Julian Sanchez

What He Said

Julian Sanchez — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:11:48 +0000

I’d been meaning to write something along the lines of this post by Yglesias for a while: Conservative pseudointellectuals who want to convince you they have some special scholarly insight into The Muslim Mind by invoking taqiyya as, more or less, a synonym for lying. Now, granted, I only took one undergrad course on Islam, but I figure that still puts me a few notches ahead of the asshat who’s gearing up to teach comparative anthropology after skimming a Bernard Lewis book. And the way we learned it, taqiyya was (1) a specifically Shi’a doctrine (2) primarily concerned with concealing one’s Muslim faith in circumstances where one was likely to be punished for it. Which sounds reasonable enough to me. But as Matt points out, this is really beside the point: The idea that authoritarian poltical leaders or terrorists (gasp!) lie doesn’t require the use of Arabic jargon. The term is invoked to make pedestrian arguments seem more sophisticated than they are, and to cast Muslims as somehow especially prone to deception. The next time you hear some phony tossing around taqiyya, laugh in his face nice and hard for me.

Update: As long as I’m me-tooing Yglesias, this totally unrelated post is dead on.

The Shock Doctrine

Julian Sanchez — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:43:41 +0000

Naomi Klein, call your office:

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” [Rahm] Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. “They are opportunities to do big things.”

Michael Lind’s Industrial Fetish

Julian Sanchez — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:52:55 +0000

Figure I should cross-link this post at Ars, since my modal political geek reader probably cares more than my modal tech geek reader about my picking a fight with Michael Lind.

Preach It, Sister

Julian Sanchez — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:10:13 +0000

Kerry Howley points out that people who treat “libertarian” and “feminist” as antonyms are, by and large, really fucking dumb:

For some reason, various libertarian-leaning men are only capable of acknowledging the limiting nature of social norms when those norms result from recent political action. We all worry that universal surveillance breeds passive adults with no expectation of privacy. We all worry that smoking bans will encourage people to accept the diminution of their choices uncomplainingly. We all realize that the more the state does, the broader most people think its natural scope to be. No thinking libertarian is only concerned with coercion; most of us worry just as much about conformity and passivity in the form of president-worship and war-lust.

It is extremely weird to recognize this sort of social pressure–the ability of government to create limiting expectations and norms of behavior–and then to immediately dismiss claims about the social construction of gender. States and patriarchies both engender certain patterns of behavior. Humans with female bodies have been dumped into a particular social category with various limiting assumptions, and they’re right to struggle against them.

If Todd wants to argue that women aren’t oppressed because they accept their assigned roles, he’d better be willing to accept the idea that governmental authority is not oppressive because most people don’t complain. Libertarians spend an enormous amount of time telling people that they are, in fact, oppressed. We don’t call it “consciousness raising” when we explain why you ought to be able to shoot up while selling your kidney to a sex worker, but that’s what it is.

Yes, I’m Alive…

Julian Sanchez — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:39:58 +0000

I”ve just been channeling my blogging Chi into the newborn Law & Disorder. Here’s what I’ve been doing there, in case (for some crazy reason) it’s not in your feed yet:

More presidential cabinet speculation porn

A galaxy of tech stars are being named as possible candidates for Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. Here are three reasons it may not be any of them.

It’s an ill Lind that blows no minds

Michael Lind glimpses a “Fourth Republic” on the horizon, driven by technological change—but seems oddly determined to ignore the Internet.

Setec Astronomy

Will an Obama White House revisit classification policy?

When You Sleep

Ars Technica’s morning politics and policy link roundup.

House of Waxman?

Waxman makes a play for powerful committee chairmanship, with responsibility for a slew of tech issues.

Wait, didn’t we just HAVE an election?

Previewing election tech for 2012.

WikiPurge

A major conservative site launches “Operation Leper” to track Palin trashers.

When You Sleep (Inaugural Edition)

Ars Technica’s morning links roundup.

You’ll be Czarry!

Wayne Crews at the Competitive Enterprise Institute makes the case against Obama’s proposal to create a cabinet-level Chief Technology Officer.

Giving “partisan hacks” a whole new meaning

McCain and Obama hacked by a “foreign entity.”

Reading the server log entrails

Sure, we’ve got polls and prediction markets by the score, but did Web hits augur last night’s outcome as well? The Compete blog compares traffic to the candidates’ official sites over the past six months.

Liveblogging Election ‘08

Law & Disorder will be liveblogging the results as they roll in, from the first exit poll frenzy to the last hanging chad.

Reading is detrimental

Would clickwrap contracts even be offered if companies expected people to read them? And if not, how seriously should courts take them?

Yo, Pep, I don’t think they’re gonna play this on the radio

Early reports from this morning’s Supreme Court hearings on the FCC’s “fleeting expletives” rule don’t sound so hot for fans of the F-bomb.

Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose

Introducing Law & Disorder.

It’s a Little Eerie, Really

Julian Sanchez — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:24:10 +0000

My Election Day Playlist

Julian Sanchez — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:55:54 +0000

Feel free to add your own suggestions in comments:

Black Swan — Thom Yorke
Succexy — Metric
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free — Nina Simone
Sick Of You — Lou Reed
Lip Service — Elvis Costello
Nothing Much to Lose — My Bloody Valentine
Cake Parade — Georgie James
Electioneering — Radiohead
Game of Pricks — Guided By Voices
President of What — Death Cab for Cutie
They Took A Vote And Said No — Sunset Rubdown
Common People — William Shatner (Pulp cover)
The People Are The Heroes Now (from Nixon in China) — John Adams
Battle of Who Could Care Less — Ben Folds Five
Shadow Of A Doubt — Sonic Youth
Nothing Ever Changes — Brainiac
Standing In the Way of Control — The Gossip
The Times They Are A-Changin’ — Bob Dylan
California Über Alles — Dead Kennedys
A Life of Possibilities — The Dismemberment Plan
First We Take Manhattan — Leonard Cohen
Catastrophe — Rainer Maria
D.C. Will Do That To You — Smart Went Crazy
The Idiot Kings — Soul Coughing
A Man of a Million Faces — Stephin Merritt
My Mathematical Mind — Spoon
Chicago — Sufjan Stevens
these few presidents — Why
That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate — Mission Of Burma
What Difference Does It Make? — The Smiths
Monsters — Monsters Are Waiting
Here Comes Your Man — Pixies
The Laws Have Changed — The New Pornographers
The Geeks Were Right — The Faint
This Will Be Our Year — OK Go (Zombies cover)

My Dear Old Poll Tax

Julian Sanchez — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:48:58 +0000

Ezra Klein and Rachel Maddow absolutely nail this: A four, five, or six hour line at the polling station is just a poll tax exacted in time rather than dollars. That’s not to say we should holler “disenfranchisement” every time there’s a bit of a queue at the booth, or even that it’s obvious which way this “tax” cuts demographically, but there’s obviously a point at which the demand to take such a huge chunk out of your workday becomes an unreasonable burden on the right to exercise the franchise, and in a way that affects voters unevenly.

Introducing Law & Disorder

Julian Sanchez — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:02:47 +0000

So, as readers have noticed, I don’t blog here nearly as often as I once did; daily journalism is time consuming. But I got my start as a writer blogging, and in a lot of ways that’s probably still my comparative advantage. So I’m happy to announce that, starting today, I’ll be blogging about the intersection of technology, politics, and public policy at Ars Technica’s new Law & Disorder blog. You can read my inaugural post to get a sense of what it’s all about. Pure politics, philosophy, unsolicited opinions on music, and other assorted trivia will still be available here, but if you want to know what I think about anything with a tech angle—including privacy and surveillance issues—that’s the place to look. I may occasionally throw links to posts there up here if I have a truly blinding epiphany, but you should probably stick L&D in your feed if you find that sort of thing interesting.

Also, if you’re going to be following any of the myriad election livebloggers, I’ll be updating regularly starting around 7 or 8. So yeah, tell your friends! Law & Disorder! It’s the hep new thing!

Update: You can follow L&D on Twitter, if you’re into that sort of thing. And here’s the direct link to the RSS feed if you’re too busy to visit actual Web pages.

The Greatest Thing Ever. Ever.

Julian Sanchez — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:21:31 +0000

Via BoingBoing, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that this is the greatest work of genius ever struck off by the mind of man: