Dan Savage: ... and pass the ammunition

After September 11, the left had some idiotic things to say--bomb them with love, Toni?--and some smart things to say. For instance, it's true that the United States jump-started militant Islam through our Cold War-era support of anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the left concluded that the United States didn't have the moral authority to attack Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Christopher Hitchens--the lonely voice of sanity on the left--destroyed this argument with a few short, devastating lines: "Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power?" Hitchens wrote in the Nation on September 24, 2001 ["Of Sin, the Left, and Islamic Fascism"]. "Yes indeed 'we' did. Well, does this not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power?"

If you're feeling guilty about supporting the war, read through this and you'll realize that you don't need to. You're right. And if you're feeling outraged at the imperfect United States' assertion of its power, read through this and you'll probably realize that you're wrong.

Here's a little more from Dan on the Iraqis...

Much more concerned about humanitarian means than humanitarian ends, lefty weekly the Nation came out--surprise!--against going to war with Iraq: "[S]ince the Gulf War, Iraq's military capabilities have weakened significantly," says the Nation ["War on Iraq Is Wrong," July 8], "to the point where they pose little or no threat to its neighbors," and the Nation worries that a U.S. invasion of Iraq might "destabilize the entire region." (Gee, you think so? Well, gosh, we don't want to do nothin' to destabilize that good ol' peaceful Middle East!)

Even if everything the Nation says is true--Iraq is weak and poses little or no threat to anyone--there's still the small matter of the threat Saddam Hussein's government poses to the people of Iraq. They live in a police state, they're ruled by a tyrant, and their lives are hell. And, yes, U.S. sanctions have made a bad situation worse, but lifting sanctions won't turn Iraq into Sweden. Or Cuba. So even if Saddam Hussein poses no threat to Americans--and that's a mighty big "if" that, post September 11, I'm not sure we should count on--Saddam is threat to his own people.

[D]emocracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Here David Schmader flirts with patriotism...

As I struggled to recall the closest thing I've ever felt to full-blooded patriotism, I remembered a quote I'd read the previous day, in the in-flight copy of--please forgive me--Reader's Digest. The speaker was Rudy Giuliani, who was addressing the differences between the U.S. and its enemies: "Our ideas of freedom and democracy are right. I don't mean this in a belligerent way. I mean it in a moral and philosophical way: We're right, and they're wrong. That doesn't mean all our ideas are right, or that we're always right. But our philosophy is correct; their philosophy is warped."

Giuliani's eloquence rang true with me, and led me to recall the age-old social truism: When I make fun of my mom's fat ass, it's hilarious. But if you do it, I'll kick your face in.

The same goes for this beautiful, fucked-up country.

Oh damn. I'm supposed to hate everything that Guiliani, the art-censoring, anti-civil-libertarian stands for. I'm supposed to reflexively dismiss him. I've already "flipped the bozo bit", so I need to hate everything he says and does.

Bullshit. Let's repeat that quote, shall we?

"Our ideas of freedom and democracy are right. I don't mean this in a belligerent way. I mean it in a moral and philosophical way: We're right, and they're wrong. That doesn't mean all our ideas are right, or that we're always right. But our philosophy is correct; their philosophy is warped."

Sean Nelson on reflexive equivocation...

Still, there is a legacy of lingering uneasiness surrounding hardcore skepticism about our nation--not so much in the thinking, but in the speaking. After discovering that patriotism could be a real, living feeling (rather than an ironic qualifier used to describe rednecks, Republicans, and ROTC morons), we now seem to feel a need to preface our criticism of America with phrases like "Don't get me wrong, I think the Constitution is an incredible document, but...," or "I mean, America is the greatest nation on Earth, but...."

But nothing. Using these qualifications may be a good way to admit the complexity of feeling that America stirs up in any intelligent person, but it's also redundant. America is defined by complexity, contradiction, and criticism; our country is a living, breathing experiment, a project designed not to reach an outcome, but to perpetuate and perfect itself through debate and discourse. Prefacing any criticism of our country with a loyalty oath is unnecessary because criticizing America is an exercise--the exercise--of our nation's fundamental promise, and the best way to show love of country.

10:13:08 PM  comment []    

Tony Pierce: No tying in baseball

via LGF

5:56:08 PM  comment []    

Running Commentary: Free Cable or the Right to Vote

And I idly wondered, how many people, if asked to choose to between free cable tv and the right to vote, would make each choice?

I'm not talking about access to cable, just whether or not they could pay for it. It's probabaly a $500/year issue for folks. Is that worth the right to vote?

For those who choose the cable, one could argue that we'd be getting some, um, interesting voters off the rolls. But that, of course, is BAD BAD thinking.... :)

We were the TV-free family that came over last night, and Christopher absolutely floored me with the observation. And it struck me that a large percentage of the population would make the trade.

And it struck me that I would probably buy an extra vote or two every year at that price. How bad does that make me?  

11:01:13 AM  comment []    

Happier surfing with Squid

This means that web pages no longer come directly from the Internet. Your browswer makes a request to the proxy, which checks the files it's cached on its hard drive to see if any match. If there's no match, the proxy server goes out to the Internet, requests the file, and sends the response to your browser. If there is a match, Squid sends the cached version straight to the browser, skipping the request to the remote server. This is both much faster and also reduces bandwidth usage.

Now if you have only one machine on your network, you probably won't see a huge benefit to going through a proxy server, since your browser's local cache will do a reasonable job. Once you add a second machine to your network, a proxy server becomes more compelling. If Sondra and I visit the same sites on our different machines, the second visitor will have a faster experience, since the images, style sheets, external script files, etc. are going to live in the proxy cache.

As an example, let's look at part of yesterday's daily proxy report...

# Requested extensions
extensions                               request      %    Byte       %   hit-% 
--------------------------------------- --------- ------ -------- ------ ------ 
gif                                          4438  50.16  6296559   6.86  36.19 
jpg                                          1289  14.57 11530353  12.56  33.28 
<dynamic>                                    1233  13.94 10619083  11.57   1.95 
<none>                                        491   5.55  6408229   6.98   6.52 
css                                           297   3.36   626409   0.68  21.55 
js                                            228   2.58   651394   0.71  70.61 
html                                          141   1.59  2524072   2.75   2.13 
JPG                                           128   1.45  2044998   2.23  32.03 
<secure>                                      125   1.41  3165147   3.45   0.00 
asp                                           117   1.32   858668   0.94   0.00 
swf                                            60   0.68  2563063   2.79  60.00 
<error>                                        50   0.57   137468   0.15  26.00 
htm                                            43   0.49   374813   0.41  23.26 
                                ....^v.. skip a few ..v^....
--------------------------------------- --------- ------ -------- ------ ------ 
Sum                                          8848 100.00 91790231 100.00  27.67 

The first line tells us that fully half of the requested files were gifs, and that 36% of those files already existed in the cache. The highest hit rate comes on .js (JavaScript) files. Nearly 70% of those were cache hits. Also interesting is the 60% hit rate on the 2.5MB of .swf (Flash animation) files. That's from things like flash ads and the games that my kids love so well on lego.com. And the bottom line reveals that of the 91,790,231 bytes requested, nearly 28% didn't leave my internal network -- a savings of nearly 25MB of bandwidth.

Stay in control.

That kind of bandwidth savings is probably reason enough to have an old Pentium box running Linux in your basement. But it gets better. Since all web traffic goes through the proxy, you have a bunch of control you wouldn't have had before.

Sondra and I have longstanding problems with games. We've done a good job of not installing them on our workstations. You won't find solitaire or any other mind-numbing distractions on our machines. But they still exist on the net. I've spent too many hours and braincells on zone.msn.com and a few other sites. Sondra has her "favorites" as well.

Squid provides you with a way to block sites by domain name. To do this, you need to edit its configuration file, which lives at /etc/squid.conf on my Debian Woody server. To deny access, you first need to define an acl (Access Control List, pronounced "ackle"). I have an acl called "banlist" which defines destination domains (dstdomain) to deny. Here are the lines...

        acl banlist dstdomain zone.msn.com .shockwave.com .wordplays.com .billsgames.com
        http_access deny banlist

The first line defines banlist as a list of destination domains and tells what domains they are. The second tells it to deny access to banlist. If I try to surf on over to zone.msn.com, I get a proxy error. Of course, trust must begin somewhere and I can always modify the squid.conf file and get access if I really want it, but that's never been an issue.

Sondra asked me to add billsgames.com to the list yesterday. This took a moment, and it got me to thinking: What if I banned access to ad sites? Is there any compelling reason to ever pull a file from doubleclick.com? I think not. I created an acl called "adlist"...

        acl adlist dstdomain .peel.com .doubleclick.net .leadcrunch.com .unicast.com 
            .adtmt.com .msads.com .eyeblaster.com .eyeblaster-ds.com .msads.net .mediaplex.com 
            .atwola.com adimages.go.com rmads.msn.com 
        http_access deny adlist

And guess what? A large number of seizure-inducing, flashy ads no longer appear on my pages. I'm looking forward to refining and expanding the list and thus making my surfing experience all the more pleasant.   

12:16:38 AM  comment []