Another political commonplace

Avedon pointed to Two Glasses, a fair and balanced political blog. Not much exceptional there, although it had a pointer to what looks like a good Joe Conason piece from the Nation about the potential return of the "compassionate conservativism" lie.

But one thing was quite good, if slightly clumsy: a new acronym, "BSATSS":

The fact is that this is just the latest example of a particularly virulent meme which is sweeping the nation: BSATSS. It's short for "Both-Sides-Are-The-Same Syndrome", and it's something I'll post a separate piece on at some point. Basically, rather than use their critical faculties to evaluate the claims of the two sides in an argument, the BSATSS-afflicted listener focuses on the form of the argument -- the apparent symmetry of the claims each side is making about the other -- and prematurely concludes that "both sides" are equally self-serving. Or despicable. Or predictably partisan. Or whatever. It's a particularly disheartening form of intellectual laziness, and while anyone can be infected by it, this meme seems to have it in for American journalists.

This is not a new observation, but pointing out that it's so common that it needs a name is a good breakthrough.

Both sides aren't the same. Yes, Democrats lie. Republicans lie more, and about more things. Yes, Democrats abuse power to help their political allies. The Republicans are betraying every principle that the US has ever stood for, even the bad ones, to siphon money from the poorest 99% into the pockets of the richest 1%. They're not the same.

A related syndrome is, of course, the TISIM fallacy--"The Truth Is Somewhere In the Middle". TwoGlasses discusses that, but doesn't name it, in the post in which BSATS Syndrome is identified. Here, it's grounded in a much- (and justly-) derided Jack Shafer review of Al Franken's new book (the famous Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), which concludes:

"I suppose that when consuming liar-liar books in pairs, say Sean Hannity's versus Joe Conason's, the average reader might come within spitting distance of political reality.

Twoglasses responds,

Puh-fucking-lease! Conason is an accomplished investigative journalist, Jack. Hannity is a hack talking-head for the Republican Party's own Pravda network. As the editor of Slate, you damn well know that.

If I say 2 + 2 equals 12, and you say 2+2 equals 5, TISIM tells us that we should assume that the real answer is somewhere between 6 and 11, probably right around 9. That's no way to run a candy store; why should we assume that it's a way to run political discourse?

Still fired up, politically

But this issue is nominally non-partisan, so bear with me.

Diebold manufactures electronic voting machines and the software that runs on them. A lot of regions use Diebold machines for their voting.

For several months, reports have been circulating that Diebold's software is slightly less secure than hiding your spare key under the welcome mat which says "Spare Key Not Hidden Under Here".

Well, someone's finally demonstrated it. Jim Marsh (a name previously unknown to me) downloaded Diebold's software ("GEMS") from Diebold's FTP site--which had no password protection--and is distributing it here so that you can see for yourself how insecure it is.

He has a step-by-step explanation of how to use Microsoft's database program Access to get password access to GEMS. It's trivially simple if you can get to the machine the GEMS software is installed on--and note that "get to" doesn't necessarily mean "sit in front of", since all of this software can be run remotely. But you don't even need the password; MS-Access will allow you to manipulate the vote totals with no password necessary. You can freely delete the audit trail (the coded numbers which are supposed to notify GEMS that the numbers have been tampered with) without upsetting GEMS in the slightest. Because of the way that the information is stored in the databases--which is extremely non-standard and suspicious, very similar to using two sets of books to cover your accounting irregularities--it takes a lot of work to notice that vote totals have been manipulated.

This is the death of democracy, folks.

I must have read this idea somewhere, but:

A couple of things converged in my mind a few days ago, and a post today from baldanders inspired me to post about it.

Baldanders said,

Universal Music Group, the largest music seller in the world and responsible by their own account for thirty percent of U.S. album sales, is dramatically dropping the wholesale and suggested list price of virtually all their cds, bringing the suggested list in most cases to $13.

Now, it's been a poorly kept secret of American commerce for nearly two decades that music CDs are overpriced compared to the cost of manufacture and distribution. In fact, over a decade ago, I heard a report that inflated prices on CDs from mainstream labels made it possible to publish small-press CDs and make a profit, so in effect the cartel pricing on big-label music CDs was funding the small-label competition!

However. A few days ago, I heard a content-light report on NPR that colleges and universities are "getting serious" about shutting down on-campus file-sharing in an effort to fight copyright violations. Of course, it is not the case that every file that is shared on file-sharing is a copyright violation; in fact, file-sharing has turned into a good, zero-cost way for new and/or small bands to distribute their music. For that matter, it's turned into a good way for artists like Janis Ian--who have a reputation and fan-base but not stardom, at least not any more--to distribute their works and get people interested in buying them.

Shutting down file-sharing. Slashing the prices of CDs. Am I paranoid in assuming that these are linked parts of a strategy designed to choke out upstart small labels?

[Updated to correct the spellings of Janis Ian and Momus.]