This Bears Repeating, Apparently

From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago":

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). ... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter…

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

The Ugliness of Free Speech

Although the United States Supreme Court today upheld a minority group’s First Amendment rights to free speech, you won’t hear many people cheering about it. Because, in a Myrna Minx, “Confederacy of Dunces” moment, the victory is for the right message coming from the wrong people.

The right message isn’t the hate that the Westboro Baptist Church spews – its most recent schtick is to protest at military funerals because the military is fighting to defend a country that “supports” homosexuality. The right message is that free speech – even speech that is ugly and unpopular – is protected under the First Amendment.

That’s pretty much what Chief Justice John Roberts says in his majority opinion on the matter (the justices voted 8-1 in this case) according to CNN.com:

Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and -- as it did here -- inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.

This case in particular had to do with Westboro protesting at a military funeral in Maryland. The father of the soldier sued, won in a lower court, but then lost at the Supreme Court level. The protesters were on public property, but not immediately adjacent to the section of the cemetery where the funeral was taking place.

Per CNN.com, Only Justice Samuel Alito disagreed with the majority:

He said the church's “outrageous conduct caused petitioner great injury, and the court now compounds that injury by depriving petitioner of a judgment that acknowledges the wrong he suffered,” he said. “In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims like petitioner.”

If you want to live in a country that tolerates free speech, you have to live in a country that tolerates free speech. This is precisely why Arayan nation-type groups held parades in various cities in the Idaho Panhandle, and precisely why those who don’t agree with their message attend the parades but turn their backs to it. We have to take the bitter with the sweet.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints see the ugliness of free speech exercised just about twice a year when protesters  show up at the church's biannual conferences to wave signs, scream, rant and rave and such. The church has also chased some protestors, including those protesting against the church's stand on homozexual marriage, off of church property. For the most part, the protests and protestors are ignored, as they should be. Should they be shut down? No.

Why I'll Never Buy an iPod Touch App

A few months ago, I was nearly convinced that I needed to buy my first iPod Touch app.

App developers have a cunning strategy: Offer a free version of an app as an enticement to folks like me who are, shall we say, cheap bastards, to tantalize us with the shiny buttons and nifty gewgaws they have created. Once hooked, it should be a simple thing to reel us in to buy the paid app to "unlock' new "features" in order to enhance our iPod experience, postpone the Rapture and otherwise make the Venkman Postulation* come through for the app developer.

But I stepped back from the abyss. I did not buy that vaunted app, nor, as I think about it, am I likely to ever buy an app unless one comes out that truly puts the magic into that iPod Touch. Here's why:

The Internet has already taught me that everything is free. And thanks to the free versions of the apps people offer, I will continue to enjoy my freeloading life as long as humanly possible. You've aided and abetted my freedom for free by offering the free versions of your apps. Good job!

Free apps help me avoid buyer's remorse. We've all been there and can mostly agree that it's not the having that's fun, it's the getting.A few months ago, I was nearly convinced that I needed to buy my first iPod Touch app. But now we can get and have our cake too, with free versions. That app I really wanted, the one I thought I'd buy? I let the free app sit on my iPod Touch for a few weeks, then used it again. I still really enjoy it. But do I need to pay for the full version? No, I do not. I can have the fun with the free app without paying the piper.

Something else free will always come along. It's not that I have a short attention span. Far from it. But if I really want to buy an app, I hold off. I experiment with a few more free apps. I find the entertainment I want without paying for it. Wheee! If I get to the point I want to buy something, I sample something else. Never have to spend a penny.

Ads? Guilt-inducing messages? Who cares? Sure, one game I have uses what could be handy playing space to display ads. Sure, other apps I use pop up annoying messages (some of them even titled "Annoying Message") telling me I should really, really buy the full version of the app if I want the developer to continue producing such wonderful material. I say: Meh. If not you, then someone else will produce what I need. Even with the really unique applications that only one person is producing. If you want people to pay for what you make, then charge for it. Putting these little annoying messages in or putting up ads doesn't drive the guilt factor here. Nothing to see. Move along.

If your app is so unique, why are there six like it in the store? Conversely, there are those who create a really wonderful app that, when you get right down to it, is practically the same as apps already offered in the store or apps that came with the iPod Touch to begin with. For example, I know some folks who have just created a stopwatch app. Now, it has a cool circular dial just like Jeffe's stopwatch, but let's face it -- if you want a stopwatch or a lap timer or alarm, you know, those features are (whisper) already there. Hope they weren't planning on charging for their app.

I harp a lot on app makers here. But have I ever made one myself? No. But soon I'll be involved in making one. Which we'll offer for free, because we're much more interested in creating a mobile application for our travel website than we are in making money from the app itself. Would we ever offer a paid app? Possibly. But you can bet I'll make sure it's downright magical before we do.

*"The franchise rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams."

Religion in the Public Sphere

Heard part of this talk again on the way home from work tonight. This really struck me:

In choosing my subject I have relied on an old military maxim that when there is a battle underway, persons who desire to join the fray should “march to the sound of the guns.”[i] So it is that I invite you to march with me as I speak about religious freedom under the United States Constitution. There is a battle over the meaning of that freedom. The contest is of eternal importance, and it is your generation that must understand the issues and make the efforts to prevail.

The full text of his speech is here.

We can read about atheism and the pressure it puts on believers in the Book of Mormon. We can read about societies that valued so little the presence of religion that they caused those who believed, even women and children, to be burned merely because of their belief.

We can also counter the arguments of those who say that religion is evil. For every person killed in the name of religion -- by men whose lips are close to God but whose hearts are far from him -- a thousand have been killed by non-believers. Hitler, Stalin, Pot Pot, and others -- the gratest mass murderers of the 20th century -- all wished to supplant religious belief with secularism and, in the case of Nazi Germany, paganism.

We can also cringe at those who kill abortion doctors in the name of religion or God today. Once again, they have abandoned the faith they claim to cling to. There is no room for the Orwellian "Thou Shalt Not Kill Without Cause" in religion; the commandment is "Thou Shalt Not Kill."

I'm also reminded of a few quotations from Mohandas Gandhi:

A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.

You Want How Much? Or, is Free TV Going to Die?

Wow. Just read this article sent to me by my good friend Alan, about how our free braodcast television services may be marching towards a pay model like cable television. Not that such things matter to me; we don't watch broadcast TV or have cable TV in the home, so it doesn't really matter how much they make people pay for it. But when they start charging for the crud we watch on the Internet, that's when we'll stand up and take notice.

It's all going to come to this: The traditional models for distributing and paying for content is fundamentally changing, thanks to the Internet. But, thanks to the Internet, the "everything is free" mentality is the one that reigns, even though we pay ISPs for access. Outfits such as the cable companies are lucky in that, from the beginning, they've trained us to expect to have to pay. One of the models proposed for fixing what ails traditional media is to make ISPs pay for content, thus making Internet surfers pay much more for access. We may see the time when the cost of our Internet service is not based on bandwidth, but on the types of content we want to gain from our Internet access. Is that any better than the trickle-torture proposed by making us pay for each and every site we want to visit? I don't know. It kinda works for cable -- they charge extra for premium channels.

It's a sticky situation. One I see working now on the net is a certain level of free access, followed by an expanded level of access for which people pay. That's the model being explored by the likes of YouTube and Hulu, and Murdoch's NewsCorp, and is already being used to some extent by a wide variety of entities from Comics.com (where I go daily to read my funnies) to Fark.com. Both allow free access, but for other features -- and I'm not sure what they are because for now I'm content with the free stuff being offered -- folks have to pony up a small monthly or yearly charge for access.

But that route is fraught with peril as well. How do you determine how much to make people pay? Try to squeeze too much and you chase away the people you want coming to your site to build up your eyeball numbers. And maybe that's an old-fashioned way of thinking. I'd really love to see companies like Flickr and such, who are using this tiered approach, open up and talk about how much the services are really costing, and how much they're able to pay their expenses with the fees they're charging. So many other things on the Internet are open-source, it's too bad a good financial model seems to be behind that knowledge wall.

Another route -- do like the BBC, and don't charge for access. But levy a tax on every television set a family owns, and use that revenue to pay for broadcasting, programming and such. I don't see that one going over all that well on this side of the Atlantic. I know it would seriously cause us to chuck some of the many, many TVs we have in the house, and, if they did the same thing for computers, make us reconsider how they're used in the home as well. And since that kind of taxation stomples on Freedom, Mother, Apple Pie and the American way, I think the vast majority of folks here would take a "you can tax my TV set when you can pry it out of my cold, dead hands" kind of attitude. But we might be willing -- and in fact, are willing -- to pay already ridiculous fees for services such as cable TV or cell phones. I used to work for a Baby Bell, and I can tell you, one of the biggest money sinks out there that people just roll over and pay for the most part is the cell phone. I'm stoggered at remembering handling bills for $300, $500 a month, consistently, from families who just paid it. Five hundred a month is almost what I pay for my house, folks. No way you'll get that out of me for a stinking cell phone service.

My hands smell like turkey. I've been making enchiladas from Boxing Day leftovers. I should go wash my hands.

How much would people pay for that non sequitur? Probably not much, eh?

Images and Quotes, 9 November 1989

"What kind of a system is it that can only exist by keeping the thorns in their own bailiwick? The wall was an actual symbol of defeat. Of inferiority."

Stefan Heym, writer, German Democratic Republic

"The use of force had discredited itself completely. It was no longer possible to stabilize the world by military methods."

Mikhail Gorbachev

"I knew that the communist system was finished. The only problem was what would be the best way to get rid of communism?"

Lech Walesa

"In short, we were speechless, because we were helpless."

Gunter Schabowski, East German Politburo

"She called me. I’m still in my nightgown. [Crowd laughs and cheers] It’s a most wonderful day."

Unidentified German woman, on the night the gates to West Berlin opened.