Bill Moyers On Shitty American Internet

The Article: Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair by Bill Moyers in AlterNet.

The Text: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first place.

Back then, the U.S. was in the catbird seat – poised to lead the world down this astonishing new superhighway of information and innovation. Now many other countries offer their citizens faster and cheaper access than we do. The faster high-speed access comes through fiber optic lines that transmit data in bursts of laser light, but many of us are still hooked up to broadband connections that squeeze digital information through copper wire. We’re stuck with this old-fashioned technology because, as Susan Crawford explains, our government has allowed a few giant conglomerates to rig the rules, raise prices, and stifle competition. Just like standard oil in the first Gilded Age a century ago.

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How Conservatives View Liberals

The Article: How Conservatives See Liberals by Michael Lind in Salon.

The Text: Sometimes your adversaries understand you better than you do. That is why American progressives can learn something about themselves from a smart essay titled “Left 3.0” published in the latest issue of the conservative journal Policy Review by its longtime editor Tod Lindberg.

The latest issue also happens to be the last issue of Policy Review. Other than here at Salon, the demise of this conservative intellectual journal attracted only a little notice, which may reflect the marginalization of intellectual life on the American right, the shrinking audience for low-circulation, highbrow quarterlies and monthlies, or both. Policy Review published little of note other than Robert Kagan’s essay “Of Paradise and Power,” which became a best-selling book and made him a celebrity foreign policy thinker, even though his thesis — that Americans are far more warlike than Europeans — has been disproven in the last decade.

At their best, the neoconservatives inherited, from the Old Left subculture from which many of the movement’s founders emerged, the ambition to try to see big-picture historical trends through the clutter of current events. In this tradition, Lindberg traces the “ideological progression from old Left to New Left to today’s newer Left.”

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The Problem Of Corporate Hacks On Reddit

The Article: Hail Corporate: The Increasingly Insufferable Fakery of Brands on Reddit by Ryan Holiday in Tech Beat.

The Text: The best kind of marketing messages are the ones that don’t seem like marketing messages. Because it means that the viewers’ defenses are down.

That may be why the front page of Reddit has become an irresistible target for feel-good messages about brands and businesses. Despite the community’s penchant for skepticism, Costco, Taco Bell (in fact, most of the Yum! Brands) and a handful of startups have all made very conspicuous appearances on Reddit in the last year–not via paid ads, but through what at first glance appear to be organic and genuine discussions by Reddit users.

But are they? Could they really be? As someone responsible for my own fair share of marketing stunts, I am suspicious and cynical—I’ll disclose that right up front. I very well may be seeing signs of undue influence where there is only rule-bending behavior, but then again, I’ve also begun getting requests from clients about the possibility of orchestrating Reddit machinations. So because of this, and because of what I’ve observed behind the scenes, I’ll come out and say it: what’s going on Reddit these days has media manipulation written all over it.

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How The Supreme Court Needs To Rule On Gay Marriage

The Article: How the Supreme Court Should Rule on Gay Marriage by Emily Bazelon in Slate.

The Text: The court challenge to California’s ban on gay marriage has made me nervous since it began. The case, which the Supreme Court will hear at the end of this month, makes the argument that banning gay marriage violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, full stop. Amen to that. But in a world in which 41 states still ban gay marriage, it was asking a lot of the courts—and especially of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the oh-so-sought-after swing justice—to award gay couples the right to marry across the country. With polls quickly shifting in the direction of gay rights, why turn to the least democratic method of social change? And it bothered me that this challenge came not from seasoned gay-rights lawyers, but from two superstars of the bar, David Boies and Ted Olson, who swooped in on their own.

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Targeted Killing: OK If Obama Does It?

The Article: Targeted killings: OK if Obama Does It? by Joan Walsh in Salon.

The Text: Civil libertarians have worried that some of President Obama’s comparatively hawkish national security policies are silencing “liberal” Democrats who would have opposed such measures under President Bush or another Republican. Now there’s new evidence that Obama’s support for such policies isn’t just silencing them — it’s winning them over.

That’s the finding of new research by Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler, who studies what he calls the “racialization” of political issues in the age of Obama: mainly, the way voters’ attitudes about race can make them more or less likely to support policies once they know those policies are supported by Obama. Last year he made headlines with an American Journal of Political Science article about the way racial attitudes shaped opinions on the Affordable Care Act.

Examining almost 20 years of polling going back to President Clinton’s efforts at healthcare reform, Tesler found that white voters were less likely to support reform under President Obama than under Clinton, with whites who exhibited the most conservative racial views (more on what that means below) the least likely to back the ACA. With African-Americans strong supporters of healthcare reform under both presidents, Tesler found that the racial divide between black and white opinions was 20 points greater in 2009-10 than it was during the Clinton-backed reform push in 1993-94.

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