing sites) are not unique to IDN and have been addressed both before and also within IDN. Wikipedia offers a decent introduction to IDN/IDNA that addresses many of these points, and provides information on IDNA support in applications (e.g: Mozilla/Gecko).

The opinion of Viviane Reding of the EC, quoted in the same article, are, I think, a bit more on target:

Viviane Reding, the EC’s information society commissioner, said: “Bridging the digital divide is not just a matter of screens and cables.

“It is equally important to recognise the extent and value of cultural diversity within global village of the internet. That is why multilingualism is important.”

She said that IDN was “sometimes wrongly seen as technical issue”.

“There is legitimate political imperative,” she said. “Users want to be able to use Chinese ideograms and Arabic scripts.

“There is a real danger that a prolonged delay in the introduction of IDN could lead to fragmentation of the internet name space.”

I cannot but draw parallels to the (oft-mentioned) doomsday protestations of car manufacturers regarding everything from seat belts to better mileage.

The title of this blog post is an intentional reference to Paul Feyerabend, who would have been glad to read this bit of news:

BBC | Public ‘needs to drive science’

A new project funded by the UK government aims to give the public a chance to drive science policy.

[ Link ]

On Sept 28, blogger extraordinaire Kos, wrote the following about the fairly large anti-war rally in DC (Sept 24, 2005):

Peace protests and the new media environment

by kos

Wed Sep 28, 2005 at 10:47:17 AM PDT

I’ve been critical of peace protests in the past […]. This time, however, I wasn’t feeling animosity for last week’s protests. I was feeling something akin to apathy.

[…]

The lack of focus is maddening, obviously. But my biggest problem with anti-war protests is that they’re obsolete. What do they accomplish?

[…]
And we don’t need marches to let the country know that people are turning on the war.

[…]

People marching on the street? Boring. Unless you 1) have violence, or 2) crazy people making crazy speeches. It’s a lose-lose situation, and at best a single news cycle story.

[…]

The Right, except for the crazy anti-abortion protesting crowd, focuses its efforts solely on influencing media coverage. And it’s paid incredible dividends in the past few decades. We need to follow suit, rather than continue the same activism tactics of a century ago.

[…]

Ultimately I was agnostic over the march this past weekend because I can appreciate that people want to gather to fight for the cause, I appreciate that they want to feel like they’re doing something.

My question, then, becomes whether the money and effort people expended getting to DC to march might’ve been better spent in other forms of activism — letters to the editor, contributions to anti-war candidates, politicians, and organizations, calls and letters to their elected officials […]

Today (Jan 30, 2006) he writes:

So now what?

by kos

Mon Jan 30, 2006 at 03:53:52 PM PDT

We lost the cloture vote, but that was — despite some of your best wishes — a pre-ordained conclusion. But that doesn’t mean we lost on the bigger picture.

What you guys accomplished the last week was amazing — the outpouring of emails, letters, faxes, and phone calls was unprecedented for the netroots and particularly surprising given how weak our issue groups organized against Alito. We should’ve played a supporting role to strong efforts by NARAL, People for the American Way, and others. Instead, we ended up being pretty much the entire effort.

But say what you will about blogs and the netroots, we are not effective organizers for this type of large-scale effort, with an opposition wielding tens of millions of dollars. That we got this much accomplished in the fact of that is simply incredible.

So we are now on the map. The Alito vote may have fizzled, but you better believe the Dem establishment knows we exist.

Hmm… is it necessary to add a comment here, or perhaps just highlight the inadequacy of such thinking with a quote from the very same Kos post, misappropriated for my purpose:

In addition (this isn’t an “either/or” situation),

On another note: elsewhere on his site Kos confesses to his Republican campaigning past while other parts of the site ridicules “hippies” (while dispensing advice on what to do and not to do at the boring irrelevant DC march). The irony highlighted by these two excerpts can serve as a good starting point on why the left doesn’t hang together in the USA.