Dana Blankenhorn

There's Not Enough Us

Pressed to sum-up Open Source values in a very few words, I fall back on something I used to say years ago at Rice University, which had just 2,600 students but had to match-up against schools with 30-40,000 students or more:

There’s not enough us to afford a them.

What does this mean in practice? It means this planet is dieing, and everything else is trivia. Iraq is trivia. Immigration is trivia. Budgets are trivia. Gasing up your car is trivia. Nearly all the issues you think are important are in fact trivia.

This planet is dieing, and we need everyone pulling in one direction if we are to have a prayer of saving it. That’s not just An Inconvenient Truth. 

The title is a joke. It is in fact the Central Truth of our time, the assurance that yes, indeed, we are all to be executed in the morning. Along with your spouse and your kids and your dog and your cat. Everyone.

Anyone who doesn’t get that, who wants to lose themselves in trivial issues, is objectively on the side of planetary genocide.

So what does this mean, practically?

Washington vs. The Roots

One reason generational patterns repeat is that Washington ignores history.

Reporters "go native" on their Washington sources, internalize the assumptions of the people they cover, and treat new movements with the cynical contempt of castle lords facing a plebeian rabble.

Some 40 years ago conservative Republicans were being lectured to by their Washington party that they were too doctrinnaire, that they were too extreme, that they should follow their leaders if they wanted power, and would never win if they demanded orthodoxy.

So the parting on the right is now a parting on the left, and it's the Netroots who are being lectured in the same way. The response to that lecture should be clear.

Netroots to Blogometer: We're not your monkey.

How dare you, in your comfy Washington office, lecture people in the field over who they must support! How dare you state baldly that unless the Netroots continue sucking up to the Joe Liebermans of the world they have no chance of ever achieving anything? The circular logic of that is amazing. If you support real change you will never get it. Go Cheney yourself!

Much of this ignorance is built on the fact that the Washington party refuses to see the differences between Netroots Democrats and Washington Democrats. The Blogometer calls them "angry activists ready to go out and vote for anyone with a "D" after their name."  This is simply not true. The campaign against Lieberman makes this clear.

So let's ask the key question:

What do the Netroots want?  What do the Netroots demand?

Headlines for July 7, 2006

Here are some of the other stories I've been working on today:

At ZDNet Open Source:  Open Source Software and Processes

Open Source and Netiquette --  submit that the process for dispute resolution is simpler, cleaner, and more efficient in the open source world. If we get into an argument and can't resolve it, we split.

MyStack is the Competitive Way to Play Open Source --With so many different Linux operating systems, middleware options, and database options out there, the new frame for competition is the "stack."

At Voic.Us: Georgia Politics

Cottingham Speaks: Is Anyone Listening?  -- Sid Cottingham, the Cracker Squire, usually uses his blog to point out stories of interest, re-publishing them and stepping back. Yesterday, he stepped out from behind his virtual curtain with a plea for gay Democrats to put the past (and their lost rights) behind them and get behind the party that needs them.

Barnes Tries Again on VoterID -- Former Gov. Roy Barnes tried again to block the VoterID law in a Fulton County court, But the latest attempt may go the way of his previous one, and on the same basis -- the standing of his plaintiff.

Endorsement Time -- Nothing is better for putting a candidate over the top than a well-timed endorsement. And now's the time. The danger is that you also collect the endorser's baggage.

This Week's Clue: An American Isolated

The following was the lead item today in my free e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.Com. I hope you'll take the trouble of subscribing. Always free.

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The Internet is a worldwide network.

This has been one of the great blessings of my career. From the first year I began covering this medium, in 1985, I found friends far away. First they came from the old Electronic Networking Association. Later they came through Newsybtes, which grew to a 12-city worldwide reporting crew before I was kicked out in 1994.

Even in the 1990s, the number of overseas friends I had grew. Many of the initial subscribers to this letter were from outside the U.S. I had electronic relationships with folks from India, South Africa, Pakistan, Australia, Russia, the UK, Germany, and Japan, to name only a few. I treasured these relationships. I still do.

During this decade I have seen it all wither away. Some of this was inevitable. I'll make an analogy to my hometown of Atlanta. When I first came here I thought nothing of going across town to eat. Now the city is three times bigger, and I seldom go more than a few miles from home. What I needed elsewhere is now here - why bother?

As the Internet has developed in more-and-more local markets, more-and-more people have found they can get everything they need from it locally. Chinese users don't often travel by modem outside China, partly due to government restrictions, but also due to language differences and the fact they can get everything they need from the Chinese Internet. The same is true in other markets, certainly in all non-English speaking markets.

The folkways of those local markets differ greatly. In Korea it's all about bandwidth-hogging applications, made possible by its advanced infrastructure. In India it's all about mobile. Europeans fret about EU policy and seldom reach outside it. There's little I can say about any of these markets, because I don't experience those local conditions.

But I also think we're seeing the result of America's deliberate isolation from the world. Since 9-11, Americans have become increasingly insular. They have been encouraged in this by a xenophobic government. The falling dollar has helped as well. We're scared of the world, and frankly the world is scared of us.

My kids have been fortunate. They've gotten out a bit. Both have been to Costa Rica, my daughter has gone to England and Belize. Most recently my 15 year old son went to Morocco. He reports that Moroccans think of America, not as a free country, but as a "Christian" country. This is a massive sea change in what had been the friendliest place in the Muslim world to American interests, and I think this feeling is probably general.

America has become a Christian nation under George W. Bush. More Americans would elect a gay man President than an admitted atheist. We wear our own secular religiosity on our sleeves, and see the whole world through that prism.

Jacob Lieberman

It's time for another history lesson, liberals.

Jacob Javits.

Back when I was a New York Conservative, in the 1960s (I was, really) the words Jacob Javits drew a shudder from my friends. Javits was that strangest of creatures, an honest-to-goodness liberal Republican.  We hated him. I learned about anti-semitism by listening to my elders speak of him. (David Horowitz, watch your back.)

The purpose of the New York Conservative Party was to run people like Jacob Javits out. (This was finally accomplished in 1980, after he'd been diagnosed with ALS, from which he died in 1986.) And, as I've noted many times, today's Democratic Netroots are the Goldwater movement of our time.

So, who's Jacob Javits now?

The 1966 Game: Who's Wolfman Jack Now?

Wolfman Jack died in 1995, but in some ways he is very much alive.

He's still heard on XM Radio, on 14 terrestrial stations in the U.S., and in two overseas.

Why? Because the Wolfman's gravelly voice is, to many, many Americans, the sound of an era. He defined the music, he defined the times. He was it, baby.

Politically the Wolfman (born Bob Smith (sorry)) represented excess, specifically the excess of the 1960s. He began his career when that excess seemed innocent, and kept on the side of "do your own thing" well beyond the era.

He was, in fact, an integral part of the radio establishment of his time, not anti-establishment at all. He was, in the end, a record-spinner, doing what his bosses told him to do, a man with a limited talent, on loan to us.

So who's Wolfman Jack now?

When Will Google Fight?

Om Malik writes today that the net neutrality fight is lost, and Google is just trying to drag it out by threatening to file an anti-trust action. (The man pictured is Sen. John Sherman, after whom our first anti-trust law is named.)

He's wrong on two counts. First, the fight isn't lost, because the bill was only approved by a committee and Democrats have decided to fight this one, hard, on the floor. They have the weapons to keep a bill from passing the Senate through the November election.

Second, anti-trust cases from private parties can be vital tools. (Ironically one of the more successful was filed by Caldera, the predecessor company to SCO, against Microsoft, concerning DR-DOS.)  Even before the case is won, it can tie up corporate actions for years.

But this is not what I mean by Google "fighting" against the duopolists seeking blackmail against them.

Filibusters

Every generational failure is different and proceeds in different ways.

Back in the 1960s, when the New Deal failed in the sex, drugs, and rebellion of the 1960s, people simply voted in the right. Some 57% supported conservative candidates in the 1968 election. Only the 15% won by the ultra-right George Wallace made that election seem close.

In the 1930s, the Herbert Hoover progressives simply withered away. Both its liberals and many of its business leaders defected to the Democrats, who won by a landslide. The 1890s saw a genuine third-party movement, with the Populists taking over several western states.

Then there were the 1850s. This was the era of pro-slavery violence. It was the era of the Filibusters, pro-slavery men who sought to export their "lifestyle" throughout Latin America.  Texas was just a start. There were also invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua,  and Honduras, even Canada (seeking the escaped "property" of slaves).  (The crew above tried to take over Cuba in 1850.) They were, in a word, terrorists, terrorists bent on enslavng nations. Most Americans have forgotten this era, but Latins never have and never will.

We're entering something like that era in today's America. As Glenn Greenwald writes, networks of ultra-rightist cells are beginning to spread their hatred and violence into the conservative mainstream, much as the Filibusters infiltrated Southern politics 150 years ago. Why? Back then the mainstream agreed with the cause of the Filibusters, if not the tactics. A slave-state Cuba could balance out a free-state Oregon. They would countenance the tactics in the name of the greater good. Same with today's conservatives:

One of the favorite tactics used by such groups is to find the home address and telephone number of the latest enemy and then publish it on the Internet, accompanied by impassioned condemnations of that person as a Grave Enemy, a race traitor, someone who threatens all that is good in the world. A handful of the most extremist pro-life groups have used the same tactic. It has happened in the past that those who were the target of these sorts of demonization campaigns that included publication of their home address were attacked and even killed.

Headlines for July 6, 2006

Here are some of the other stories I've been working on today:

At ZDNet Open Source Open Source software and processes

• Microsoft to Support ODF Wtih Plug-In -- Governments around the world have forced Big Green to back-off its refusal to support the open source Open Document Format.

At Voic.Us Georgia Politics

• No Special Session: Gay Marriage Amendment Upheld -- The Georgia Supreme Court ruled unanimously this morning that Georgia's 2004 gay marriage amendment did not violate the rules against single issues being on a ballot, and is thus law.
• VoterID Back in Murphy's Court -- The VoterID law is back before the Rome federal court where its previous incarnation was struck down last year.
• Konop Goes Cable on Price -- John Konop has launched a cable TV ad campaign against incumbent Tom Price in the 6th CD Republican primary. The move makes sense, given cable's low cost and the heavy penetration of cable in the 6th, Georgia's wealthiest Congressional District.
• Cox-Martin vs. Taylor-Hecht -- Reading the local political blogs I get the distinct impression that organized Democrats are mostly lined up in one of two camps. Either they support Cathy Cox and Jim Martin for Lt. Governor, or Mark Taylor and Greg Hecht for Lt. Governor.
• Can't We All Just Get Along? -- With the primary less than two weeks away, activists in both parties are starting the process of getting their troops together for November. A first step in the process is letting potential losers vent.

Libertarian Democrat? Or Open Source Democrat?

Markos Moulitsas is an enthusiastic organizer, a savvy technologist, and a risk-taker. He'd make a great entrepreneur.

He's not a philosopher. But, given the power he has been given by his readers (and thus by the mainstream media) he is trying to be.

So he does the very best he can.

He sees where the Democratic Party is rising fastest - in the Mountain West -- and proposes the phrase "Libertarian Democrat" to describe this new type of Democrat. It's an interesting label, appealing as it does to a group that has long been Republican (but less willing to admit it) and that might switch, if given the right push.

But I don't think it fully describes what is happening on the ground. The movement launched by Kos, and others, is really broader than that. There are traditional liberals in it, there are interest-group liberals in it, there are old hippies and young in it.

What they have in common, I think, is a basic belief in something basic. I call them Open Source Democrats.