It's pseudonyms all the way down for me.
I'm more worried about whether I should be worried about the new privacy policy than about bugs. Several people I know have deleted their accounts as a result, and can't tell if they're overreacting to a minimal change or if I'm overly sanguine about the potential for leakage.
I put bugger all information on my Facebook account, so I'm not too concerned about myself. If I actually used it "properly", I'd have left over the recent shenanigans.
I've refused to let FB have access to my email address book out of concern about what they'll do, and I never accept app access requests. I also have very limited information on my account, so a full leak would only reveal stuff that's already pretty much public information.
I really want a service that monitors my privacy, and I'd be happy to pay for it. Even just something that emails me with instructions on how to restore some modicum of privacy when FB or Google Buzz or whoever decides to spew my personal info all over the web would be nice.
What is the new privacy policy?
You are sitting on the toilet with your pants round your ankles, and they just took the door off. That sort of privacy.
I don't trust FB at all, and, paradoxically perhaps, while I haven't deleted my account, that's only because I don't ever use it. I basically just use it as a way to store contact information for a number of old friends. My profile is really only generic biographical information. I probably log into my facebook account about once a month.
If I actually used the website frequently, their various infractions (some deliberate, some egregious "bugs"--I'm not sure which is worse, honestly) would probably scare the hell out of me, and I think I'd stop using it.
5 is basically me, too. I use it assuming anything I put there might be seen by all my students and the rest of the world.
Also, via CCarp on the same buggy facebook, other websites can aggregate information from all kinds of crazy places and make it publicly available. Can these websites get into Facebook now? Probably.
5. Out of curiosity, why do you have an account then? I've never joined, largely due to privacy concerns but also because I have no inclination to use it 'properly'. Is it good for anything much?
There is very little I love more than reading about people's dissatisfaction with Facebook.
Is it good for anything much?
Scrabble, mostly.
Personally, I have a facebook account because without it I would not be in touch with anyone in other cities except family, and would never interact at all with people I don't already see in person regularly. It's had an incredible positive effect on my life and I have not yet detected any negative effect.
Relevant. As I alluded in 8, #4 strikes me as especially galling.
I like finding out about the weird interconnections in my social life. There have been 5 or 6 times when people I know from one thing know people I know from something else, and we might never find these things out if it weren't for facebook.
However, this isn't worth very much to me and I'm willing to give it up if the privacy stuff seems like serious business.
Personally, I have a facebook email account because without it I would not be in touch with anyone in other cities except family, and would never interact at all with people I don't already see in person regularly.
Works for me. I probably don't want as many casual acquaintances as you.
Is it good for anything much?
I like the amount of contact I have with students who have graduated, via Facebook. We don't have to have a correspondance. I can loosely hear that they're continuing to do okay.
I like to see photos and videos people post of their kids, that I wouldn't otherwise see. Helps me keep in touch with them.
I like the derivative Unfogged conversations that end up happening between you guys, over there, and other links people put up.
Like CN, I get much more benefits than drawbacks so far.
Out of curiosity, why do you have an account then?
This wasn't direct at me, but I'm in the same situation, so I'll answer: I had a friend who was almost impossible to reach any other way. Didn't answer his phone, didn't respond to emails, but was always on FB. I've had an account since 2004, and haven't found much other use for it. I don't even use it for Scrabble.
So, if I never use any applications, I'm safe from the Facebook Overlords, right?
weird interconnections in my social life
Yeah, it was odd to learn that someone from real life who's in no way aware of anything I'm up to in the blogging world is a mutual friend of an Unfogged regular (well, used to be around more regularly, but still drops by). Small world.
I have enjoyed FB a great deal, and usually find that people are more kind and thoughtful than I'd expect. There are good conversations, and it makes me miss my blog less. In professional matters, it's often a good way to continue to exist for people who might not otherwise remember me--people I've met at conferences or something who suddenly think of a panel they might want me on. And I love keeping up with former students that way; I don't always care about what's going on with all my former students, but I do sometimes wonder if so-and-so finally got her green card or whatever.
The drawback is that I'm a lot more sensitive about certain jokes or indecencies on FB than I am here, and I have deleted comments from people that would be perfectly funny if posted in a closed community. Lord knows I can be awfully indecent here, and even in the classroom, but FB requires at least a pinch of moderation.
Another drawback is my terrifying birther cousin who keeps trying to friend me. She's one of those ALLCAPS people. No thanks.
Yes, the privacy stuff really bothers me, but it hasn't gotten so bad that I want to quit yet.
Is it good for anything much?
At least in my circle, FB makes a really good social calendar. If I want to know what's happening locally on a given night or week, I look at FB. I don't care about all of the rest of the games and the contacting long lost classmates etc. The event notification I would be sad to lose.
Still, I'd leave in a minute if there were anything better than Facebook.
Social networking is good, but it would be nice to get Facebook, Inc. disintermediated from it. I'm waiting for the great peer-to-peer social networking technology to come along, so we can get away from Facebook as a big, obnoxious, privacy sucking central node.
Also, here is another Facebook privacy fuckup from today.
I'm with Brock, here. Something about Facebook rubs me the wrong way -- in theory it's not all that different from blogs, but in practice I'm bored and annoyed. And I don't have a circle of people I keep in touch with through Facebook.
So, I sort of hope that everyone abandons it because I think it'll make blogs livelier, but I'm not staying away out of privacy concerns, mostly.
I sort of hope that everyone abandons it because I think it'll make blogs livelier,
I definitely think that FB has deflated the blogs in a way I find sad.
I don't think of fb chat or email as private. It's clearly a really buggy site, and the incompetent information sharing/broadcasting by apps suggests that the people that run it either don't have clrear policy ideas in this sense, or can't implement them.
That said, it's a great way to keep in casual touch. Someone I hadn't heard from in a while contacted me this week, it was nice.
If I still had any applications installed I might be worried about the privacy-whatever-worries interacting with the application I used to have a lengthy conversation with someone as their secret admirer. Not using applications and not staying logged on when I leave the site makes wonder what to worry about.
I definitely think that FB has deflated the blogs in a way I find sad.
31: I was just looking for bave's post to link it.
30: How do you stay a secret admirer, rather than just an admirer, when you're emailing someone on FB?
33: It sounds like it was a secret admirer application.
Like, something that would let you send anonymous messages to your friends? I suppose that makes sense.
I just hope that Farmville continues to grow in popularity, because I can't say too many positive things about the application's positive effects in my life. And I don't even play it! I just love hearing about it that much.
36: Let the slash fiction begin! Oh, who am I kidding. I'm sure it's been out there for months.
31: It has deflated the blogs a bit. My blogger sister has taken most of her stuff to Facebook. As for me, I lack the focus to maintain a blog, but its pretty easy to post random shit on Facebook from time time.
That said, about 80% if my Facebook posts fall into either the category of "cute things my kid said/did" or "bitter complaints about how much the Orioles suck". So I don't think not having that on the blogosphere is any big loss.
It is about time for FB to be all toppy, isn't it? {sniff} {sniff} {sniff} {brightly} FUSION!
m, serious, but not desperate
Out of curiosity, why do you have an account then
Basically, because after a long period of resistance, I missed out on a couple of party invites from people who have stopped using email for social purposes. I almost never log in, because Facebook now sends me an email when I get an invite. Also, I have now trained most of my friends to send me emails as well as Facebooking.
I know for a fact that I'm missing invitations because I am not on Facebook. That's how it will have to be.
I've been spending more time on Facebook in the past few months than I had been for a long time before that, but since this latest privacy stuff I've cut back a lot. I also went in and tightened up my privacy settings. There's never been anything particularly damning about me on there, but I've decided it's probably best to err on the side of discretion. My interests were already public, so I didn't have the experience of having to choose to make them public or have them deleted, but I went ahead and deleted them anyway. I was starting to feel that having a list of interests was a bit too personal for what Facebook has become. I've always used it mostly as a sort of convenient online Rolodex, and now that so many people are on it I've been moving more toward using it that way exclusively.
I've thought about dropping my Facebook account, since in principle I think they're doing horrible things. But it turns out there are quite a few people I maintain a connection with mostly through Facebook -- old roommates, college friends, friends-of-friends whom I get along well with at parties but wouldn't call up to go for a drink just the two of us, etc. A somewhat richer social life is worth giving up a little privacy for, right?
42: See, missing invitations would kill me.
I don't love it, but they'll have to decide they want me to join them enough to find me where I am (which I don't think they'll do, since I don't think people are generally aware of what is missing) or I'll have to issue invitations or find more people. Two and three are do-able.
The worst thing about FB dependency is that I get a little annoyed with my few close friends who aren't on it. One of my closest friends refuses to get on it, and I feel like I'm constantly having to inform him about things I have already told "everyone." This feeling makes me a tool.
Yeah, I'm bad at issuing invitations and finding more people.
Dyadic withdrawal is great that way. Invitations?
Invitations are like pull-ups. The more you do, the easier they get. I recommend keeping in shape, in case one day you need to scale some scaffolding with conveniently placeed cross bars to foil a dastardly plan.
It's really remarkable how much Facebook has changed over the years. I'd say few if any of the changes were for the better.
I check Facebook, I don't know, probably about every other day. Used to be less until I started dating someone who uses it a lot, so now I have to check every so often to see if she sent me something on that for some reason rather than by e-mail. (Or text message or, maybe rarest of all, phone call. These are odd times we live in.)
Like someone else said upthread, I like how I can keep up with how people are doing without the delay and trouble of actually writing something and waiting for a reply. For contrast, I had a pen pal when I was in junior high and high school. All things considered I think I held up my end of the correspondence pretty well, and I certainly wanted to do it, and yet it was a constant struggle to sit down and write a letter even once every week or two. Without Facebook I'd keep in touch with maybe three friends in other states, maybe three times a year. With it I talk to more people than that more often (albeit not by all that much), and know generally what's going on with far more people than that, and they can do the same for me. And it has been cool finding serendipitous connections too. I don't spend too much time browsing it, but that's because of that "chat" window, through which any of my friends can say something to me at any time. They're friends, of course, but that can get annoying.
It probably helps that I was an early adopter of Facebook. I think I started before "apps" even existed for it, and I don't think I've ever used any. (Reading the article in the original post led me to check. On my "applications settings - recently used" list, I see seven things, and most of them are services I wasn't even aware were apps, like the event invitation thing and viewing peoples' photos.) That's not because of privacy concerns, but just because I don't have the mental space for it. As I always tell people when they invite me to Farmville or whatever the hell they're playing, Warcraft is all the addictive, absorbing, geeky online timesink I need.
All that being said, good god the stories linked in the original post and upthread suck. Suddenly I'm glad I don't use apps rather than faintly apologetic, and plan to avoid them rather than try one out even if it happens to look interesting. And I generally take a "don't worry about it" attitude to online privacy concerns.
People who know me already know I'm boring; I wish Facebook would stop trying to tell the rest of the world.
Warcraft is all the addictive, absorbing, geeky online timesink I need
what are you doing here?
Facebook is both tremendously useful and tremendously awful. Useful because you have so much more access to the lives of your friends and acquaintances, and so you don't miss barbecues, birthdays, parties and so on. Awful because it's a terrible way -- but is it the worst possible way? -- to find out that, say, a close friend's marriage or relationship has ended, someone you know is having a nervous breakdown (which their access to Facebook and a mobile compels them to document online in close-to-realtime), or someone you know has died. All those examples have happened so far this year, some of them multiple times; that more than privacy issues is what has me reconsidering whether I should be using it.
It's a reasonably surprising way to learn that somebody has switched genders.
I don't spend too much time browsing it, but that's because of that "chat" window, through which any of my friends can say something to me at any time. They're friends, of course, but that can get annoying.
You can turn that off, and I think it then stays turned off forever. I turned it off about one day after it first appeared.
Yeah, my Facebook experience became much more tolerable when I realized you could turn off the chat thing.
Somewhat related, I was startled by a GE commercial the other night. Patient in his underwear talking to doctor with his iPad like electronic medical record. "Have you ever been tested for __" asks the doc, and then the camera zooms out to an auditorium full of doctors. "In '89!" one such doctor shouts out. "Came back negative!" And then the voiceover says how great it will one day be to have all your medical info in one place, where doctors all across the country can access it with the click of a button! And I think, no, that would not be great at all! And the patient in the commercial squirms uncomfortably trying to cover up as he realizes all these people are observing what he thought was a private moment. And then I was just puzzled that GE was apparently obtuse to that detail.
I definitely think that FB has deflated the blogs in a way I find sad.
This. I've witnessed at least one blog/discussion list migrate to Facebook in such a way that it's no longer open, and is, frankly, dying as a result.
You can also turn chat off selectively by dropping people into groups. I had it figured out at one point.
57: You can? Fuck, I've gotta get on that...
Click on the "Chat" thing, then "Options," then "Go Offline."
I turned it off about one day after it first appeared.
Me too.
That is excellent. I was start to avoid it when I saw certain people (lovely people, mind you, just... not that lovely) turning up in the Chat window.
57: Yeah, as I wrote the comment I figured something like that must be possible, and I had never seriously looked for it at all. But I do like to use the chat system occasionally, here and there. Maybe I'll give that a try... but like I said, I don't want to get more into Facebook.
I seriously need to keep the distinction between blog chatter and FB chatter better in mind. A fundie FB friend linked some article on divorce and lamented about how all the heartache and pain of divorce was being concealed from these poor women... I couldn't help it. I trolled. She appears to have since ramped up her privacy settings as all but two bible verses have disappeared from her wall. Sigh.
I forget where Stanley posted that video of grilled cheese with cheese on the outside, but I just made one (with much less cheese, and, of course, stuffed with fresh tomato, arugula, and scallions) and it was delicious.
Question re: how "hiding works."
Say I hide my posts and wall from John Doe. John Doe can't see them when he clicks on my profile. My question is: does John Doe get notices in his news feed that I've posted something or that someone has written on my wall, even though he can't actually see the posts/wall on my profile?
I would add to bave's post (which comments on that post already did) that twitter has killed a lot of the good things about blogs. People go on and on about how it makes participation easier, but it makes commenting much more difficult. You write a comment on a post, it appears with the post; you write a reply on twitter, it's easily lost if it's not acknowledged (which it probably will be, especially if the poster has a lot of followers and you aren't well-known to them). You can still write replies to posts, but my general impression is that the comments to heavy-twitterers blogs pretty much suck and are dominated by tweets linking to the post - like a comment thread of trackbacks.
I deactivated my account. The Facebook people can go to hell. I've been using Twitter, IM, and IM status messages a lot more as a consequence.
You know what is THE BOMB, not that I've actually tried it? Getting a *.status.net site. Free optionally-private Twitters for everyone! You could register unfogged.status.net, say, and everyone with an identi.ca or status.net account could participate.
Or we could install the statusnet package and host our own Twitter-like thing on unfogged.com. You know, because the chat room worked out so well.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SEES ALL
(unless you protect your tweets, or delete them within six months, or something)
I'm a computer engineer by trade.
I've deactivated my account, specifically over privacy concerns. and I'm becoming convinced that I need to delete my facebook data to the extent that facebook implements this. I no longer trust fb in the slightest.
70 - that's the thing I like about Brightkite. One of my social circles is on there, and it is like mini-blogging. The initial post can only be 140 characters but then you can carry on threaded conversations and replies can be much longer. We were all on Twitter together back in 2007, and migrated from it when Twitter stopped sending tweets as texts.
It would be nice if one of the computer engineers could explain what's so frightening about Facebook, compared to, say, Gmail. Or is Gmail even more frightening but we're all compelled to use it?
Everything is frightening, but we are each sensitive to different fears.
I am unimpressed by the spectre of having my "likes" and "dislikes" sold to corporations. OMG, I'll get ads in my browser. I already get ads in my browser, and I always ignore them. Now I'll get ones that don't assume I am a divorced father of two who just bought a house and several bars of gold and wants to go back to school for an associate's degree. Maybe that'll actually improve my life.
I do not get ads in my browser. For a brief time, I switched to Chrome and didn't have AdBlock, and was assaulted by all kinds of offensive ads created by my interests on Facebook. Despite my other problems with Firefox, I had no interest in using the internet if all it was going to do was make fun of me for being single and suggest ways to lose weight.
I think you're giving Facebook too much credit here. I get ads making fun of me for being single and suggesting ways I could look more like the thin women in the ads as well.
The fact that Gmail's ads bothered me less was, I suppose, just a sign that they were scouring my private email so thoroughly that they knew exactly what would not irritate me.
77: It isn't engineering, its public relations. Google is much better at making you feel like everything they do is to make things more convenient and easy for you. Mostly, they do this by not introducing jarring changes or suddenly deleting your data. Also, with the exception of the Wave debacle, they haven't shared information in a way that has personally hurt or embarrased individuals who can tell their story on the net.
The Wave debacle, or the Buzz debacle.
when Twitter stopped sending tweets as texts.
Huh? I still get tweets as text messages (do the UK folks call these SMSs?). Or did you mean something else. I'm not very good at understanding the purpose of Twitter, I should add.
Fb is the only way I can find out when soon-to-be famous drummers are playing in my area.
Facebook is boiler-room scam artists. Gmail is Goldman Sacks.
It's a question of competence and scale to me. Google buzz made me kind of nervous-- it seems like there is in fact a single google account (blogger, gmail, picasa, buzz), with google choosing screwy views of the data. I think google's retaining control, though, in contrast to fb.
87: See, once again that does not give any sort of explanation for what people should actually be scared of.
From what I gather, it seems like that scares some people about Facebook is tied to the Facebook function. When it goofs, it does so in front of people you know. There was something about a poll yesterday that showed people's faces next to who they voted for. When it reveals something or other by accident, it is to your known stalker. The privacy implications are within your social group, not to corporations, who own us all anyway and we just hope that we're too lowly for them to notice.
88: I had a thing where I'd signed up for a Blogger account, because I needed it to comment on Blogger blogs, and somehow google linked it up with my realname gmail account, meaning that I was, or may have been, I'm not sure giving out my real name to anyone with a Blogger blog I commented on. Now, better management on my part would have avoided it, but I didn't want it to happen, and I certainly never affirmatively told Google to use my realname email in relation to blog comments.
That's the kind of thing I worry about -- that Google will do something to make my life easier, and I won't realize that it links things I wanted to be unlinked, and gives people info I didn't want them to have.
Yeah, I had to stop commenting on all Blogger blogs that asked for the Google/Blogger account in order to do so. That was pretty annoying. I guess real hard-core blog commenters are supposed to set up a special account just for that.
The Wave debacle, or the Buzz debacle
I actually can't remember which is which now.
Blogger™ bloggers who care deeply about the privacy of their commenters allow anonymous comments. Of course, this means a fair amount of spam comments, but it seems to pile up on two particular posts in the case of my Blogger™ blog, so it's not too annoying to deal with.
and somehow google linked it up with my realname gmail account, meaning that I was, or may have been, I'm not sure giving out my real name to anyone with a Blogger blog I commented on.
This sort of thing is my big fear. Similarly, I was getting photo links sent to my Real Name email account, say from my brother, and then if I went to Flickr or Picasa or whichever one, I'd be logged in as Heebie Geebie, which freaked me out. Hence different browsers for my different personalities.
Yeah, any specific instance is something you can work around, but the problem is that google's linking stuff up and handing it around without you asking it to. To be sure you're not giving out information you don't want to, you have to be paying close attention to everything you do.
Something that worries me a bit is that somewhere, someone (not Facebook) will do a Deja News-type thing where archived information* from Facebook is re-presented with better search, linkage and accessibility. Given the frequent changes to the security scheme, even folks who keep after have probably had periods of time where more of their info was "open" than they would like.
*I have no idea to what extent Facebook is crawled by third-parties.
Dead thread, but this is fun. Especially the Venn.
A somewhat richer social life is worth giving up a little privacy for, right?
I find Facebook a pretty perfect medium for my social existence -- I like to have weak but affectionate connections to lots and lots of people, and want those relationships to require very little maintenance.
I have yet to understand in any visceral way how the privacy concerns affect me. I realize that plenty of people have real sensitivities about this sort of thing, but I'm not one of them, and I don't see any organized boycott or action in their interests.
As far as things that only people who spend too much time on the Internet care about, I'm much more open to the Jonathan Zittrain critique of the future of the internet -- iPhone and iPod as closed systems that betray a fundamental promise of interactivity in computing. Though this may change once I can afford an iPad or an iPhone. (I tell myself that Droid will catch up. I tell myself.)
85 - Twitter stopped sending texts (and some people that I don't know may call them SMS's - it says that on my phone - but I don't) to British phones in 2007 or 8 because to do that cost them too much money. So this particular group of friends stopped using Twitter and moved to Brightkite because we wanted constant access to hearing what each other was doing. And then BK stopped it too, because it cost too much. But BK is much easier for conversations, so we stayed anyway. Now, Twitter does again offer the option to send texts - initially just with Vodafone, though perhaps with other networks too now - but I don't have that set up because the people I follow on Twitter has changed a lot from being just personal friends. And now everyone has the internet on their phones anyway, so it's not even an issue.
I don't think it ever changed in the US because you pay to get texts or something weird?
because we wanted constant access to hearing what each other was doing
See, this is weird to me.
I don't think it ever changed in the US because you pay to get texts or something weird?
We do pay to get texts, yes.
100 - I was kind of exaggerating for comic effect. And at the time the novelty was also appealing. But this is a group of 10-15 close friends who are scattered all over the country and I really like being able to keep up with the minutiae of their lives. Being able to mutter "bloody kids" and have people hear and sympathise, is nice.
One of the group has just had a baby who sadly was not well at all and died at 11 days old. She said being able to be in touch with so many friends whilst being stuck in hospital was incredibly comforting. Her first baby was born 12 years ago with a cleft palate, and she spent a couple of weeks in hospital with her when she was born, and said that that was so isolating and lonely that this time round was almost easier to cope with.
We do pay to get texts, yes.
I don't understand why? You don't pay to receive a phone call, do you? (I think I do if someone phones my mobile from another country.)
You don't pay to receive a phone call, do you?
Under some circumstances, yes. Generally if you've gone over the number of minutes provided by your plan in a month. Happens less than it used to, since they now give you more minutes as part of the plan.
102: I absolutely understand that need (and thought you might be exaggerating just in general). My sympathies to your friend.
Back in the olden days -- say, three years ago -- groups of close friends in my own realm kept in touch via email discussion lists, accessible only by those who were subscribed. Updates, often lengthy, sometimes ponderous, not infrequently funny as hell, as well as general chatter were conducted there. I've seen such networks die down, and I regret it. Facebook offers an alternative venue if everyone is willing to be on Facebook, but everyone is not. And let's face it, the way I might talk to *those* friends is not remotely the way I would talk to those other friends.
Twitter? 140 characters? Are you kidding?
I will say, having just checked in to Facebook:
You know what I think is silly? This so-and-so "likes" [thumbs up] thing. Use your words, people.
Liking is handy when you don't want to get an email for every update to the thread. You know "Amanda passed her oral exams!!!" is going to get 9,000 identical "Congratulations!" comments, so liking is a nice way to be counted among the well-wishers without getting emails.
Do you not get the e-mails from just "liking" something? I seem to recall still getting them, but it's been a while since I "liked" anything. There's probably some way to adjust the settings, I guess.
I think Amanda would like to know that I knew, and was happy for her. Also, I can talk to her in person and ask her details about the process in private, now that I know she passed. Any more than that on FB, where we are both friends with two of our committee members in common, might be sensitive information.
Anyway, I like the "like" feature, and attempts to electronically emulate non-verbal communication in general. Thinking of the right words is often difficult.
110: I get emails from follow-up comments, which I like, but not from likes, which I also like. I don't know if this is a setting that I made for myself, but I do feel like it changed at some point.
I have noticed that I don't get e-mail notifications when people like something I post, but do get notifications when people comment.
I get emails if I "like" someone's post. But I'd imagine this could be turned off.
111: Yeah, I'd just skip the "like" function in that case, and write to her privately anyway -- that's actually what I do when some has important news to impart. The "like" thing isn't a big deal, but it seems kind of rote.
when someone has important news to impart, that is.
I have yet to understand in any visceral way how the privacy concerns affect me.
Yeah, me either. But I've maintained a fairly open-book online persona all along.
I know Saturday night is a terrible time for talking politics, but I just saw this article on the cumulative costs of the war and I have to say: Wow is it surreal. Talk about a remarkable reminder of how narrowly even the liberal side of the mainstream political conversation is counting the war costs.
I mean, it doesn't mention -- even in passing -- opportunity costs for the US military. When you think of the human ingenuity and time and effort and skill that was diverted by our decision to launch this war, it's stunning.
It doesn't mention immediate indirect effects on military families. Showing charts of the injured and wounded without a deeper examination of what those costs mean seems really superficial.
I mean, to say RAND estimates 20% of American troops with traumatic brain injuries? TWENTY PERCENT? And then not to discuss the fallout of that -- not merely in VA hospital costs, but in parents caring for adult children, in marriages strained or broken, in children affected by injured or absent parents. Or longer-term, in soldiers someday later killed by a SWAT team because having your brains shaken up inside your skull does crazy things to your impulse control and ability to relate interpersonally that we're just barely beginning to figure out.
It doesn't explore what it means to say there are 2.6 million displaced people. And that can't be because the world doesn't have reams of research literature on the experience of involuntary displacement, including displacement for people who were living relatively urbanized, educated, professional, privileged lives before their displacement.
It doesn't explore the short-term and medium-term environmental costs -- the sheer pollution of the number of excess private and military flights going into and out of that part of the world for the last seven years; the phenomenal local environmental impact of the scale at which the US military operates (food waste, toilet waste, and shipping containers alone must have generated tons upon tons of waste -- is it all just getting buried in the desert?); the metals and other chemicals that are the ordinary byproducts of modern war; the known (not counting the unknown) costs in maternal and fetal health and mortality....
I read something like this and I think it has to be that I am misunderstanding. It has to be that this is a political chess move rather than an attempt at actual analysis. It has to be that analysts at a liberal think tank like this think (perhaps rightly) they will not be taken seriously if they look beyond these narrow confines and raise up the other costs for discussion.
Is that it? Are there other factors I am not considering? Am I misreading the intent of the article?
'Cause if not, I'm having some mighty uncharitable thoughts right about now.
Back on topic:
I have yet to understand in any visceral way how the privacy concerns affect me.
To me the major concern is how effortless it makes aggregating little facts that by themselves are fairly meaningless, but taken together give an extremely detailed picture of one's life and daily habits.
I mean, a close reader of comments here would be able to figure out roughly where I live, where geographically I work, how I travel to and from there, and some major hobbies/activities I'd be likely to do on weekends. I'm more or less OK with that, not least because it takes a fair amount of paying attention over a period of time.
But if you aggregated, say, my letters to the editor and my public tax/property records and my signed-up-six-years-ago membership in an online hobby group and my posted-online-because-that's-how-they-encourage-you-to-complain comments about the local transit system...all of a sudden you could make a very good educated guess about exactly where I am likely to be at various times of the day, and my route for getting there. And THAT feels unnerving.
Maybe it's because yet again today at work, a patron insisted on knowing my (first) name. There's really no way around it, other than outright denial. I've been lucky enough never to have anyone actually fixate on me, but I've watched it happen to others and it isn't fun.
It isn't analysis Witt it is advocacy, and takes place at that level because you can't get votes with details.
120: And yet we're still all puzzled by exactly what you do for a living. Ninja librarian is close, but not quite.
121 sounds right. It looks like exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from an explicitly ideological think tank like CAP: fairly superficial, based mostly on easily obtainable data, and short.
OK, taking 121 and 123 as correct, then, what is the goal? I mean, what are they advocating for? Whose votes do they want to support what?
Or is it just an attempt to establish bona fides so that they get called on by the media? I don't meant this dismissively; there's real value in positioning yourself as a go-to person for media commentary from Position X on Topic Y.
Or is it just an attempt to establish bona fides so that they get called on by the media? I don't meant this dismissively; there's real value in positioning yourself as a go-to person for media commentary from Position X on Topic Y.
Mostly this, I'd think (note the media contacts displayed prominently at the bottom of the page).
120.last is interesting. It seems like in some sense jobs that involve interacting with the largest cross section of the general public also tend to be the ones where one can maintain the most privacy. Conversely, things I do at my job tend to be very public, but only an insignificant fraction of the population cares.
124 --
The point is to provide journalists with a quick one-pager on how much the war cost. That is important because we are about to see an inevitable run of stories about how we "won" the Iraq war because we are leaving and Iraq looks kinda sorta like a functional democracy.
I thought CAP did a pretty good job, although I was surprised at the low numbers they used for Iraqi body count.
122 -- At this point, I am convinced the hints Witt drops about her job and activities are part of an ongoing false flag operation. I believe she is in fact a male officer in Pakistani military intelligence.
I'm trying to suss out the stat that 20% of returning soldiers have traumatic brain injury, because the citation is a little vague. The stat right before it is about PTSD rates, and has a footnote to an exact page in a RAND literature review. The traumatic brain injury stat is also credited to that review, but gets no footnote or page number. On page 92 of that review, they say that they found two peer reviewed studies of TBI, which report 8% and 15% TBI rates. The other sources they list after that are, by RAND's description, vague and unreliable.
Also weird: 4% of servicemen who are not deployed report TBI. For these studies, TBI means getting hit on the head hard enough that you lose consciousness, become disoriented, or suffer memory loss. That's not exactly Massive Headwound Harry, but I doubt 4% of the people at your workplace can report getting that sort of injury recently.
because we are leaving
Wait, we are? Really?
(Note to lurkers: 122 and 127.last are LB and Halford trying to make me feel better about privacy; if not even the regulars remember that my weekend gig is public library reference work, then I'm golden Russ Barnes.)
Oh, I missed this the first time through:
According to the U.K. Maplecroft research group, Iraq is the most vulnerable country in the world to terrorism.
I guess they're bracketing out Somalia as not a country...?
Oh, Witt, you have different weekday and weekend jobs? This resolves so much confusion for me.
128: why is htat weird? People being trained how to use explosives, high tech weaponry, vehicles, etc are going to have accidents.
And while i woudl guess without even cursory level of knowledge that the military wants minimize costs from losing highly trained solders/marines/etc, its also not friendly to pansy OSHA concerns.
I guess they're bracketing out Somalia as not a country...?
Sounds more like they're saying that Iraq is more vulnerable to terrorism than Somalia is.
They're trying to get numbers out there that are not easily rebutted by "no it's not." Anchoring plus the value of the "accorrding to DOD" or "coun the death certificates" equals superficial factsheet type "reports."
124
... what is the goal? ...
The goal seems fairly explicit, to diminish support for the war. This means arguments which will appeal to conservatives, something liberals have trouble with.
129 is a pretty lame attempt to hide the fact that 122 and 127.last are both true. The fact that Pakistani intelligence has ninja librarians in its employ is much scarier than the fact that they have a nuclear weapon. A nuclear bomb is too-crude of a tool to use for much of anything except deterrence. But deploy a team of ninja librarians, and you can do anything. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but neither is mightier than those pen/sword combos ninja librarians use.
The ninja librarian's response to a noisy patron? "Shhhh..uriken!"
129 also raises a disturbing possibility: Witt may only be a ninja librarian in the employ of the Pakistanis on weekends.
131 simplifies things for me as well. What I've been stuck on was the combination of reference librarian and someone providing social services at an upper managerial level -- if those are two different gigs, it's not confusing at all.
Yes. The librarian costume goes underneath the social services one. But, with disappearing phone booths, the transitions have got to be tricky.
Since the mix thread has gotten pushed off of the front page, I'm just gonna slap this up here. Not sure exactly how to classify it except for Southern.
Holler
01 Graceland McCollough Tigers - Matthew 7:7
02 Drive-By Truckers - Drag the Lake Charles
03 Southern Bitch - Get Ready
04 Snatches of Pink - Rocks
05 Scott H. Biram - Wildside
06 Jim White - Combing My Hair in a Brand New Style
07 Hellwood - God's Back Pocket
08 Black Diamond Heavies - Smooth It Out
09 Left Lane Cruiser - Get Me Free
10 Steve Earle & The Del McCoury Band - Carrie Brown
11 Hayes Carll - She Left Me for Jesus
12 The Weight - A Day in the Sun
13 Delta Moon - Low Country Boil
14 Cary Hudson - Mad, Bad, and Dangerous
15 Wild Sweet Orange - House of Regret
16 The Everybodyfields - Tuesday
17 Blanche - What This Town Needs
18 The Legendary Shack Shakers - Somethin' in the Water
19 Lucero - Sixes and Sevens
20 Ray Wylie Hubbard - Choctaw Bingo
142 -- Love it. And I never properly thanked you for Apomerica, which is also great.
The funk ones are incredible, too, but everyone already knows that. I feel like the Americana/Southern Soul stuff gets less love.
(Still dowloading the mixes from the other thread).
Thanks, RH. That batch of mixes in the other thread is full of win.
Since the mix thread has gotten pushed off of the front page, I'm just gonna slap this up here.
This would be more sympathetic coming from someone who didn't have the power to create brand new front page posts out of thin air.
Didn't think it really merited an entire new thread.
It's a great mix, though. (I haven't downloaded it, but I recognize enough of it to say that confidently.) I'm just worried it will get insufficient notice way down here in the basement of the comments.
Didn't think it really merited an entire new thread.
03 Southern Bitch - Get Ready
04 Snatches of Pink - Rocks
I'm really tired and I ran these lines together to get "Snatches of Bitches" (if my tired brain were more clever it would have run them together to get "Snatches of Bitches - Get Ready to Rock").
I like that Jim White song.
Have you (or anybody, I suppose) seen the sorta-documentary he narrates, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (trailer 1, trailer 2)? I have some criticisms about its message and execution, but it's quite beautifully shot and the soundtrack is swank.
I just encountered a Facebook profile that listed as TV-watching preferences "turn off the TV and go outside!" and Wife Swap.
I haven't seen it, no. I suspect I'd like most of the music but my impression has been that its message is something like "the South sure is weird!".
Well, it's all focused on a certain (relatively small and shrinking) sub-culture as being the "real" south, which is silly. But it's still worth checking out. Can't go wrong with Harry Crews cameos.
154: I prefer to save time by watching YouTube videos of Jesco White.
The Tap-Dancing Bandit! Loves the Jesco.
Question: How do you turn off the thing where facebook trolls your e-mail address book for contacts?