Category Archives: Politics

General Politics

Controversies II

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It’s been a few days since I posted. Mostly because my friend Brian just moved to Eindhoven and I’ve been busy showing him around. But i also had an exam on friday and was kept busy with that.

In my last post, a reader pointed out that I was perhaps being a bit over generalizing with the group of people that refute climate change. I said that it was rural christian republicans that most likely refused to accept the evidence for climate change. I still say this is true, however, not everyone that falls into this description refuses to accept climate change.

Indeed, we should be thankful for that. In a study that was looking to determine how trust is developed in an informational source it was determined that similarity in other opinions increases trust in topics unrelated. Meijnders et al (2009) investigated the trust that develops with sources related to Genetically Modified foods.  They found that when there is no other information about the source other than what they wrote about an unrelated topic if the opinions matched it increased trust in the source. So if an author wrote about a cash register and the reader agreed with the author, and then the reader read an article about GM foods by the same author there would be higher acceptance of the information in the source. It also found the opposite to be true as well. That if there was a difference in opinion then it would lead to a rejection of the author and they would dispute their claims.

What does this have to do with climate change or any other controversy though? Well, who are the people that speak the most about evolution and climate change? Scientists, and as Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out in his talk on naming rights that 40% of scientists in the US don’t believe in God and 85% from the National Academy of Science. For the group that has the biggest issues with these topics this reduces any  trust between the reader and the author. The amount of evidence presented become inconsequential as there’s no trust between the two and the evidence may in fact strengthen the rejection of climate change or evolution.

How can we deal with this? Well, one way is through more communication with the general public. It may also include educating the religious leaders of how the science works and why they should accept the evidence. Many atheists may not like that idea, but these leaders can reach a lot of people and they are a trusted source of information on other topics. The next step would be to have christian scientists that work within the field of evolution (there are some not many) and climate change explain how these two accepted scientific principles do not conflict with belief in god.

The catholic church has already accepted evolution, and have made positive remarks on climate change. This helps some, but most US citizens are not catholic, so we need to go after different people. Evolution is going to be much more difficult to succeed in this. As pastors are leading the charge against evolution in many churches. However, there is no reason why an approach like this would not work for climate change.

In controversial topics, science would be better served to be inclusive in educating as many religious leaders as possible to ensure that their followers are getting correct information from the best sources. This is in additional more scientific communication in general. More scientists need to function as journalists and start their own blogs.

References:
Meijnders et al, 2009, “The role of similarity cues in the development of trust in sources of information about GM foods”, Risk Analysis vol 29, no 8 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2009.01240.x/full
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

Science Controversies in the US

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In the US, there are a few “controversies” raging in the public debate. For the most part these controversies have been settle in the scientific community and many other countries. Europe for exam does not have a problem with either evolution through natural selection and climate change. These two are huge problems in the US. What are some others? Geocentric solar system, flat earth, connection between HIV and AIDs, and the link between autism and vaccines. While most of these can be laughed off, such as the geocentric or flat earth, others can have serious repercussions. For instance there is a growing population that is refusing to vaccinate their children because they are afraid that they will develop autism. This not only puts that child at risk, but it also puts every other child around them at risk.vaccines only work when a critical mass is vaccinated, because not all vaccines actually take. Typically, scientists look at people that are skeptical of the main stream science with scorn and tend to mock them. This will not get people to change their views.

I’m going to focus on evolution and climate change in this blog. Mostly because the people that don’t accept the evidence for either or both fit into the same set of people. Dealing, I don’t know enough about the autism/vaccine group to comment on them intelligently.

Who are the people that reject evolution most often? They are typically rural white, Christians that are also republicans (article). The same people also reject climate change (I can’t find an article, but republicans rejected global warming in the house). So, let’s assume that these people aren’t stupid, uneducated and are not immoral. What reasons could they have to reject Climate change?

Well, what kind of ethics are these people following? They believe that humans have no ability to change nature. This is actually a belief that Kant held, that there is a separation between what humans can impact and what they cannot impact. Next the Bible says God won’t allow another flood. This, to some extent, falls under the belief that we don’t have the ability to impact the world enough to destroy it.

BUT! Look at the data! It’s pretty obvious. Unfortunately, we humans have an amazing ability to take contradictory evidence and convince ourselves that it’s actually completely wrong and strengths our currently held position. So, people will create elaborate stories or point to anecdotal evidence that “disproves” the aggregate data. Meijnders et al, puts this as statistics are humans with the tears dried off. Basically we need stories. We don’t understand statistics  or how it relates to people in general.

Are these people being irrational? Well, the first case is clearly not irrational. They are operating within a clear set of ethical principles that dictated to them that the world is not at risk as we cannot impact it in this way whatsoever. Not accepting scientific evidence to the contrary is not irrational. The second part, well that’s a defense mechanism to increase the rationality of their decision. If you can show that these data are wrong, then obviously your ethical stance is even more justified.

Accepting climate change as fact for many of these people would cause an earth shattering change in their current belief system. It won’t cause them to lose faith in the bible or anything, however it will force them to look at their current behavior in a way that maybe incredibly painful for them.

Tomorrow, I’ll attempt to come up with some ways to correct this problem. How we address this is important for addressing our growing climate problem.

References:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
Meijnders et al (2009) “The Role of Similarity Cues in the Development of Trustin Sources of Information About GM Food” Risk Analysis Vol 29, No. 8 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2009.01240.x/full

Is the internet a truly democratizing technology?

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Boring title I know. However, I believe this is an extremely important discussion to have. Are technologies political things? Many people claim that the internet has radically changed things. That through the internet now all sorts of political activities can happen. Things are freer and more open. Is this true? Is this a result of technology? Does this technology have to be democratizing? I’m going to argue that while there are political implications of many technologies, there are other factors to considered when talking like this.

Can a road have political implications? Most people would argue that, no it’s a road, you use it to get from point A to point B, or just for fun. Well, what if you have to use public transportation and some one designed a bridge so that the bus couldn’t go over it? Would it be political then, or would the person who designed it be instilling political capabilities into a technologies? I would say in this case, the technology was used to prevent the lower class from reaching a nicer area in New York. A designer named Robert Moses designed many bridges for NYC from 1920-1970 that prevented exactly this type of traffic from occurring (Winner, 1986).

Other cases include using assembly lines to control how workers work and the steam engine to force people to work at a steady pace, or a takt time. Other technologies such as an automated tomato picker forced a lot of other changes in California. For instance it laid off workers, forced small farms to combine into larger farms to use the technology, which drove down the cost of tomatoes which big farms were taking advantage of, and also changed the tomato itself. It actually forced the development of a harder tomato so it could survive the automated picking. Which really pissed people off.

Ok, but we’re in the age of the internet. Big deal, what’s your point with all these old technologies? Arab Spring. Protesters were able to rally using the internet. The US government created these things called suitcase internet This allows users to create a mesh network and connect to websites so users are able to get around the walls that governments put into place. Wikileaks is another source of political technology. Sure, it’s just a site where you can upload files, but you could say that anything is just a site. The point is that there are norms and expectations around Wikileaks that allows some one to feel secure if they leak something to.

Additionally, governments are starting to and continuing to control the internet and how it is used. Eric Schmidt, of Google, is worried that this sort of governmental control is only going to increase. Hacktivists such as Lulz Sec and Anonymous are only going to increase the likelihood of this. The US government itself has a conflicting approach to hackers. In the cases where these hackers are going after groups that are not within the US or not the US government, the State Department has been extremely supportive. However, as soon as these groups change focus to the US, they are declared terrorists groups, or something close, which much be destroyed. NATO recently declared much the same thing.

We are in the beginning of a struggle over the future of the internet. Hacking groups are standing up for regular users and attempting to change the direction of governments. There have been a few successes coming from unexpected locations. This op-ed has some of them. The TL;DR of the article is that the UN lambasted some of the UK’s laws, and that an Australian ISP backed out of a filtering agreement with the Government.

Clearly there are many different uses for the internet. These uses can be good and bad. However, these uses have political ramifications. The choice to hack, the choice to be social on the internet, and the choice to educate yourself all impact how the future of the internet goes. I don’t support hacking. However, it is forcing transparency and increasing awareness of people both in and out of cyber space, what is actually going on in the Interwebs.

Also, the UN declared the three-strike laws for copyright, where if you get caught three times you lose internet for life, to be a violation of human rights.

References:
Winner, L. (1980) “Do Artifacts have Politics?” Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1: https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/75695134/Langdon+Winner+Artifacts+and+Politics.pdf

Soft War: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504943_162-20073030-10391715.html

California VS. Video Games (Video games won!)

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In 2005 California enacted a law which would have made it illegal to sell extremely violent video games to minors. Much in the same way that it’s illegal to sell Hustler to a minor. The video games version of the RIAA, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), objected to this, with the support of many different organizations like the RIAA, MPAA, ACLU and many big players in software, like Microsoft and Activision. However, there’s more history to this case than first meets the eye. You have to go back to the initial ruling on pornography to really understand what’s at stake here and how this ruling could impact the gaming industry.

In 1964 a movie called “the Lovers” a French movie was banned in Ohio, because Ohio deemed it obscene. Ohio also fined the owner of the theater where the movie was shown. The owner took Ohio to court over this ruling. In this case the court decided this movie was not obscene, and that Ohio was violating the First Amendment of free speech. This case is where the phrase, I can’t tell you what it (pornography) is, “but I know it when I see it” comes from. One of the Supreme Court Justices, Justice Peters,  had decided against a hard and fast definition, but declared that this movie was ok.

Fast forward nine years and you run into another case against California. In this one a guy name Miller was selling sexually explicit material through a magazine. In this case an actual test was created to determine if the material was obscene or not. This test is the basis for the California law signed into effect in 2005.

If this law had gone into effect, it was halted with an injunction, it would have had a chilling effect on the video game industry. So, we know that it’s steadily gotten more difficult to buy violent video games since the 90’s because of the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) placing ratings on video games. This is similar to what happens with movies. The major difference is that it is up to the reseller to determine if they want to carry a product with the M rating or not. Effectively what this law would have done is to turn the M from the equivalent of an R rated movie into an NC-17 or X rated movie. This would devastate the First Person Shooting (FPS) industry as well as many other games, such as fighting games, some real time strategy and most likely role playing games as well.

We got lucky. The court ruled that Video games are protected by the First Amendment. The results from the Justices were interesting. While the ruling was 7-2, it could have easily been 5-4 if the law had been written differently. The majority, 5 of the Justices, argued that California had been unable to prove that video games were different enough from books, movies, television and other media to justify this law. Thus they ruled it was violating the First Amendment. The two other Justices, Roberts and Alito, argued that the law was too vague and thus, if narrower the Justices would have sided with California.

The dissenting Justices argued that minors have different kinds of free speech, and they claimed there is not much difference between binding and murdering a women and binding and murdering a topless woman. Using this argument is basically saying that it’s obscene to create this kind of art.

There were also discussions on the science used in this case. Which claimed that the more interactive nature of video games make them more dangerous to children developing minds than any other sort of entertainment.

Now that you have some understanding of this case what does it all mean? Well, first, in a way, this legitimizes video games as a type of art. We all have felt that they’ve been art, but now officially the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) has agreed and given video games the protection they deserve. Second, this prevents any other state from attempting to pass a law similar to the California law. It’s also clear from the way that the Justices ruled on this decision that even a narrower ruling would have gone in favor of the video game industry. This is a really good thing, as it means that it’s unlikely another state will try to challenge this ruling with the current Supreme Court.

What other implications does this have? Well, it clearly says that as a culture we feel that violence is inherently different than sex. We have made it clear with this ruling that the US is willing to accept graphic violence as non-obscene while sex is. This is interesting itself. The initial ruling on obscenity, and the 2005 California law, state that what is culturally acceptable defines obscenity. With this ruling we are saying that violence is acceptable in media.

Other observations, while the SCOTUS ruled that there isn’t a difference between video games and books and movies, I can’t help but still see that there is. Some in books, such as A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIF), would never be allowed in movies are video games because of the sexual content. However, a young impressionable mind can more easily pick up one of these books than they could pick up a movie or video game with the same content. I started to read ASOIF when I was 13, it would have been extremely difficult for me to actually be able to see a movie that had the same amount of sex and violence. Now, I’m not saying that it should have been easier, but that’s because of my parenting more than anything else. As a matter of free speech, I personally don’t see any difference between the word and the picture. The picture just requires less effort to understand or see the scene. This is not a reason to segregate a section of material. Additionally, in Lawrence Lessig’s Code 2.0 he describes an author that writes stories that are violent and sexually violent towards women. This author was arrested and charges were pressed against him. He was acquitted as he was protected under the first amendment. We need to be aware that no matter how much we don’t like these images or words that we can’t make them illegal. Our founding fathers fought for our freedom to allow us these rights.

So, video gamers rejoice! We have won a great victory, one that will hopefully set a precedent which will protect video game writers, artists, coders and everyone else involved long into the future.

Happy Gaming!

Further Reading:
http://kotaku.com/5795472/video-games-defeat-california-in-supreme-court-battle-over-violent-video-games
http://kotaku.com/5678354/all-you-need-to-know-about-this-weeks-violent-video-game-case-in-the-us-supreme-court
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/06/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-video-game-law-on-first-amendment-grounds.ars?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+Featured+Content%29
Actual Ruling: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf

LulzSec, Anonymous, ICE, FBI and users

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I this post, and some future posts, I plan to discuss several different entities and how they are currently impacting web usage, some potential future impacts and how users fit in with all of this. First I’ll talk about the users and then talk a little bit about each of the other entities and some of the current activities.

For users, I think every one is aware of the broad range of types of people on the internet. You have your grandma and grandpa who only use the internet for email, or I’ll these users novices. Then you have the more sophisticated users, which use various chat programs and may look at different websites and get their news, these are basic users. Intermediate users and basic users kind of blur together they’ll probably user online games, both paid games and simple online games like yahoo games etc. Next there are Advanced users. These people are consumers of content and may create some. They are probably also aware of how to create websites and pretty technically savvy people. Then you have the Power users. People that use massive amounts of content, create their own content and spread large amounts of information over sites like 4chan, reddit, digg, and various other Web 2.0 sites. These users are typically well aware of what’s going on with these four groups I listed above. These groups do not have hard and fast end points, it’s more of a continuum. In some cases it’s difficult to tell the difference from an advanced user and a power user.

So why are the Power users, and some advanced users, aware of the activities of these groups more than other people? In some cases these power users are actually involved in Anonymous, or actively support the action of the members of Anonymous. Ok, is that a good or bad things? Well, that’s a really difficult question to answer.  I can only answer that by explaining who and what Anonymous is.

Anonymous came about from the chat rooms of 4chan, and similar groups such as that. I’m sure there are many other sources that I’m completely unaware of, probably IRC(Internet Relay Chat). But what do they do? Well, partially they are a response to the governmental responses to Wikileaks, an organization devoted to safely leaking government or business related information (whistle blower site). They decided to attack, through a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) (Which basically take a website offline), websites that didn’t want to work with Wikileaks, like PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Amazon. However, it has since escalated to include many governmental agencies. Such as the US government and other organizations. This wouldn’t really be that big of a problem if it was just DDoS, which are illegal but short lived. They also started to hack companies and steal information.

So who is ICE and why do I care about them? Well, ICE is the US commerce department. The same people that are in charge of the US boarders. Some how, they have been given broad authorization to target websites that are either streaming or directly distributing copyrighted material. They do this through seizing websites. Which has been considered very questionable under constitutional authority. See the picture below for an example of a website seized by ICE.

ICE Seizure web page

Well, I still don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. They could be going after child pornography or shutting down those pirating websites. You know, those are good points. ICE, accidentally shut down a few websites, wrongly claiming the accused was distributing child porn. These were actual businesses that were shut down due to this. 
Well, this post has gotten rather long. So tomorrow, I’ll post about LulzSec and the FBI and hopefully discuss how all four of these groups intersect with each other. As a teaser, all four of these groups feel that they are fighting over the control and structure of the internet.