About Me 0074: Making Money Internet

Jimbo3 on November 19, 2010 at 1:26 PM

Let’s address your feeble strands.

Secondly, let’s remember the macro issues of ideology and of who values free speech and who vitiates it. The history of the Left is one of hostility to dissent. This is evident through every leftist movement, is plainly observable to any person with an able political consciousness walking the earth, and has been manifested in every Leftist regime in history through their inevitable criminalizations of dissent, from post-Revolution France to Soviet Russia to communist China to Cuba to Venezuela. Do you plan on contesting this?

Rove and Bush/Cheney essentially said that anyone in the US that didn’t support the war with Iraq was unpatriotic and a dangerous fool.

False. Here is what Cheney said:

“The suggestions that’s been made by some U.S. Senators that the President of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.”

Here is what Bush said:

“It’s irresponsible to use politics. This is serious business making, winning this war, but it’s irresponsible to do what they’ve done.”

But what were “they” doing? They were alleging calculated lies to engage a war — to put US soldiers at risk for political purposes.

Why isn’t it within the president’s rights when accused of lying (directly accused by Howard Dean and Al Gore) to defend himself and his administration from lying? That’s also part of free speech.

He did not attempt to delegimitize the dissenters, but to counter the charges they made.

And even though he said this ONCE, even though he never accused critics of being unpatriotic, he took pains after his deliberately misinterpreted comments to qualify every speech on the war, and every point of exception to the criticism he received, to reaffirm the right of dissent. This rhetorical reaffirmation became a mantra by Bush for the rest of his presidency. Because he believed it. It is not something I’ve ever heard from Barack Obama. I have never heard him make a point to accept the legitimacy of dissent. Because he doesn’t. He doesn’t respect it or appreciate it as fundamental to freedom. He never has.

Furthermore, Bush consistently demonstrated decency in discourse and respect for his opponents, e.g., lavishing praise on Nancy Pelosi when she became House speaker, and refraining during his entire administration of singling out or even making an issue of his numberless slanderers. Bush served eight years under the most withering siege of personal attacks directed at any president in our history, including 78 studio-distributed anti-Bush and anti-war “documentaries” (the greatest flowering of dissent in American history) and also including several feature films calling for his assassination, along with a booming hate-Bush cottage industry on colleges and in the fringe media, but never reduced himself or the presidency to attacks against anybody or against the right of dissent. He never attacked MSNBC or Air America.

Rove played favorites with news reporters and television stations and newspapers, depending on whether he liked what they were writing.

So what?

Bush didn’t allow dissenters to attend many of his rallies when he was running for re-election.

Who does? Has any president in modern times invited hecklers to campaign rallies? This does not signifiy hostility to free speech, just an appreciation a certain campaign orderliness. The fact is, every time Bush addressed the media he was facing “dissenters.” Who among them was ever singled out had their taxes audited? Who among them, like Joe the Plumber, had their personal lives laid open on the op-ed pages of major newspapers just for asking an inconvenient question?

Cheney personally attacked several of his critics.

Name them. How were they “attacked”? But if so, good for him, because most were filthy liars like Joe Wilson and deserved being called out for who they were. That’s called free speech and the marketplace of competing speech. He never tried to SHUT THEM DOWN.

Cheney would not allow access to the records of people he met with to determine his proposed Energy Policies.

Cheney was vindicated on this as appropriate under Executive Privilege (which by the way, Obama has invoked more times now in two years than Bush-Cheney did in 8). Hillary Clinton, let’s remember, was fined $200,000 by Judge Lamberth for NEVER revealing the names from her Healthcare meetings.

Again, none of this has ANYTHING to do with suppressing the right to dissent.

Some of Bush’s early records have disappeared, including some of his arrest and service records. Shall I go on?

What? Yeah, sure, go on. If they’re as lame as these, we can all share a laugh.

Oh, and I didn’t see alot of people on the right defending the comments of Rick Sanchez of CNN. He said, correctly, that Jews “control” the networks (or something very similar).

Rick Sanchez is an idiot and made defamatory statements even he admitted. If people didn’t line up to defend idiocy they can hardly be accused of suppressing the right to speech or supporting institutional barriers and arbitrary authoritarian control over speech like the bill in question does. Sanchez can go write a book.

I’ll overlook your ugly comments about the “Jews.” The antisemitism of the Left is a whole other chapter in its sick history.

I don’t pat myself on the back. But you can take your “we’re equally guilty” charge and eat it. I’m not equally guilty. I’ve gone to the streets for freedom of speech, for Michael Moore and for Pat Robertson. I understand Voltaire’s maxim that mine is tied into yours (something the Left can’t understand simply because it cannot afford to — it cannot survive true “equality”).

The Left wears the blood of millions of deaths from the suppression of freedom, the blood of millions of dissenters who challenged that suppression. It seeks the same suppression now as it has throughout history. In America, its path is legislation. The police state follows.

Your sorry examples don’t come close to addressing the larger issues raised, and the great ideological Leftist drift toward the eclipse of freedom.

Twitter launched a number of new features for its website today that allow more companies to embed their content in the site’s right-hand media pane, making the site feel even more “app-like.” Coincidentally enough, while Twitter was making this announcement Google was launching Chrome OS, and talking about all the great apps that users can download from the Chrome store — many of which cost money to download and have features that don’t work fully unless you are using a Chrome browser or the Chrome OS. One is about the web and the other is about apps.

Obviously, Twitter has apps too — it has an iPhone ( aapl) app, an iPad app and an Android app, and may even be working on a Chrome OS app. But the company has also been spending a lot of time and resources on its website and adding new features to it, including the ability to embed Slideshare presentatations, Instagram photos, iTunes links shared via Ping, YouTube videos, Rdio tunes and other multimedia content. The new version of the site (which is still being rolled out to users) even feels app-like in the way content slides out into the media pane. But you don’t have to download it and you don’t have to pay for it.

The features that Google’s Chrome OS apps have to offer are nice as well, and the user interface in many cases is very slick, but they still represent new apps that users have to find and download from a new app store, just as they have to download apps for their iPads or iPhones, or their Android devices. Everyone seems to want to have an app or an app store — even Mozilla is apparently developing one — in part because of the monetization potential that many see, not just from users paying to download the application, but also from in-app purchases or subscriptions or upgrades.

So what happened to just using the Internet and the regular web? The father of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wrote recently in Scientific American about the rise of the walled-garden approach to applications, and his concern about how users are being restricted by proprietary platforms, with limited abilities to link or share content, both of which are at the heart of the web’s power — and he is right to be concerned. In some ways, the web seems to be getting subsumed by a flurry of different platforms and app stores.

One of the powerful things about HTML5, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his talk following the Chrome OS launch, is that it allows developers to produce rich, interactive websites that look and feel like applications. So why don’t more companies take the approach that Twitter is taking, and develop better websites instead of focusing on building apps for a dozen different stores? Obviously apps have a number of benefits — monetization through downloads being one of them — but there are a ton of benefits to just having a better website as well, and one is that anyone can use it without having to pay for it.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners

What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Making Money Internet

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