May 2nd, 2007

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Nutroots=CPC….you decide

To Walsh and other journalists, the relevant metric is true versus untrue. To an activist, the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful.

There is a term for this sort of political discourse: propaganda. The word has a bad odor, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. Propaganda is often true, and it can be deployed on behalf of a worthy cause (say, the fight against Nazism in World War II). Still, propaganda should not be confused with intellectual inquiry. Propagandists do not follow their logic wherever it may lead them; they are not interested in originality. Propaganda is an attempt to marshal arguments in order to create a specific real-world result–to win a political war. jonathan chait, The New Republic

Chait is writing about the emergence of the netroots as a political force in the American Democratic Party but the above has a direct relevance to the intellectual collapse of the CPC which we are witnessing here in Canada.

One would think that for a politician in government the metric would be “true versus untrue” but to the activists whose only motivation is the creation of a majority CPC government, “the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful”. Which, goes a long distance to explaining the truly wacky approach the CPC is taking to global warming. Doesn’t matter a damn if the measures proposed deal with a real problem in a cost effective way; what matters is that they are seen by an awfully stupid electorate as doing “something”.

Update: Greg Staples has new polling numbers and this comment:

all this morphing into Canada’s New Liberal Party isn’t getting them into magical majority terrority, it’s getting them defeated. political staples

Yup.

Written by jay on May 2nd, 2007 with 2 comments.
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09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0

Send mail and I will send you my Canadian address for service. Oh, and, before you do, you might want to check to see if the Digital Millennium Copyright Act applies in Canada.

Read more at Boing Boing. Those take down notices sure are effective….

Update: Well, that is one dead little bit of code….Here’s what DIGG did after pulling the posts containing the code.

What this snippet of code was designed to do was preserve the business model of the movie biz. Now they are going to have to think again. Sadly this will cost them several millions of dollars. Their net unsavvy lawyers basically blew the game by demanding that big blogs and others take down notice that the proverbial cat was out of the bag. Surely the divx hack could have taught them something. Apparently not.

Update#2: the damn number is showing up all over.

Update#3: Now they are just getting mean…09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com and, er, some pirates have posted it in Sweden. Pirates who deal with takedown notices thusly:

We are well aware of the fact that The Pirate Bay falls outside the
scope of the DMCA - after all, the DMCA is a US-specific legislation,
and TPB is hosted in the land of vikings, reindeers, Aurora Borealis and
cute blonde girls. the pirate bay

And so on

Update #4John Dvorak blames the tone deaf lawyers…Always a safe move.

Written by jay on May 2nd, 2007 with no comments.
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