Mitch Wagner's Blog

Christopher Hitchens defends the war in Iraq and Obama

You hold to the increasingly isolated position that the war in Iraq was morally and strategically justified. How many casualties would it take for you to change your mind?

It was the casualties, in a way, that persuaded me in the first place. I mean, if there’s going to be a body-bag argument—which, incidentally, I don’t completely think there should be—but to the extent that body bags weighed with me, it was because of the cost of the survival of the Saddam Hussein regime. Which was very severe, and was being borne mainly by Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds. Not much less than a million, we reckon. Which is to say nothing of the suffering of the people who weren’t being killed—who were being tortured, or being forced to lead meaningless lives under a dictatorship. And the possibility that that could get worse, if the regime ever reacquired nuclear and other capacities. So I thought the Baathist regime was too dangerous to be allowed to carry on. The number of casualties incurred in removing it will never ever, ever, ever catch up, can’t possibly catch up with the number of casualties that were necessitated by its continuing in power.

Also, why Hitchens cautiously supports Obama:

I wasn’t completely bewitched.... But one of the things I’ve learned is something I never should have not known: How important character is. Nobody says it isn’t, of course. But you used to hear serious people saying—and I would probably have agreed with it for quite a bit of my life—“Let’s talk about the issues, not the personalities.” But I’ve never heard a politician say that who didn’t have a very strong interest in people ignoring the question of his personality. And I liked what I knew of Senator Obama. And, by the way, I still do. There are things about him that I don’t like, but there’s nothing diseased about him. As there is about Mrs. Clinton, for example: People go running for therapy and ego. One thing that impressed me about Obama is that it was quite clear if he lost the election, it wouldn’t be the worst day of his life. And I noticed something a while back that is impressive exactly because no one, including me, remembers it most of the time: namely, the decision to rescue the captain and crew off the coast of Somalia.

Right. The piracy bit.

Yes. Now, someone must have come to him and said, “Mr. President, we have two, maybe three options. We can try and run out the clock on these guys; we can try and negotiate with them and their onshore Somali backers; or we can ask the Navy SEALS to do a maximum of four head shots, and put an end to the whole standoff.” He must have said, “Tell the SEALS to go get it done.” Which, with amazing forensic selectivity, they were able to do. But that’s not what impresses me so much. It’s that he didn’t make a speech saying, “Hey, look what I just did.” Imagine what Reagan would have said. You’d never have heard the end of it. Obama basically thought, “You can draw your own conclusions. People who need to know, now know.” I like that combination of qualities. That’s what I want in a president.

Christopher Hitchens

About refusing to use the Internet

When reporting a story, I sometimes need to find a particular kind of person—someone who's battling cancer, or who recently switched banks, or who owns both a Chevy pickup and Toyota sedan.

At such moments, I call my brother Keith, a telecommunications worker in eastern Kansas. Usually he says, "I know just the guy."

His contacts are so diverse in large part because he's offline. At age 52, he's never sent an email, surfed the Web or bought anything online. With no BlackBerry to distract him in the grocery line, he's likely to make a friend or two before checking out. With no Web page to instruct him on his latest project—how to grind sausage or build a cow fence or install a wood-burning stove—he seeks out the help and advice of neighbors who have done it, and during beer-drinking sessions afterward he listens carefully to their talk of health problems, banking habits and new-car purchases.

"I like talking to people," he says. "I don't understand this thing nowadays where people in the same room send each other emails instead of talking."

Although my older brother always fancied himself old-fashioned, Internet trends are making him more so. As a stranger to the Web, my brother belongs to one of the nation's fastest-shrinking minorities....

On the morning of Christmas Eve last week, I arrived at my gym—usually open at 5 a.m.—at 7:40, only to find that the holiday had delayed its opening to 8 a.m. Four of us stood there in a vestibule, listening to a frosty wind blow outdoors. The moment seemed perfect for holiday banter—how virtuous we were to be squeezing in a workout, how virtue would utterly disappear in the festive hours ahead. But one fellow pulled out his BlackBerry, and as if on cue, the rest of us did the same. For 20 minutes we read or sent emails and spoke nary a word to each other.

Daring to Live Your Life Offline

One of the most important features to master in any Internet-connected device is the "off" button.

Some thoughts about the Northwest terror attack

Blogger John Robb points out how the Northwest Air attack was an accidental sucess for al Qaeda, even if they failed to bring down the plane. It led to "new and sweeping rules on airline passengers (mostly inane) and beefed up security," a sweeping review of regulations and military intelligence--in other words, it cost the U.S. a whole lot of money and hassle for relatively little expense by al Qaeda. He says we might see more "failed" attacks in the future.

Yet again we've seen alert citizens successfully fight back against terrorists, when the government utterly failed. It happened when fellow passengers fought shoe-bomber Richard Reid, it happened on 9/11 when courageous passengers on Flight 93 crashed their plane into a field rather than into Washington, D.C. And yet the government response to these attacks is to take more steps to disempower citizens, which is completely backwards. John has some thoughts on that too, he says it's "more about bolstering nation-state legitimacy (why do we spend all this money in taxes on these massive bureaucracies) than preventing attacks." I think that's true, and I think it's also true that police just don't see the American people as trustworthy adults.

One of the things that bugs me about these kinds of incidents is that there don't seem to be any repercussions for the national leadership. They get medals of honor from the president. They get told, "Heck of a job, Brownie." If they're forced out of office, they get lucrative jobs in the private sector. When business leadership screws up, employees--most of whom were doing their job right--get laid off, while upper management continues to prosper personally. Doesn't anybody ever have to resign in disgrace anymore?

I know I'm sounding like a cranky old guy on a Sunday-morning chat-show when I say this. It's easy and cheap outrage. I'm not going to make any enemies on this blog by suggesting that Washington politicians and Wall Street fat cats are sticking it to average Americans. But watching the continual parade of incompetents rewarded is making me cranky. It just seems like punishment and reward is cross-wired in American today: Homeland Security screws up, and the rest of us have to suffer by being unable to pee or read a book in the last hour of the flight. Wall Street and Washington regulators screw up, and Wall Street gets fat bonuses, whie the rest of us or either unemployed or living in fear of unemployment. There is a fundamental unfairness how America runs, and it transcends liberal and conservative political lines.

Next on Copper Robot: Our avatars, ourselves

Join us on the next Copper Robot program for a conversation about avatars. The movie Avatar is cleaning up at the box office. Those of us in Second Life are familiar with avatars--they're the faces that we show the virtual world. But how do they relate to our physical identities?

WHEN: Sunday, Jan. 3, 6 pm Pacific Time/Second Life Time

WHERE: The lovely Seaside Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, or watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the playback later on this Web site.

What is the relationship between our physical identities and our Second Life avatars? Pick one:

None. It's called "Second Life" because nothing we do or say in-world has any relationship to the physical world. It's another life, separate from the one we lead in the atomic world.

Or total. Our Second Life avatars are simply the extensions of our physical identities.

The longer we spend in Second Life, the more complex the question appears, and the less satisfactory the two extreme, simple answers seem to be.

We'll discuss these issues with two of Second Life's leading avatars and the people behind them:

Kim Smith (SL: Rissa Maidstone), is an old friend of the Copper Robot. She's co-founder of World2Worlds, the company that provides the venue, media streaming, and priceless production help with this program. World2Worlds consults with enterprise businesses, governments, and other organizations on putting on virtual worlds events, applications and programs. Prior to World2Worlds, she had a long career with positions of responsibility in technology training, engineering, and public works.

Harper Beresford (RL: Jennifer Grace Dawson) is business manager of SL clothing vendor RFyre, and author of the blog A Passion for Virtual Fashion. She's been active on virtual worlds since the text-based MUDs of the early 90s, and has a masters degree in English with a partial Ph.D. in cultural anthropology.

By the way, alert readers will note that I called Kim primarily by the name she uses in the physical world, and Harper primarily by her Second Life name. That's how I think of them--and I think that's part of the discussion.

To get you started, you might want to listen to this episode of the Studio 360 podcast, it's about Avatar the movie, and avatars, and it includes interviews with Avatar director James Cameron, as well as Felicia Day, star of the Web sitcom The Guild, about a group of obsessive online gamers. Copper Robot interviewed Felicia and her Guild colleagues in April. Also interviewed is an expert on Internet avatars; he describes Facebook personas as "avatars." I'm not sure I buy that they're avatars in the same way that our SL identities are avatars. We can talk about that Sunday.

Hope to see you there!

Update 1 pm: The blog Metaverse Journal looks at "Avatar: The film, the idea and the word," noting that the major world religions have the idea of avatars at their centers: Our bodies are not ourselves, our spirits are our true selves, and our bodies merely avatars in the physical world.

That suggests an image: Our Second Life avatars are puppets, manipulated by our physical bodies, which are also puppets, manipulated by our true selves.

From Copper Robot. iTunes

Photo: The house that Christmas threw up on

I love the demented exuberance of the decorations on this house around the corner from us.

Why handwriting doesn't matter

When Kitty Burns Florey’s Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall Of Handwriting, a nostalgic look at handwriting’s history and call to revive it in schools, came out early in 2009, the reviews tended to follow a pattern: The reviewer begins by admitting he or she never handwrites anymore, but thinks that is a shame. He or she goes on to laud Florey’s book and ends by promising to do more handwriting in the future. Michael Dirda writes, “After reading Script and Scribble, I feel like digging out my beat-up calligraphy manuals. … Of course, I also need to clean out the dried ink from my italic pen. But before you know it, even Ludovico Arrighi — the great Renaissance master of italic — will be envying my p’s and q’s.” Florey wrote her own version of this genre in an article on the writing of her book. She tells how she always writes on the computer, never longhand: “My last eight books are children of Microsoft Word, and virtually everything I write, from a long book to a short e-mail, is done on the computer.” While researching the book, she learned how to do italic script, and became enamored of it. She ends her piece by advising all of us to do more handwriting: “I suggest you set aside half an hour, grab a piece of paper and a pen, and, in your best script (be it Italic, Palmer, or a cleaned-up version of your usual scrawl), write a poem, start a diary, send a note to a friend, or … compose a love letter.”

Handwriting Is History (via @jsnell)

In-depth interview with David Simon of "The Wire"

It’s one thing to recognize capitalism for the powerful economic tool it is and to acknowledge that, for better or for worse, we’re stuck with it and, hey, thank God we have it. There’s not a lot else that can produce mass wealth with the dexterity that capitalism can. But to mistake it for a social framework is an incredible intellectual corruption and it’s one that the West has accepted as a given since 1980—since Reagan. Human beings—in this country in particular—are worth less and less. When capitalism triumphs unequivocally, labor is diminished. It’s a zero-sum game. People paid a much higher tax rate when Eisenhower was president, a much higher tax rate for the benefit of society, and all of us had more of a sense that we were included....

[T]he overall theme [of "The Wire"] was: We’ve given ourselves over to the Olympian god that is capitalism and now we’re reaping the whirlwind. This is the America that unencumbered capitalism has built. It’s the America that we deserve because we let it happen. We don’t deserve anything better. The Wire was trying to take the scales from people’s eyes and say, “This is what you’ve built. Take a look at it.” It’s an accurate portrayal of the problems inherent in American cities.

DAVID SIMON

Watching "Sunshine Cleaning" and "Up in the Air"

Minor spoilers for both movies in this post -- stop reading here if you haven't seen them, or else we'll dock you a million miles and force you to clean up exploded brains.

Christmas in our mixed household

This is the first year in many years that we haven't gone to Columbus for Christmas. Last year, we decided going to Columbus for Christmas wasn't working for us. We can see Julie's family another time of year, when the weather's better.

This is a big deal for us because Christmas is a big deal for Julie. Me, I'm a secular Jew, and I don't care whether we celebrate it or not, but it's a big deal for her. So we're trying to make Christmas traditions of our own. It's fairly late in our marriage to be doing that, too; we've been married sixteen years.

Julie's been decorating the house for weeks. We got presents and wrapped them and put them under a tree. I couldn't remember what one of the gifts I got Julie was, so opening that one was a revelation for both of us, and even after we opened it, we're still not 100% sure what it is. It's a windy glass tube with some kind of red liquid in it. If you warm the liquid with your hand, the liquid snakes through the tubes. We've decided it's a thermometer.

Julie got me several nice gifts. She got me a pullover fleece to wear when I take my constitutionals in chilly weather. It's a perfect gift, because I've been saying I need one for weeks, since the weather cooled off. I have a gray pullover shirt that works fine, except it has no breast pocket for my iPhone. The fleece has a breast pocket. Also, I think Julie thinks the gray shirt is too nice to wear for constitutionals, but when else am I going to wear it, especially since we're not going back east for Christmas anymore?

Julie got me one of these. I already have this one, which Julie got for me a few years ago, it's my favorite cup to drink tea from and I use it every day, all day.

Julie got me a calendar. I like to hang a calendar on my bathroom wall and look at the pictures while I brush my teeth. I'm reminded of something that a colleague said about me a few months ago: She thinks I spend every waking minute consuming or creating media. I think she's right.

And Julie got me a T-shirt with a funny slogan on it. I'll post a picture later.

Now comes the Jewish portion of the holiday: An ordinary day, although one with no work or shopping because everything's closed, finished off with dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and a movie.

Julie and I are sending out special prayers for one particular family we're friends with: He's in the hospital, and she's decided to put off Christmas this year until he's home to celebrate. They did the same thing Christmas 1968, when he was in Vietnam, and they celebrated when he was home in February 1969. She's hoping they won't have to wait until February again, and we're hoping for the same thing.

How is your Christmas?

Getting things done the digital way

The other day, I needed to fill out a hardcopy form. Actually, three single-page hardcopy forms. I dislike printing things out and filling them out by hand, because it's inconvenient, because my handwriting is unreadable, and because it's easier for me to keep files electronically. I know I'm going to need to fill out a lot of forms when I'm self-employed next year, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to make sure I could do that easily.

This is what I had to go through:

1) I have software on my Mac for annotating PDFs, but the last time I used it was over the summer and I couldn't remember the name. So I needed to go through my Applications folder and find the app. It's FormulatePro.

2) Update the software.

3) The forms were e-mailed to me as Microsoft Word attachments. Open the documents on the Mac and convert to PDF.

4) Open the first document in FormulatePro. Remember how to use Formulate Pro.

5) Find the scan of my signature, which I did over the summer.

6) Use the "Place Image" tool in FormulatePro to insert the image of my signature. It appears in the wrong place in the document, and about eight times too big.

7) Look in the "Edit" menu for "Undo." It doesn't seem to be there. How can you write software without "Undo?"

8) Google around for instructions on re-sizing or undoing. I don't find any.

9) Press a lot of buttons until I figure out at random how to move and re-size the image. Mess up the document in the process of figuring this out.

10) Re-open the original PDF, and fill it out again. Put the signature in the right place, at the right size.

11) Open up the second form. It crashes Word. Try again. It crashes Word again.

12) Move on to the third form. Quickly fill it out. I'm flying now, baby!

13) Uh-oh. This document requires a signature of a witness.

14) Get Julie to sign a blank piece of paper to scan in her signature.

15) The scanner doesn't work.

16) Re-boot.

17) VMware won't shut down to let me re-boot.

18) Successfully re-boot. This includes installing software updates.

19) Watch The Closer.

20) Julie says she already has a scan of her signature, but she'd have to look for it on her disk.

21) Return to my office.

22) One of the software updates requires yet another re-boot.

23) Try the scanner again. It still doesn't work.

24) Cycle the power on the scanner. It still doesn't work.

25) Print out a document to see if the computer and printer are talking to each other. It works. So the printer and the Mac are talking to each other -- that's not the problem.

26) Google for a solution to the problem with the scanner. Discover it can be solved by re-installing the drivers.

27) Download and re-install the drivers.

28) Play with the cat by waving the laserpointer around for her to chase.

29) Successfully scan Julie's signature.

30) Finish filling out the form.

31) Go back to the second document. It still crashes Microsoft Word.

32) Try opening the document as HTML in Gmail. It crashes Firefox.

33) Successfully open the document as HTML in Safari.

34) Print as PDF, fill out with FormulatePro, attach to e-mail reply and send.

35) Bless the digital age for making our lives so much easier.