I don't understand why these people have jobs, especially in a weak economy.

So I will be making a concerted effort to never link to or use another AP story on the blog. Why? Because their recent attempt to charge people who quote more than five words of any AP story online just goes to show what monumental, malicious assholes the AP's lawyers and copyright people are.

I mean never, ever, not even after AP backs off once they realize how stupid the attempt to gouge bloggers makes them look. Although everyone is justifiably worried about how media will pay for itself in a free/digital world, unilaterally trying to rewrite the existing laws of fair use is not only a terrible solution, it just goes to show you why these media companies are in the fix they're in in the first place. The world is still too full of content providers for me to ever have to use AP again.

This leads me to the latest backward attempt to analyze Barack Obama and race. I think the MSM, frankly, needs to just give up on this whole topic, their record is disastrous. First Obama wasn't black enough. Then he was so black that he couldn't win the nomination. Now the question is "How black is too black?" Lemme explain something to you, dog: I just watched a black man carry Iowa and Oregon and then carry roughly nine out of ten black voters. Don't give me that business about Appalachia. You know damn well if I had told you three years ago that a black man would do that you would have laughed at me. With that backdrop I've gotta say, I don't even know what the phrase "too black" means.

One thing I do know, the Times definition of blackness--"a sense of black grievance"--is a joke. And if it weren't Al Sharpton would have dominated the black vote. That sort of flat rendering of black America, keep up this false idea that the most unifying factor of black culture is the ability to make white people feel guilty. Look, I know this is tough to believe, but black people aren't nearly as obsessed with white people, as media would have you think. Fueling that notion is a cheap and easy way to fill some column inches, while not giving a flying fuck about stripping the humanity and complexity away from black folks. [full ta-nehisi]

The NYT op-ed that Ta-Nehisi is shitting on was written by Marcus Mabry. I actually (usually) like Mabry's work, (we might be friendeded on some or another social network) but this strikes me as a case where a (youngish?) black writer was ill-served by white editors who didn't know enough to him ask the right questions. When you're the only member of your tribe in an editorial encounter, and when, moreover, the underlying narrative of that encounter involves you being imported in order to explain said tribe to the publication and its readers, well, you're basically blogging with the aid of a highly compensated human spell-checker. Your editors are very often useless in guiding the piece and are themselves basically sweating it out on their side of the computer screens praying they bet on the right horse/native informant.

I didn't bother to read Edward N. Luttwak's May 12 New York Times op-ed President Apostate? because: A) it seemed stupid, and B) it seemed stupid, so I missed this example of assassination spam:

FOX News analyst Liz Trotter, while discussing the Hillary RFK gaffe, mistakenly calls Obama "Osama," then, catching her error, laughingly goes on to joke of assassinating "both, if we could." [h/t Think Progress]

There is a Bruce Sterling novel (I think. Maybe Neal Stephenson? My books are still in storage) that includes the idea of a spam assassination engine. In the book, highly intelligent people known to suffer from certain forms of violence-producing mental illness are constantly spammed with encoded emails that subliminally suggest that a given target must be killed. The program is autonomous and long running, and it only needs one successful "conversion" in order to be measured a "success." You send out an encoded email a day to a million susceptible and capable people until someone tries to kill the target. What is that over five years? 1.8 billion messages, one assassination and a 0.000000054% conversion rate?

How many people were exposed to Hillary's gaffe or Trotter's joke either directly or in the context of reporting? I don't know which FOX segment Trotter was on, but, according to last week's ratings, FOX News tended to have between 800-900K people tuned into the channel every day during its daytime hours last week. What's a conservative estimate for the number of people who saw just that one clip? 100K? 200?

How many more such jokes will there be between now and November just on FOX? (FOX jokes about killing Obama times 100K viewers = ? between now and November?) What about if Obama wins? How many times will an equivalence be created between Obama and Osama bin Laden on air or online? How many joking references will there be to killing Obama in the first year of his presidency alone? How about the whole four years or during the 2012 campaign? Will the Secret Service investigate every single one of these jokes? Will they knock on Hillary's door or Liz Trotter's?

As explained by me, here.

Click over and give my numbers some love.

that special machete place: special machetes are everywhere, except when they're not

I've been worried about my friends in Kenya, so it was quite lovely to get a few emails from Binyavanga and to see his op-ed in the New York Times.

I'm not sure exactly where he is right now, but these lines from his op-ed indicate to me that although he might not be completely alright in the grand scheme of things, he remains at the very least himself:

My further suspicion is that Mr. Odinga wants to sell to Kenyans and the world a sort of Ukrainian “people’s revolution” — where protesters take to the streets and change the order of things, and are seen to be throwing happy pink petals on television, so America can say, ah, the people have spoken.

But rather than matters leading to a popular but peaceful uprising against a flawed election, we are likelier to suffer an escalation of retaliations and a descent to that special machete place that nations rarely recover from.

That special machete place!? Throwing pink petals on television, so that America can say, ah, the people have spoken!? How the fuck did that get past an op-ed editor?