Today my son and I participated in the Rust Belt Bloggers' Neighborhood Walk. I pushed him around a section of Squirrel Hill and took pictures at most intersections and few other places.

map of route

photo set

“The issues that have provided conservatives with victories in the past — particularly welfare and crime — have been rendered irrelevant by success,” Michael Gerson, the Bush speechwriter turned columnist, wrote last week. “The issues of the moment — income stagnation, climate disruption, massive demographic shifts and health care access — seem strange, unexplored land for many in the movement.”

In fact these “issues of the moment” have been with us for years now, decades in some instances, but until recently they were either ignored by conservatives or dismissed as the hobby-horses of alarmist liberals or entrenched “special interests.”

He continues with a brief recap of the last thirty years in Washington, with observations that, to my perception, demonstrate that while the Republicans have been making a lot of noise with their ideological agenda, the Democrats have, slowly but surely, been developing a pragmatic approach. The election of Barack Obama, together with Democratic gains in Congress, appears to be the fruit of that labor.

Throughout the campaign there were plenty of people who criticized Obama for choosing to vague a theme with “Change.” At the same time, there were lots of Obama supporters who worried, up until just a month or two ago, that he was not mean enough, not aggressive enough in partisan combat. But I think both groups missed the real message of Obama’s campaign, which was wisely concealed right out in the open. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” Barack Obama conducted himself and his campaign in a way that distinguished him from recent politics; he brought a reasoned and measured tone to everything he did. Melding smarts with rhetorical finesse, he managed to appear both pragmatic and inspirational.

The idea of “change” as a campaign theme was a brilliant move because the word evokes something different for everyone. People feel involved. They begin to cause changes. And now, after the campaign has ended, it leaves Americans the way an artful and thoughtful movie leaves them: with something to talk about. What was the “change” Obama kept talking about?

As seems to be standard practice for companies these days, you do not provide an obvious or easy method to give direct feedback on your products and services. So, after rummaging around the AT&T Wireless website for a while and finding no ways to “contact” you except when I need “support,” I decided instead to write a blog post, hoping that you, like Comcast, have minions that track these kinds of things.

I have an iPhone. That means a couple days ago I received the text message you sent to iPhone users informing us that we can now access free Wi-Fi at locations like Starbucks, where AT&T provides wireless internet access.

When I received the message, it seemed like a pretty sweet deal. But this morning, while I was at Starbucks, I tried to use your system. Here’s the short version of what I think: Your “service” sucks.

Whoever designed your “free Wi-Fi” for iPhone users clearly has no idea how iPhones are actually used. Let me explain by walking you through an example of how I tried to use your service.

While enjoying my coffee and reading a book, I turned to a footnote in my book, which cited another book that I may be interested in purchasing. So I pulled out my iPhone, opened Safari, and tapped my bookmark to Amazon.com. The usual prompt to choose a wireless network popped up and I chose the AT&T “free Wi-Fi” network. Then, instead of taking me to Amazon.com, your network hijacked my browser and required me to enter my ten-digit telephone number and tap a box to indicate that I agree with your terms of service. (By the way, do you think anybody really, honestly “agrees” with your terms of service when you make that indication mandatory to even use your service? But, you know, you’re a telecommunications company, so you get to just push us all around.)

But entering my telephone number and tapping that acceptance box did not connect me to the internet and send me on my way to Amazon.com. No, instead, you told me I would shortly receive a text message with a link to internet access. So I waited a bit, maybe ten seconds, and the text message arrived. It said:

Thank you for choosing AT&T. Click the link below to connect or reconnect to this AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot today. Free access is renewable every 24 hours.

Then there was a link. Which I tapped. AT&T interface design people: nobody “clicks” anything on an iPhone. But you are clearly not thoughtful enough to realize that.

Anyway, I tapped the link, which took me back to Safari, where another browser page popped up. That means when I tapped the icon to zoom out and scroll back and forth between the various browser pages in Safari, I now had two worthless pages open from AT&T: one telling me to wait for a text message and a second one telling me that I was now connected to the internet. Did you then automatically drop me off at my original destination, Amazon.com? No! I had to pull up my bookmarks and tap that link again. Ridiculous! Way too cumbersome.

But that’s only the first part of why your system sucks.

After looking at the listing for the book I wanted to see, I decided not to initiate a purchase just then, so I put my iPhone back in my pocket and kept reading. But a few minutes later, there was something else I wanted to look up, so I pulled out my iPhone again, thinking I was still connected to the “AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot” that your irritating text message had linked. Nope. I had to go through the whole routine again! Why? Apparently because “due to inactivity,” my session was shut down, or some such nonsense.

Listen, iPhones are not like internet terminals back in 1995. People do not sit down, log on, do a bunch of different things, log off, and walk away. With an iPhone, users connect, disconnect, reconnect, go online, go offline, and carry out small tasks here and there. This idea that “due to inactivity”—for just a few minutes!—the ability to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot should be terminated without going through your ridiculous little procedure again is preposterous from a user interface standpoint.

And if I want to use another internet-connected application on the iPhone, like the Mail application, the added steps are even more ridiculous. To check my email with a Wi-Fi connection, I have to go into Safari, then into the SMS application, then back to Safari, then to Mail. That’s just stupid.

So what did I do? I went to the Settings on my iPhone and told the phone to “forget” that network. I went back to the “Edge” data network. Even though the connection speed was not as fast as the Wi-Fi, I didn’t have to waste my time entering my number, waiting for a text message, clicking a link, closing two worthless pages, re-navigating to where I wanted to go, etc.

In other words, your “service” sucks. I put the word “service” in quotation marks because it didn’t feel like a service. It felt like a waste of my time. Your free Wi-Fi for iPhone users needs some major improvements before I’ll use it again.

Maybe you could talk to Apple and get them to add something into the firmware so that when AT&T routers detect an iPhone trying to connect, they perform some kind of “handshake” transaction with the phone to determine whether the user is an AT&T customer. Then provide seamless connectivity for people who are your customers, without making us go through all your silly procedures.

Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative group, called it a “top order of business” to determine Ms. Palin’s future role. “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proven that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years,” Mr. Bozell said. “No matter what she decides to do, there will be a small mother lode of financial support behind her.”

The Democrats are running a candidate with an impressive intellect, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, who is so articulate that the humorists at Saturday Night Live still haven’t figured an effective way to make fun of him. Even conservatives are impressed by how well he’s run his campaign.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are running a couple of intellectual lightweights who are so easy to parody that even I can totter around like a mental patient saying “my friends” or pull out a snippet of halfway decent Palin-speak sometimes. You betcha. Then you have Republicans saying things like the remark quoted above, conflating “leadership” with the ability to “electrify the grass roots” and raise “a small mother lode of financial support.” Who are these people? Could they be more transparent about their desire to have power even at the cost of putting idiotic figureheads in the Oval Office, destroying our national respect at home and abroad, and systematically dumbing down our social discourse?

When was the last time Republicans ran a candidate who had some intellectual heft or at least respectability? Twenty years ago? Thirty years ago? Maybe. But then Alan Greenspan wrote in his recent book that Richard Nixon was hands-down the smartest president he ever worked with, so maybe a wicked-smart Republican is not what the world needs.

If the Republicans could run somebody with the intellectual credentials, articulation, and rhetorical strength of Barack Obama, on a solid conservative platform without all the “moral” issues that have plagued the Republican party for the last thirty-five years, since Roe v. Wade, then I would probably vote for him or her. But who are they looking at? Sarah Palin. Ridiculous.

Serrin M. Foster presents "The Feminist Case Against Abortion"

Thursday, November 20, 7:00pm
Clarion University, Clarion, PA
Carlson Library, Level A

Wednesday, November 19, 8:00pm
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
McConomy Auditorium, University Center

For those who cannot make these talks, Fems for Life is beginning to put some brief talks on Youtube. There is only one so far, but keep your eyes peeled as they will be building it up.

Well, I didn't finish the Race for Pace in under 25 minutes, as I'd hoped. Still, I can't be too disappointed. Running on a very hilly course just one week after running a grueling half marathon, I finished in 25:20. Not bad.

Adam often comments on the Opinion Talk blog run by our local newspaper, The Fresno Bee. Recently, one of the editors posted a request that people who participate there refrain from using personal attacks in their discussions. This prompted a comment from someone named Brian Murray, who wrote, “Sounds like suppression of free speech,” and thus precipitated a lengthy conversation in the comments on the post about free speech and the proper methods of argumentation, among other, subsidiary topics. Not all of the comments were friendly, but Adam correctly points out that he stayed civil and rational where others failed.

After reading that conversation, I had some thoughts, which I posted as a comment on Adam’s blog. But they were so lengthy and substantial that I decided to share them here, too. Without further ado:

That guy Brian is right that they are limiting his free speech, but they are not limiting his right to free speech.

The right to free speech as provided by the First Amendment is narrow and circumscribed. It only applies against the government and it only applies when the speech is “constitutionally protected,” which generally means it contributes to a constitutionally meaningful discourse. (So the Supreme Court has established things like “fighting words” and “obscenity” that are not protected speech, and in the case of defamation, we have a complicated tissue of rules to balance between the right to disparage and the right to be free from false and damaging disparagement. Holding up a sign that says “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” is apparently not constitutionally cognizable speech.) In practice, that means we have scads of limitations on our free speech.

Depending on how you look at it, we have far more limitations on our freedom to speak than we have extensions. For example, there are economic limitations (I can’t afford to speak my mind in a nationally televised advertising spot), customary limitations (I’m not allowed to say certain things in certain company), linguistic-ideological limitations (I’m not “allowed” to say things that our language, as controlled by our society, does not allow me to communicate), and practical limitations (I’m “allowed” to say things that other people don’t understand, but if they don’t understand them, I can’t do anything about it). There is no legal recourse for those limitations: you cannot get somebody else to subsidize your speech, you can’t force people to let you say things in their presence that they don’t want to hear, you’ll have a hard time escaping the “box” of the dominant ideological paradigms, and if people don’t understand you, you cannot force them to.

All those limitations are limitations on free speech—they’re just not constitutionally cognizable limitations. But most people have a standard for freedom of speech that is much wider than what is constitutionally cognizable, and they are only vaguely aware, often unconsciously, of the non-legal limitations I mentioned above. So when the people who run an online form like Opinion Talk say, “Don’t use personal attacks,” they receive a response like, “Hey, you’re limiting my free speech!” That’s what Brian does when he asks, rhetorically, “Are there rules to Free Speech[?]” The answer can only be an unequivocal yes.

Whether there should be “rules” to “free speech,” and what they ought to be, are other questions, and difficult to answer.

Where this can be troublesome is when the non-legal limitations are employed, either overtly or covertly, by people in positions of power, whether governmental or not (like moderators of online discussion forums). The classic literary example is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the government actively works to pare down the language into something that no longer expresses anything meaningful. Since the particular expressivity of people’s thoughts is generally confined to the language they have to express them in, that kind of program essentially destroys free speech by non-legal means, but makes it possible for the government to say, “No, you can still say whatever you want.”

In my view, we have seen some of that, though not so obviously or systematically, from our government during the last few years. When they insist on using certain words like freedom, terrorist, insurgent, good, evil, patriotism, homeland, war, etc., they control the rhetoric and limit what people can effectively say. Since we attach so much political and emotional baggage to those words, if you try to disagree, you look much worse than perhaps you ought, which creates a chilling effect on disagreement and dissent. This is dangerous to freedom because there is no legal recourse against, say, the Bush administration, for its word-choices. They create a de facto limitation on free speech, especially for people who are not aware of what is happening with the language, to whom it does not occur that there may be different ways to talk about the issues with more nuance. For those people, their ability to think about the issues is hampered by the language in which the issues are presented to them. That, in my opinion, is the most insidious threat to free speech of them all.

I think Brian has an inkling of that, but he expresses it imperfectly when he calls the limitation (which is really just a suggestion, because the stated policy does not include enforcement) a “socialist” one.

The other commenter [Adam] interacted with, Wayne, is a good example of the Orwellian tendency when he suggests that the logical coherence of speech can (and perhaps should) take a back seat to its “entertainment” value. While he clearly believes he has a “right” to say whatever he wants (since he sees your criticism as “rule-mak[ing]“), so long as it is entertaining (one wonders what he thinks of illogical non-entertaining speech, or whether he believes that illogic is intrinsically entertaining), his position is essentially, “Let’s batter all the meaning out of language. Then we can all say whatever we want because it won’t matter what anyone says.”

Despite Americans’ acute sense of “free speech,” which is far vaster than their legal right to free speech, few of them seem to have gotten much further along in their understanding than what Mark Twain suggested over a century ago: “[I]n all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.” You can see that pretty clearly in the comment thread you linked (and in most comment threads online). But when people can move past that informal “rule” and begin to do as Jim Boren suggested—”you punch a hole in the other person’s logic rather than call them names”—the concern about suppressing “free speech” ceases to be an ideological counter-”argument” in specific conversations and regains its position as a political and philosophical topic. In other words, rather than responding to the limitation against personal attacks by complaining that his “free speech” was being limited, Brian should have addressed the specific limitation at issue—as many of the other commenters did. When he simply complained that his free speech was limited, he substituted ideology for reason and that emptied all the meaning out of the idea of “free speech.” For him, “free speech” just became a tool to get his way.

And, ultimately, isn’t that the root of the problem? When we use language and discourse as means of control rather than means of communication, we devalue our ability to think, which is the quintessential human quality.

It was the best of races. It was the worst of races.

On September 28, I ran a PR in the Great Race, finishing in 50:49. That's more than 3 minutes faster than last year's 53:56. The only way I could have been happier is if I'd broken 50 minutes.

The Chamber Classic half marathon was a different matter entirely. I'd hoped to run the Ikea HM, but the blessed event of my son's birth prevented that. I figured the Chamber Classic would be an adequate replacement race. My next HM opportunity won't be until late March. Training has been going well, as have races. I'd hoped to break 2 hours and felt ready and able to do so.

I was wrong. I did terribly. The race started out fine and through 8 miles I was on pace for a 2:00:39 finish. Something happened during the 9th mile, though. I hit a wall…hard. I completely ran out of energy and my legs felt like lead weights. I jogged occasional and forced myself to run through the finish, but I had to do a lot of walking. I finished in a dismal 2:14:30. Hopefully I'll be able to set a PR and break 25 minutes at the Race for Pace 5K tomorrow.