Goldy

With last week’s primary ballots mostly counted, I think it’s safe to take a look at voter turnout and speculate how it might have been influenced by the yawning “voter enthusiasm gap” that Republicans are counting on to sweep them to victory this November. And in fact voters turned out in far greater in Republican areas of the state than they did in dark blue King County, a fact that would seem to bode well for the Part of No this November.

But…

While King County barely turned out 37 percent of registered voters, compared to almost 42 percent in the rest of the state, that differential is pretty typical for Washington state in even-year primary elections. (Odd years are a different beast, when competitive city and county races sustain voter interest in King, while much less is at stake in most of the rest of the state.) For example, in 2006, King County’s primary voter turnout trailed the rest of the state by 36 percent to 40 percent, and in 2008, when Democrats arguably held the enthusiasm edge, the turnout gap was even greater, 35 percent to 46 percent.

What does that mean for November? Who knows? For one, such a top-line analysis does nothing to evaluate who turned out within each county, though it is reasonable to assume from various contests that the electorate trended a bit more Republican than usual. Neither does the primary electorate tell us a lot about what the electorate will necessarily look like in November, though historically, Democrats tend to turn out in higher percentages in the general, though slightly less so during non-presidential years.

But what I can confidently say is that the primary turnout differential itself provides little or no evidence of an impending Republican wave.

How about this? Metro bus drivers should agree to give up their contractually guaranteed 2-percent COLA increase if the Seattle Times agrees to give up its 40-percent B&O tax cut for which Frank Blethen successfully lobbied last year.

I mean, if, as the Times editorial board argues, “the public sector is not in a position to pay out COLAs right now,” then certainly the public sector is not in a position to hand out 40-percent tax cuts to wealthy, Mercer Island millionaires. Right?

Seems like a fair compromise to me. Your move, Frank.

You know how you get to know somebody online or in email or on the phone, and then when you finally meet them in person they’re nothing like what you expected? Well the first time I met Ivan Weiss, he was exactly what I expected.

Kinda sad that some of the best journalism today comes from a fake news show.

The Seattle Times’ editors just seem to love stories like this — “Online ranters increasingly pay a price” — apparently drooling for the day when uppity bloggers like me are put in our place.

The Internet has allowed tens of millions of Americans to be published writers. But it also has led to a surge in lawsuits from those who say they were hurt, defamed or threatened by what they read, according to groups that track media lawsuits.

[…] “Most people have no idea of the liability they face when they publish something online,” said Eric Goldman, who teaches Internet law at Santa Clara University in California. “A whole new generation can publish now, but they don’t understand the legal dangers they could face. People are shocked to learn they can be sued for posting something that says, ‘My dentist stinks.’ “

I’ve never claimed that bloggers and commenters should be free to defame their subjects with impunity, but the example above shows why your typical online citizen journalist/participant needs more protection from defamation suits, not less. Obviously, anybody should be allowed to go online and say “my dentist stinks,” because that is a statement of opinion for which one would likely never be found liable in court. I think the Seattle Times editorial board stinks; good luck winning a defamation suit over that.

But just being sued for defamation by a determined plaintiff is enough to crush one financially, thus chilling public discourse via the mere threat of legal action. Yet this is exactly the kinda fearful mindset the the Times seems to be cheerleading.

Times Crown Prince Ryan Blethen, in a previous opinion piece, blames bloggers like me for this very real and imminent threat to online speech, warning that they should “learn to check themselves, and use a modicum of restraint” before, you know, some deep-pocketed asshole decides to make an example of us. But the plaintiff’s side of our defamation laws seems an awfully odd position for a future newspaper publisher to stake out… unless, of course, you view it within the broader context of the industry’s dramatic decline, and Blethen’s documented history of blaming his paper’s woes on external forces rather than, say, his own boneheaded idea to leverage the family business by buying newspapers in Maine. (I’m just sayin’.)

The problem as I see it is that defamation laws that evolved to address the unique circumstances of print and broadcast are simply not well suited to the realities of our more democratic, online media landscape, a nuance that, as I’ve written before, appears to escape Blethen the Younger:

And that is what Blethen, heir to a dead tree publishing throne, obviously doesn’t understand about this new medium. HA isn’t a “publication,” and my words aren’t “spun off the press” in some inviolable, datelined tome. A blog is an ever evolving dialectic, a give and take, a living conversation between writers and readers, and readers with each other, and between one blogging community with the blogosphere as a whole. HA may be my own personal realm, but the world is my fact checker.

Under the old paradigm, where the scarcity of the airwaves and the huge financial barriers to market entry left the bulk of the media in the hands of a powerful and wealthy few, the libel laws were often the best or only defense against the indiscriminate, negligent, and malicious misuse of the power of the press. But in this new medium, this distributed, democratic and decentralized paradigm of the Internet, the best defense against bad journalism is more journalism, the best remedy for falsehood is the truth, and aggrieved parties should only look to the courts as a desperate and last resort.

… [For] in a media landscape increasingly dominated by freelancers, contractors and lone wolves outside the protection of deep-pocketed corporate overlords, the mere threat of costly legal action to resolve disputes threatens the viability of the medium itself, potentially shielding those able to afford attorneys from legitimate criticism by those of us who cannot.

In other words, our defamation laws evolved to protect the average citizenry from powerful publishers like Blethen, not the other way around.

It is, in fact, not reckless bloggers but this blogger-beware meme that presents the real threat to the viability of the Internet as a meaningful and credible medium for disseminating dissent and facilitating public debate. Blethen argues that a lowly comment troll can and should be held to the same defamation standards as a Rupert Murdoch or a, well, Ryan Blethen, but this would be the legal equivalent of hitting a nail with a pile driver.

Unlike Blethen I don’t have attorneys on staff or on retainer, and thus I lack the opportunity to take every potentially controversial post I write, and run it past legal. Neither can I afford to defend myself against even the most frivolous of SLAPP suits. The alternative, which Blethen seems to advocate, is that I write fearfully.

Media-law experts repeat the advice that bloggers and e-mailers need to think twice before sending a message.

“Before you speak ill of anyone online,” Baron said, “you should think hard before pressing the ‘send’ button.”

What an utterly oppressive and ultimately undemocratic sentiment.

The balance that needs to be struck, and that needs to be reflected in our laws, is the balance between the individual harm that can come from truly reckless and malicious free speech, as opposed to the societal harm that comes from crushing dissent. Personally, I’d argue that a legal standard that puts one at risk of financial ruin for posting the words “my dentist stinks,” clearly strikes the wrong balance. But Ryan Blethen and his newspaper apparently disagree, otherwise, I suppose, they would he would be advocating for the law to be changed, rather than for bloggers like me to fearfully mind it.

Emily Heffter has the scoop in the Seattle Times:

City Councilmember Tim Burgess has appeared to be positioning himself to run against McGinn in 2012.

Which of course would totally catch Mayor Mike McGinn by surprise, considering the election isn’t until 2013.

It’s an okay ad that makes a point that I can’t help but believe will resonate with voters, the majority of whom already start out at least a little suspicious of Dino Rossi, but what really strikes me about this ad is the new ground it breaks in citing PubliCola as a source to back up one of its claims… and in a U.S. Senate race, no less.

See, the power of a daily newspaper monopoly like the Seattle Times to influence elections comes not as much from the initial coverage of any one story, but from their role as an allegedly credible, unbiased and independent source that the political campaigns can cite to back up their campaign ads. For example, the bullshit Darcy Burner diploma story would not have had nearly the impact it did if the Reichert campaign had not spent a million dollars citing it.

That’s an advantage the Seattle Times will always have over me, for while I am at least as good a writer as any of their editors, and all of their editors are at least as biased and partisan as me, nobody’s going to put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind an ad attempting to cite HorsesAss.org as a credible source. I just don’t have the brand.

But apparently, PubliCola now does, and after only a year and a half of publication. Congrats Josh and Erica.

And to be fair, a little bit of self-congratulations to me, for while Josh et al downplayed my involvement in PubliCola’s startup for arguably good reasons, I put a lot of effort into getting it off the ground, and used HA to promote the hell out of it for its first year. To be absolutely clear, I’ve never had any editorial role in PubliCola, and I’m not always happy about the editorial direction they’ve taken — Josh is simply wrong a lot of the time — but I still believe PubliCola plays an important role in our local political media landscape that would remain unfilled without them.

And with this citation they’ve clearly proven that even relatively small scale new media ventures can quickly break the credibility monopoly formerly held by newspapers like the Times.

No doubt the entertainment industry has a lot of trepidation about the recently announced Google TV (though it sounds to me like Google is just building Android and Chrome into TV’s and set-top boxes, much in the same way that everybody expects Apple to put iOS into its unannounced iTV… I mean, if you’ve played with the NetFlix or ABC apps on an iPad, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything really new here)… but what really struck me from the LA Times article reprinted in today’s Seattle Times was this particular toss-away:

The prospect of Google getting into television frightens many in Hollywood, who worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just as the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries.

Yeah, um, except… what happened to the music industry and what happened to the newspaper industry are two entirely different things.

Music sales, in both units and dollars, rose steadily and healthily for decades before plateauing in the late 1990’s at about $17 billion annually. That’s when digital piracy, particularly the widespread popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing networks, started to take the legs out from under the industry. The dollar value of music sales has pretty much shrunk nearly every year since, to about $10 billion annually today, though thanks in large part to Apple’s iTunes, unit sales in 2009 reached an all time high.

Total paid U.S. newspaper circulation on the other hand had been relatively flat since about 1960, despite huge increases in population, and has been on the decline since the mid-1980’s, well before the market penetration of broadband Internet could have much of an impact on its business. Indeed, if any medium is to blame for stealing away paid subscribers, it is television not the Internet. And while readership has shifted dramatically from print to digital over the past decade, unlike the music industry, it wasn’t digital pirates who put the newspapers’ content free online, but the newspapers themselves.

Furthermore, there’s another huge difference between the music and newspaper industries, and the respective woes they face sustaining themselves in this new medium. While it is true that music industry revenues have continued to slide even as unit sales reach record highs, so too have their unit costs. Thanks to new digital technologies, the cost of recording an album is now a fraction of what it was just 20 years ago, while the cost of distributing a digital track has shrunk to virtually nil. If the old labels can’t figure out a way to exploit these new efficiencies to remain relevant in the new online marketplace, well, that’s their problem, and no real loss to artists who now have multiple means of promoting themselves to new audiences.

But newspapers haven’t benefited nearly as much from new technologies, for while the cost of delivering an online paper is, likewise, virtually nil, they’re still locked into the expensive, capital-intensive medium of print, regardless of how many fewer customers now purchase the print edition. As I’ve previously argued, the whole notion of an “online newspaper” per se is oxymoronic, for the industry’s entire business model is one based on the physical need to print and distribute paper. Absent this medium, much of what a newspaper does as an institution becomes unnecessary, and its legacy print edition becomes a financial drag on the organization as a whole, making it less competitive to newer, totally online competitors.

Indeed, it is reasonable to question whether most dailies can survive the shift from print to digital in much more than name only… which suggests the biggest difference between the music and newspaper industries, at least from the consumer’s perspective. Music labels publish and distribute the collective work of independent artists, whereas newspapers mostly create their own content via staff reporters. Thus if the large music labels were to suddenly collapse and disappear, few consumers would notice, as the new distribution medium is already mature enough to allow independent artists access to the marketplace. But if newspapers were to suddenly disappear there would be an equally sudden collapse in the amount of local journalism being produced… with potentially dire consequences for our democracy.

All the more reason why newspaper executives should not be allowed to absolve themselves of their own mistakes, simply by blaming the bulk of their industry’s woes on external forces.

I have to say that I have newfound respect for Clint Didier and his campaign after reading spokeswoman Kathryn Serkes response to Dino Rossi’s predictably mealy-mouthed evasion of Didier’s prerequisites for endorsement:

“So is Dino saying, ‘Fuck you’ to those people [who supported Didier]? ‘Fuck you, I don’t need your votes? I can win with 33 percent.’”

Ah, I love a woman who talks dirty to me, especially about politics. The BIAW’s equally foul-mouthed Erin Shannon better look over her shoulders, as she may have new competition for my unwanted affections.

The truth is, Rossi’s response was a “fuck you” to Didier and his supporters, and Serkes should be applauded for using the most accurately descriptive term available. This is the way real people speak, and while there are certainly times and places that demand more formal language, politicians and their spokespeople make a mistake by abandoning the vernacular in favor of vague politenesses. Voters crave authenticity, even if that comes with the occasional F-bomb.

Of course, such rhetorical bluntness is not without its risks, especially in a media landscape where the boundaries of public discourse are still rigidly defined by the sticks shoved firmly up the asses of the editors at our once-dominant  “family newspapers.” Indeed, back in May of 2004, in my very first post, it was a risk I clearly anticipated when I warned readers what to expect from HA:

Now I know some might find this split between the politically prankish Goldy and the politically earnest David a little arbitrary… or even weird. So to those upstanding members of the political and media establishment who insist I cannot possibly expect to maintain my credibility as an activist while producing an irreverent and outrageous blog, the Goldy half of me respectfully says: “fuck you.”

And I’ve been saying “fuck you” ever since, despite frequent admonitions from critics and fans alike that I would be taken more seriously, and reach a wider audience, if I would only clean up my language. But… you know… if folks can’t tell the difference between being serious and being solemn, well, fuck that.

Ironically, I don’t actually swear all that much. Of my 5,732 posts since May 10, 2004, only 336 have contained some conjugation of the word “fuck.” That’s less than six percent of my posts… fewer than five per month on average. In fact, despite my reputation for foul-mouthed muckraking, the bulk of my posts are neither.

But sometimes a “fuck you” is a “fuck you,” and no other euphemism would be quite as honest, so if politicians, spokespeople and other public figures seem more willing to speak truthfully theses days when speaking truth to power — even when the truth involves, say, calling a sitting state senator a “pig fucker” — then I hope my example has served to help raise the level of public discourse to a more accurate, truthful and honest level.

Deuteronomy 21:10-14
When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

Discuss.

Had I gone through middle school today, rather than during the dark ages of the 1970’s, there’s a good chance I would have been expelled, or quite possibly even imprisoned or institutionalized. Oh, not for anything I actually did, but for what I wrote.

By sixth grade I had left juvenile fiction behind, plunging headlong into the books that lined my parents shelves. I devoured authors and their oeuvres whole, starting with Kurt Vonnegut and moving on to J.P. Dunleavy, Philip Roth, and J.D. Salinger, before an astute clerk at a local bookstore directed me to the short stories of Harlan Ellison and a decade long passion for “speculative fiction.” I’m not sure I understood all of what I read — in fact, from subsequent re-readings, I know I didn’t — but there’s no doubt these authors had a huge impact on me and my writing, especially the numerous short stories I churned out between seventh and ninth grades, most of which remained unread by any eyes but my own.

I’d always had a taste for the absurd and the macabre, and inspired by the likes of Vonnegut and Ellison (not to mention the adolescent hormones running through my veins) my own stories sometimes tended toward the violent and the bizarre. While some stories were more mundane, others dwelled on murder, suicide and meticulously descriptive narrative of gruesome deaths, all juxtaposed against the banal routines of everyday life… in short, the ravings of an obviously disturbed child.

Except, I wasn’t disturbed. At least no more than your typical, suburban 14-year-old. No, in retrospect, what I was engaging in was a healthy cathartic outlet in which I could channel all my frustration, rage, depression, confusion, mania and whatever into brutal but harmless fiction.

But had my stories been discovered by school authorities in today’s paranoid climate — say, the one in which I imagined the intricate, Rube Goldberg-like demise of a hated teacher, or the one in which a seemingly happy and popular student unexpectedly lights fire to the locker room, with the football team locked inside — you can just imagine the response. Good chance the courts would be involved, as would the press, who would surely sensationalize the lucky prevention of another Columbine. Yet all I did — all I ever did — was imagine the worst, and put it down on paper. And in most cases, I wasn’t even imagining myself in the perpetrators’ shoes.

In his collection of short stories titled Shatterday, Ellison rails against the tendency of readers and critics to assume autobiographical hints, explaining that “writers take tours through other people’s lives.” Likewise, it wasn’t me who performed the horrific acts I chronicled, or who even wanted to perform them, it was my characters.

And in Roth’s The Ghost Writer, a character has tacked above his desk Gustave Flaubert’s advice to a young writer: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” This is advice that has stuck with me throughout my adult life, and which has been most fully realized in this blog, much to the consternation and confusion of my trolls and other readers who apparently lack the imagination and/or nuance to distinguish between the writer and his words.

At the time, I shared little of my most violent work, not because I feared how adults might react, but because I rightly feared that it wasn’t very good. (It wasn’t. I stumbled on one of my old notebooks a few years back, and found the stories to be overly ambitious and profoundly derivative.) But it never occurred to me that I might actually get in trouble for something I imagined; in fact I handed in the story about a teacher’s elaborate death to the teacher on which the main character was clearly based, and while he didn’t particularly like it, the only consequence I suffered was a rather middling grade.

Which brings me, convolutely, to the inspiration for this post, the news that Seattle Public Schools has established a new policy in which they can discipline students for content posted to public sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, “even if done at home on their private computers.”

“The safety of our students and the security of our students is our first concern,” said Teresa Wippel with Seattle Public Schools.

Wippel says the Seattle School Board voted yes for the measure so schools can respond to kids who may be planning something on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or by texting that will be disruptive.

But, what exactly is disruptive?

Wippel says, for example, a threat to fight another student after school, or bullying another student would be considered disruptive. But what if it’s a student saying something negative about a teacher? Is that free speech or is that disruptive?

“I think, again, that would be up to the principal to decide after he’s taken a look,” Wippel said.

So… is lovingly describing a teacher’s slow, excruciating death “disruptive”? I guess under the Seattle Schools new policy, that would be up to the principal to decide. In other words, hello Juvenile Detention.

But this new policy offends the child in me at a more fundamental, less paranoid level, for what is being presented as an anti-bullying measure is at it’s heart an assertion that children have no rights — no right to free speech, no right to free expression — even when exercised off campus. And since the determination of what is offensive, inappropriate or disruptive is somewhat subjective, individual principals will surely enforce this policy in a somewhat subjective and arbitrary manner… a particularly disturbing development in a world where so much speech now takes place online.

Take, for example, my own 13-year-old daughter, who has recently become an obsessive writer of fan fiction on a particularly bloody series of Japanese manga. She spends hours upon hours writing and rewriting new chapters before posting her work to FanFiction.net, where she is instantly rewarded with numerous comments and critiques. It is a medium that is as educational as it is gratifying, permitting her to hone her craft via constant and immediate feedback. I wish I had that opportunity when I was her age.

But what if a school official were to stumble upon her work and be shocked or offended by the violence she portrays, or the foul language that is common in the genre but totally inappropriate at school? What if the principal discovered that other students were joining in, writing reviews of my daughter’s fan fiction, and adding equally violent and foul-mouthed chapters of their own? What if the principal feared this activity was disruptive?

Fan fiction, like blogging, is an online, participatory medium… one in which you cannot engage without making your writing public. Surely I cannot warn my daughter to think twice before posting, out of fear of how teachers and principals might overreact, for how can any artist learn her craft while constantly looking over her shoulders? Of course, she can’t.

But that is the message the Seattle School Board is sending to all its students in enunciating its new, intrusive policy. It is one thing to develop policies to patrol and discourage bullying, but nobody benefits when these same policies are inevitably used to discourage free expression.

Yes, I know, the Supreme Court has repeatedly weighed in on this issue and determined that minors do not enjoy the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, and that yes, School officials can discipline students for expression that occurs off campus. But that doesn’t mean they should.

I’ve got an appointment this morning (apparently, it takes both parents these days, in person, to renew your child’s passport), so don’t expect much from me until after noon. So in the meanwhile, here’s your daily Daily Show.

Responding to an email query, King County Elections Communications Director Kim van Ekstrom reports that 9,300 new ballots were received at their Tukwila headquarters today, but only about 1,900 had postmarks that indicated they were mailed on time.

That strikes me as a pretty big number of late postmarks, and while they won’t be counted in the final results, they are useful when considering turnout as a reflection on voter enthusiasm, which looks to have been not all that bad. In fact, in both percentage and raw numbers, this primary looks to be second in turnout only to the 2004 primary, at least over the 12 years for which the county provides data online.

As for who is turning out in King County, it’s hard to say, but given the numbers in Eastside legislative races, it certainly looks to be skewing a bit more Republican than it has in recent years. That said, the best apples-to-apples comparison I can think of is 2008’s top two primary, which had only slightly lower turnout numbers, and in which Gov. Gregoire led Dino Rossi 60 to 31 percent. Patty Murray currently leads Rossi here 58 to 28 percent.

Gregoire went on to beat Rossi in November by a 64 to 36 point margin amongst King County voters. Make of that what you will.

Given the proper motivation — and I guess, lack of moral compass — I’ve always felt that I’d make an excellent terrorist. I’m both devious and technically minded, giving me the skills to mastermind an audacious attack, and have a flair for the dramatic that would surely be useful in extracting the maximum emotional impact.

Just call me by my new nom de guerre: Goldy al-Ḩmār.

And so in the spirit of computer hackers who expose security flaws in an effort to make our devices and networks more secure, I’ve decided to offer my own services to the Transportation Security Administration, free of charge, in an effort to make air travel as absolutely risk free as humanly possible. I mean, clearly, if the imminent threat of terrorist attack is so great that we must now irradiate our children before allowing them to board a flight, then TSA can surely use all the help it can get.

Remember, the goal here is to eliminate all risk, no matter how improbable, and no matter how expensive, inconvenient or irradiating the means. With that in mind, my first tip to TSA is:

Eliminate Web Check-In.

Web check-in, in which you check in and print your boarding pass from home, has proven a huge convenience and time saver for tens of millions of passengers, not to mention a big money saver for the airlines. But it’s another 9/11 just waiting to happen.

Assume for a moment that the TSA’s limit on liquids, gels and aerosols is based on legitimate security concerns rather than pure fantasy. Currently, such substances must be in containers no larger than 3.4 ounces, and all such containers must fit in a single, one-quart, zip-locked bag per passenger. Now assume that the TSA is actually capable of scanning for such substances, rather than like, say, when I recently returned from Vegas and forgot to remove the very visible 750 ml bottle of water from the mesh enclosure on the outside of my backpack, only to have it pass through the x-ray machine without comment.

Well, assuming liquids are potentially dangerous, and assuming TSA is capable of consistently screening them out, web check-in creates the opportunity for a team of terrorists to individually carry through security, and combine on the other side, dozens of 3.4 ounce bottles of liquid explosive… without even buying tickets for each member of the cell!

See, TSA doesn’t actually scan the bar code on your boarding pass like they do before you board the flight, they just look to see if it’s for today, and whether the name matches the name on your ID. So all an enterprising group of liquid bombers has to do is print one boarding pass, capture the image, and photoshop it to create and print additional boarding passes for each member of the cell. No cost, and no need to tip off authorities that a bunch of people with dangerous sounding names are all traveling from the same airport on the same day.

And secreting through security large quantities of liquid (or individually innocuous looking parts for some easily assembled weapon) is just one of the many nefarious things a terrorist might achieve via the fake boarding pass scam. For example, a terrorist on the watch list could simply purchase a ticket in somebody else’s name, and then photoshop the name on the boarding pass to match his own ID; the airlines and TSA would have no idea that this terrorist was even flying!

So while web check-in may be a welcome time and money saving convenience, as long as there’s even a vague risk of it being used as part of a terrorist plot, TSA has no choice but to shut it down and go back to the old system where we all waited in line for hours to check in.

For if Goldy al-Ḩmār can imagine it, so too can the real terrorists. And can we ever be too safe?

I’ll be on KUOW’s The Conservation today at about 12:40 PM to discuss the installation of pointless, stupid, dangerous full-body scanners at Sea-Tac… and I’ll do my best not swear on air.