on citizens united
17:37 - 22 Jan 2010
A follow-up to my latest post. I didn't mean to imply that the consequences of an interpretation should be disregarded altogether, but rather to express a certain restraint in deference to the subtlety that is often lost in these discussions, a subtlety that I felt I hadn't yet grasped enough to condemn the Court for its interpretation of the Constitution. (The danger of the decision and that the Court failed to exercise judicial restraint and defied stare decisis were more evident.) I suppose you could say I hesitated because I didn't know how to back up the opinion I wanted to have in the context of con law. Caution in the presence of the obvious, perhaps. (Plus, I was in a bit of a mood to dis the press already. More on that later.)
I realize I still don't have a full grasp on all the issues at hand, but having done a quick read through Stevens's dissent and some of the amici, I was reminded of some aspects to the interpretation of the First Amendment that, frankly, I should have recalled. The majority's opinion was covered more, and seemed less subtle in comparison (correct me if you disagree!). I'm actually still not sure where I stand on the much more narrow matter actually at hand in the case, but I now feel more comfortable in being annoyed at the Court's overreaching decision. So, I join you, liberal friends, and say RAWR. But let us still tread carefully in matters of free speech and remember that an appreciation of subtlety in political matters, though harder to explain -- by definition, and particularly in sound bites -- is essential to productive civil discourse.
on on citizens united
20:15 - 21 Jan 2010
Given my rate of posting, I'm sure no one's holding their breath for me to weigh in on Citizens United v. FEC. It actually is the sort of thing I'd post about, since it seems likely to be a fairly dangerous ruling in light of the consequences it could have on future elections. But I think decisions like this deserve a consideration in terms of the interpretation of the Constitution, not just a quick reaction to the consequences. And I know enough about con law to know that I don't know enough about the particulars here to give a fair commentary on the interpretation. At least not until there are some more reasonably detailed summaries, because I'm not reading all 183 pages of the opinions. Hopefully SCOTUSblog delivers, because I expect the less specialized media to be more focused on the aforementioned consequences.
eye rhyme
08:12 - 14 Dec 2009
Per Weekend Editon's Sunday Puzzle (a bit late, I know)
The town had a charming young Father.
At the back of the church, they'd all gather.
You see, even though
He looked good enough,
They wished he was more of a bather.
undisappearing
20:22 - 10 Sep 2009
I've spent the recent months fairly uninvolved in the social web. This wasn't so much a conscious decision, but perhaps an attempt to keep my signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible. Having taken stock of the direction of the distribution of social information, I've decided to try to join the "more is better" school of fish.
In my mind the primary division (though not an absolute one) in social content on the web is between creative (original content, analyses, etc.) and informational (status updates, links). I'm pretty much a lost cause on the first type; some of it takes more effort than my oft-tired brain will allow (this was nearly a much longer post about my thoughts on social content) and I question the relevance of my thoughts on a movie from 2004 that I just saw. In the latter, though, I have been far more conservative than my peers. And seeing as I find their nonces interesting, filtering my own to the degree I have seems less necessary. So with that liberation and my getting accustomed to the not-as-great-as-it-once-was Facebook, I may actually start to develop more of a web presence.
If past experience is any indicator, this will maybe last a month.
welcome to zombocom
23:13 - 26 Jul 2009
So. Dot com. Obviously, this didn't happen overnight. Hence the lack of updates. Many apologies. It was probably under a week of actual working moving over, but when you spread that out over sporadic weekends, it ends up taking a while.
Why the move? Partly just to try something new. My webpages have generally progressed mostly with my experimentation with new things. It started when I was pretty young, just me manually editing HTML, back in the days when you actually had to know HTML to have a webpage. (I may be exaggerating slightly, but I do remember my distaste for GeoCities and my disgust at FrontPage when I ended up having to maintain some of its mess.) The birth of the iframe and of blogging sites allowed a much easier way to update my page, and so a second design was born, not too ugly, but table-based and pixel-perfect back when I didn't know better. Then, in college, not content to keep things easy, I guess, I decided to write my own blogging system from scratch, mostly as a way of teaching myself Perl. I later learned MySQL, and moved my blog database away from the ad hoc file database I had been using. The DB schema changed once after I actually learned MySQL, and I had to add a captcha because of some comment spam, but it remained mostly untouched, with occasional maintenance when the OCF would change something with their servers.
On a whim, or maybe in reaction to an OCF downtime, I decided to do this move. Again, partly to do something new and to see how easy it would be, but also partly because I like the aesthetic of a dot com. (Insert uninteresting stuff about DNS and directories here.) The possibility of reduced maintenance was also a plus. So now we're here, running on Blogger (with some wrangling of a custom layout) and Google App Engine (with the Blogger Data API). Lessons learned? Google App Engine is pretty awesome, but the loss of fine control of the blogging side was a bit jarring. I suppose I could use the App Engine Datastore, but I didn't want to re-reinvent the wheel. I've moved the posts from the previous version of my site over (sorry, I couldn't do the comments), and I'll be trying to set up 301s if I can get the OCF's Apache to cooperate. (In my experience, these things are either really easy or impossible. [EDIT: It was really easy.]) In the meantime, take a look around. If anything seems to not be working, let me know.
