This seems to still be climbing up Popdex and Blogdex (up to number #2!). Even at a peak 36GB/hr, I should be ok until tomorrow. After which I’ll be clamping down w/ some mod_bandwidth and some dynamic redirects I think.


From Propaganda and the Public Mind, and worth contemplating:

You make yourself available for various groups all over the country. You made that choice early on. Why don’t other intellectuals, other privileged people in your position, get engaged politically?

Individuals have their own reasons. Presumably the reason most don’t is because they think they’re doing the right thing. That is, I’m sure that overwhelmingly people who are supportive of atrocious acts of power and privilege do believe and convince themselves that it was the right thing to do, which is extremely easy.

In fact, a standard technique of belief formation is to do something in your own interest and then to construct a framework in which that’s the right thing to do. We all know this from our own experience. Nobobdy’s saintly enough that they haven’t illegiitimately done that any number of times, from when you stole a toy from your younger brother when you were seven years old until the present.

We always manage to construct our own framework that says, Yes, that was the right thing to do and it’s going to be good. Sometimes the conclusions are accurate. It’s not always self-deception. But it’s very easy to fall into self-deception when it’s advantageous. It’s not surprising. (167-168)


Crossfire Downloads Exceed Broadcast Audience – glad to do my part. Will be interesting to try to total up the aggregate stats. (Does anyone have actual viewership numbers for that Crossfire show? Anyone from CNN reading?

Some observations:

  • Bittorrent is still too hard. A lot of people still can’t get it to work
  • Freecache (RIP) and Coral still suck too much for general purpose use. There are features that should be implemented that I’ve written out before, but this would be a fun project to do, so I won’t spoil it too much. At least not until I switch to something with a commenting system so a discussion can get going.
  • Legitimate torrent/media aggregators have a lot of untapped potential. Hmm, should contact Media Matters or some of these guys…
  • Doing Good™ doesn’t require all that much funding. Isn’t it time we reclaimed the Internet?