How I view Ann Coulter

"Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America"...the title of her new book. In this book she puts forward ideas such as liberals embrace "contradictory ideas" and that liberal thought is the result of "mob behavior". I will admit that I have not read the book and will some day venture to read one of her books. But regardless of my not having done so, I believe I can still critique her ideas and behavior and from that critique understand the very deliberate strategy she is pursuing through them. This strategy is not new. Ann Coulter is a provocateur. Her words are constructed to be as sharp as possible with the intent of eliciting strong counter-reactions. This type of provocation is often brought against those who are more broad-minded, or "liberal." The intent is to push the limits of their personal tolerance of criticism (by being unabashedly rude and abnoxious) to get them to abandon their general willingness to listen to differing ideas and modes of thought. This way of intellectually approaching the world (the "liberal" way) is often characterized in several ways by the opposition: weak, wishy-washy, "liberal" (apparently this alone is now a derogatory word) but I think these criticisms passover an inherent characteristic of the "liberal" approach: diversity is strength. And while Ann Coulter may attempt to analyze liberal thinking as a single strain of thought pulled in every direction by conflicting ideas, there is no single strain of thought. There is no single, totalizing mode of analyzing the world around us that we know of yet.  The ability, and willingness, to neglect and throw aside the unknown (or fail to extract and pick apart the details of the known-yet-rejected) is a fundamental weakness. It is either intellectual laziness or hubris and in Ann Coulter's case, I say hubris. And in the liberal tradition (as oxymoronic as that sounds) - we cannot cling falsely to our ideals, which is to say - we must always analyze and challenge our ideals: "convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies" (Nietzsche - "Human, all too Human"). This is not embracing "contradictory ideas" - to listen and make an attempt to understand is not "to embrace", it is to reason; to rationalize. And this quality of man has been what has made him great. But despite this deliberate effort to piss people off by being flat-out uncivil (not pulling an Ann Coulter here...look it up: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/uncivil), I will turn this into a Rogerian Argument. A weakness of liberal thought is that in its search for more knowledge and greater understanding it often leaves out the progress that has been made and what is right about the current state of things. It has a tendency to explicitly neglect honoring the past (I've italicized "explicitly" because I feel the honor is implicit in the act of trying to refine one's understanding and continue to improve upon the present). Western civilization has accomplished a great deal in terms of maximizing human freedom and material abundance. The United States has often been a nation that works in favor of these ends. The United States is a great nation, one that I have served and am proud to be a citizen of, but it is our duty to scrutinize and continuously attempt to improve ourselves regardless of our successes or fatigue. So in honor of the liberal tradition, I take Ann Coulter's words in stride. While I feel that anger is an important human emotion, the reckless and irresponsible use of it is wrong; to demonize (a cliche word, yes, but I use it here because the title of her most recent book literally uses the word "Demonic"), another without making an effort to define them in non-biased terms first (or ever for that matter?), is wrong and dishonest. It is a great disservice for public debate and (in an ironic reversal), a great disservice to the past. 

Playing with the fan

This totally reminds me of being a kid. Sitting by the fan and being entertained by the way it made my voice sound

Having Fun with Gnome 3

I have been digging into Gnome 3 on Arch and want to talk about some of the cool things I have discovered while getting accustomed to it. Being a developer, here are a couple of links that I have found to be very useful about Looking Glass (Gnome's new Firebug-like developer tool), a Gnome Shell cheat sheet, and a link to some extensions that have been written to extend the Gnome Shell.

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/LookingGlass

Screen-cast of Looking Glass in action (though not too much action):

See that screen-cast...yeah I took that with a new easy-to-use integrated screen-casting feature. Press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R to start and stop the screen-cast. You'll see a recording symbol at the bottom right of the screen. That shortcut along with several others can be found here:


https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet

along with other fun stuff. Another really cool detail about Gnome 3, especially if you're a web developer like me, is that you can now extend Gnome with Javascript and CSS. I think this alone will generate TONS of new third-party features and extensions given a bit of time. Here are some links for extension development:

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions
http://blog.fpmurphy.com/2011/04/gnome-3-shell-extensions.html

You can checkout the extensions in the public gnome extensions repository by running this:

git clone git://git.gnome.org/gnome-shell-extensions


Instructions to install them are included here:
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions


Note though that if you want to hack on an extension, in order to see your changes you must restart the Gnome Shell. Very easy though, hit "Alt-F2" enter "r" and bam!!! It's restarted. Happy Hacking!!!

Tidy up XML with Perl

I've really been trying to hone my Python skills and thought this would be a great opportunity to take on a small task and do just that. But after having a difficult time finding documentation and examples that were worth anything for TidyLib, I resorted to my weapon of choice - Perl. Working on another project, I just wanted something to properly indent insanely long strings of XML. The small script can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/davidcollins4481/MyTools/blob/master/XMLTidy.pl

Being a Linux and Gnome user, I added support for it to be used as a nautilus script. Throw it in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts and you can right click on a file and tidy it up without having to open up the command-line.

Pithos For Android!

Hoping to get a port of Pithos, an awesome gtk-based linux client for Pandora, up and running. For anyone unfamiliar with the software development process, developing software takes time and patience. So please be patient when it comes to waiting for an initial release.

Will the Supreme Court Rule on Health-Care Reform? - Newsweek

Will the Supreme Court Rule on Health-Care Reform? - Newsweek

For quite a while now, the right has been arguing against the constitutionality of the new healthcare law passed in March 2010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act). The crux of the argument against it's constitutionality is the individual mandate (the federal requirement that an individual must purchase health insurance through a private company). Now despite the degree to which I disagree with many of the details that finally made it into the law, I have to say that I disagree that it is unconstitutional. The recent ruling in Florida (full text here) bases it's central argument around this:

"At issue here, as in the other cases decided so far, is the assertion that the
Commerce Clause can only reach individuals and entities engaged in an “activity”;
and because the plaintiffs maintain that an individual’s failure to purchase health
insurance is, almost by definition, “inactivity,” the individual mandate goes beyond
the Commere Clause and is unconstitutional" [page 13]

Now before I address the lack of precedent mentioned in the ruling when it comes to distinguishing between "inactivity" (supposedly the position on the right) and "activity" (supposedly the position on the left) I would like to comment about how I personally believe that one's "inactivity" (the choice to not buy insurance) is actually (in modern society) an "activity". And not surprisingly, my argument does not stray very far from many of the arguments made during the health care debate. A person's lack of health insurance costs other people money. Now whether or not you believe that this "lack" constitutes an "inactivity" or an "activity", no one can dispute this cold hard economic fact. Even though I am involved in a strictly private health insurance market (a large source of my discontent over the final bill), I am subject to the expenses involved in taking care of others and these costs emerge from within this same private market without my consent. I am not free, in an abstract sense, from the obligation to pay for others and I hardly believe that even the staunchest of the laissez-faire crowd believes that a civilized society without this obligation would be a better place (if so, I hear the rent is cheap in Somalia!)...but I digress. The point is that there are many cases when a persons negligence is considered an action in itself, or to word this in a way that may help you conjure up a few examples of your own: there are many cases (even at the federal level) where you are not allowed to not do something. Anyone try not paying their federal taxes? Taxation is not commerce, yes, but this principle can be applied to a myriad of issues to varying degrees. This may seem ironic - that I (a social/modern liberal) am complaining about paying for others.  I have thought about this quite a bit. Why on the one hand do I mind my premiums being high because I have to pay for the uninsured, yet on the other I fight for the institutions of our welfare state such as Medicare and Medicaid (which I pay into)? I find the answer to that question in this fundamental belief of mine: the weak and unable should be protected and the able should contribute their share. We can fuss and fight about where these two groups end and begin, but to allow those who are able to insure themselves continue to put it off at our expense, like a welfare cheat, they are burdening society with their irresponsibility. I have serious doubts that many disagree with this reasoning. At least regarding people buying health insurance so others won't suffer the cost in their premium payments. Is the other side really so idealistic that they believe the system comes before the people rather than the system existing for the people, or is this ruling just complete partisanship at its worst?

Where's the bourbon?

I've been really into drinking bourbon. I've gotta slow down though, had a rough night earlier this week:

(embedding was disabled)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SB086e1QeJY