No. Bad. Blog Torrent should be doomed to failure, and for exactly one reason:

“The ‘easy download’ link gives them the torrent file they want wrapped in an executable installer. The installer just installs Bittorrent, asks them where to save the file, and starts getting the torrent they want.” (emphasis mine)

Anything that encourages people to download and run executables from untrusted sources is a Very Bad Thing. Isn’t it enough that I already cringe whenever I’m at a friend’s place and I open up their spyware-encrusted Internet Explorer? Isn’t it enough that I already have to explain to countless people why they keep seeing porn pop-ups even when Internet Explorer is closed? The internet already has enough malicious executables and scripts out there that adding more semi-legitimate ones will just confuse people more. The only message people should get about executables is, “If you don’t know where it’s coming from, don’t run it.” Anything that gets in the way of that is a setback.

One year after Georgia’s Rose Revolution, another election scandal in Ukraine may lead to a second soft revolution. The streets have been filled with orange, the colour of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidential campaign. Amid the accusations of blatant election fraud, Russian meddling and rank intimidation of opposition supporters, it seems clear that the people of Ukraine are willing to do everything possible to ensure the candidate they feel has won is rightfully declared the next president.

The European Union has already stated its strong disapproval of the way the runoff election was conducted, and both the U.S. and Canada have demanded an investigation into the results. Several Ukrainian city councils, including the nation’s capital, Kiev (Kyiv), refuse to recognize unofficial winner and Kremlin supporter Viktor Yanukovych, effectively turning much of western Ukraine orange. Tensions are high, but current president and Yanukovych supporter Leonid Kuchma has asked for negotiations between the two parties in an attempt to forestall a violent conflict.

It sounds as though despite all the turmoil and uncertainty that there is much hope for Ukrainians, and that the right president-elect will be certified without violence or bloodshed. Keep an eye on this one; when so many other nations seem to be so far away from democratic elections, it’s good to know there’s a nation willing to fight for the same rights the western world takes for granted, now that it’s within reach.

TiVo, having already allowed its service to be infiltrated by advertisements, is taking the next step: during commercial fast-forwards, the service will now display the TV equivalent of pop-up advertising. Does this mean anything for television viewers now accustomed to seeing commercials whiz past at eight times the normal rate? Will they rebel against the further encroachment of advertising into their space, just when they thought they’d managed to stave off the inevitable?

No. Probably not.

Technology has given us the ability to make our own TiVo; with a good TV tuner / encoder card, some free software and a giant hard drive, you too can have your own personal video recorder without having to pay for TiVo’s services. Of course, you’ll have to install some form of *nix for the free packages, as the only Windows PVR package I’ve found costs $80. That’s about six and a half months of TiVo service right there, though, so perhaps not a bad purchase. Anyone who’s determined enough to be free of ads will have to go through the trouble of setting all this stuff up, and while it’s getting easier every day, it’s still not as easy as plugging in a TiVo. Factor in the likelihood that the new “pop-up ads” won’t be as intrusive as imagined (it sounds like they’ll serve as quarter-screen billboards telling you what the commercial you just fast-forwarded past was for) and you won’t see many people abandon TiVo just yet.

But what happens if options like SageTV and MythTV get easier to set-up? The hardware is already fairly cheap, and it’s only getting better. And the early TiVo adopters are probably already a tech-savvy bunch; it won’t be long before they decide to move to the new platform in large numbers. With a Senat bill proposing to outlaw the ability to skip advertisements, it’s clear that broadcast networks may one day see the ad revenues they rely on fall sharply. And then what happens to broadcast television? Many would not be sad to see it go, but there are still legitimate concerns about the health of the television industry and how it would be affected by lower advertising income. Some interesting questions to ponder.

And now, changing gears, some of the reasons why Vancouver isn’t exactly the greatest city on earth. To be fair, I’ve only been here a couple of months, so it’s very likely I haven’t discovered all the great places to go out at night. But in terms of places to go out and have a drink late at night, there don’t seem to be very many downtown, along Commercial, along Main or along Broadway west of Commercial and through Kits.

I suppose there’s always DV8 and the Railway.

It’s the cities, stupid. Urban Archipelago, written by the editors of Seattle’s Stranger. Citizens of Toronto have been in a similar, though less acrimonious, relationship with the rest of Ontario for years now, showing this is not just an American issue. I daresay someone in Vancouver has far more in common with someone from Calgary, Portland or Atlanta than someone from the B.C. interior.

If the Democrats become the urban values party in 2008, I’d hope someone like the NDP takes the hint and does something similar up here.

Blink, a new book by Malcolm Gladwell, will be out in January. His previous book, The Tipping Point, is my most treasured work of non-fiction on my shelf, and the many articles he’s written for the New Yorker on everything from ketchup to SUVs to airplane hijackings are consistently fascinating. Basically, I want to be Malcolm Gladwell, so you’ll understand when I say I can’t wait for this book to come out.

There’s a buzz going around now that suggests the “moral values” vote wasn’t as decisive a factor in Bush’s victory as everyone makes it out to be. The argument Klinkner puts forth is that the effective turnout for Bush didn’t change amongst those who attended church at least once a week, while the turnout for Bush amongst those earning more than $50,000 went up by three percent. This would, indeed, explain why the popular vote gave Bush the victory, but I don’t think it paints the right picture.

The shock on election night was not that Bush managed to win, or that he won by the amount he did (reasonably decisive but nowhere near a landslide). The shock for many of us north of the border, and certainly for me personally, was the fact that even as the campaign entered its final week, the election was a toss-up. We were all still wondering how it was even close at that point; even if Kerry had won, there still would’ve been half a nation backing the other guy, and that didn’t make any sense. What was so compelling about Bush that so many people would vote for him despite their dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the state of the economy?

This is not a case of the elites hijacking the election; the numbers Klinkner quotes show that the religious bloc’s “performance” was 25 per cent, versus the wealthy voters’ performance of 10 per cent. What, exactly, does performance mean in this context? It’s measured by multiplying the turnout of a particular group as a percentage of overall turnout by the percentage of that group voting for a particular candidate. In other words, that 25 per cent represents 25 per cent of the overall popular vote, which means the religious bloc made up about half of Bush’s votes this election. (My interpretation of the numbers may be wrong; please let me know if it is.) Of course, the numbers are also somewhat misleading; there’s no indication, for example, of how many of those wealthy voters are also in the religious category, so there may be some overlap.

Essentially, while wealthy voters may have proved to be the decisive factor, they certainly couldn’t have done it without the foundation of support the religious bloc gave. Moreover, it was obvious from the start how wealthy voters would split; considering the question of self-interest versus collective interests, most wealthy people would obviously choose the former. It’s not so clear-cut, however, that Bush’s policies will similarly benefit the religious bloc, which makes theirr loyalty all the more puzzling unless you assume that “moral values” trump all other concerns, that those people made bad decisions based on misleading facts on the war on terror and the economy, or that those people just looked at the same evidence we did and came to different conclusions.

What have always been harder to argue against, however, are the county-by-county maps showing who each county voted for and by how much. I can’t imagine how much it must suck to live in Shannon or Todd County, South Dakota.

I don’t know what this all translates into right now. I don’t see how you’re going to be able to convince the wealthy to vote for a party that’s more likely to raise taxes on them than the other guys, nor do I see any way to convince the more rabid religious conservatives to vote Democrat now that they’re even attacking other Republicans.

It’s true that Canadians base too much of our national identity on the idea of a subsidized public health care system; it’s not like we thought of it first or anything. At the same time, though, it’s amazing how some nations continue to do without.

Yaaaaaaaay!

“It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose abortion and where gay relationships have full civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values—as deplorable as I’m sure they are—don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same gender, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?”

From a Los Angeles Times editorial reprinted in the Washington Times, subtitled “I apologize for everything I believe in. May I go now?” I have stronger words, but I feel you’ve already heard enough from me on the subject already. But I will say one thing.

Already there are cries on message boards and community weblogs to stop talking about U.S. politics, that the losing side has had enough of fighting and the winning side just doesn’t want to hear it anymore. Already the people who voted for Kerry are tired of arguing, and most of the Bush voters never wanted to debate anything in the first place. Too fucking bad. You can go ahead and think of happy things to keep your mind off what happened last week. All I see is another four years of curtailed civil liberties, continued destabilization in the Middle East, the marginalization of gays and lesbians in the States, and a push to recombine church and state. What the fuck is there to be happy about? I’m not interested in burying my head in the sand and hoping it’ll all go away; in fact, to do so now would be giving up and giving in. It is practically your duty to continue to scream from the rooftops, to fight what’s happened, to ensure there’s still a republic left instead of a theocracy when Bush is finished four years from now.

“He said that he would bring allies to our side to share the burden, but he also said he would be sending 40,000 more of our troops. He said that we must finish the job, but he also said it was the wrong war at the wrong place and the wrong time. Huh?”

Why is this so fucking hard for people to understand? Attacking Iraq was wrong and dangerous, but now that you’ve done it, you can’t turn tail and run; doing so only leaves Iraq in its shattered state, ready to become the next Afghanistan or Iran. Why can something not be “the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time” and also something that needs to be finished and cleaned up so at least we can salvage something, anything out of the colossal mess Bush handed us? Why is this argument so hard for people to wrap their heads around?

And how, exactly, does terrorism demand a military response? Terrorist groups are so powerful precisely because they have no state. They are not a nation with leaders; they own no territory that can be attacked; there are no collateral casualties when everyone is a combatant. Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda continue to thrive because they have very little to lose. You can take away their training camps in Afghanistan, and they will simply form new ones in other sympathetic nations; you can kill their leaders and new ones will take their place; you can attack their families, destroy their homes and take over their countries, and legions of new warriors will flock to the terrorist cause. The old way of prosecuting wars doesn’t work anymore. I don’t agree with Bush or Kerry’s rhetoric that you have to hunt down and kill every terrorists, or even that it’s possible; what’s telling to me is that Kerry couldn’t possibly say what I’ve just said above because Americans now assume the only way to defeat terrorism is to kill everyone who engages in it. A dangerous attitude to take, for if you continue down that line, one day you will become the terrorists.

And “not caring what Europe thinks” is a dangerous attitude as well. This isn’t some high school where everyone’s trying to be the coolest kid and stomps on people because they’re ugly or stupid. It’s a fucking world community. You wouldn’t ignore your neighbours if they told you to turn your music down at night unless you’re a giant prick. You definitely shouldn’t ignore your neighbours if they tell you, “hey, what you’re doing could destabilize an entire region, and maybe you’ll want to consider that WE LIVE CLOSER TO IT than you do before you go ahead.” Essentially, by rejecting the idea that we have to listen to anyone else (and I mean listen, not blindly follow, not that I’d normally say this except apparently that point never gets across), Americans have shown themselves to also be giant pricks.

This viewpoint from a former member of the third of the nation who are religious ideologues is not a piece of hope, but rather one of despair. If these people truly see themselves as “warriors of Christ,” and their numbers are growing in the way they seem to be, then what hope does America have? When will they understand it’s not the religion Democrats dislike, but their intolerance? If you have issues with abortion, that’s something to be discussed. If you kill doctors for performing them, you’ve crossed the line. I don’t vehemently disagree with (likely) half the nation because you’re Christians; I disagree with you because you think “fags should be shot” and “stem cell research kills babies.”

The ascendancy of intolerant conservatism is, perhaps, obvious in hindsight. But until November 3rd, the rest of the world could believe that it was just George W. Bush that was ineffective at best and downright dangerous at worst. We could believe Americans had simply been led astray, and that they’d realize the many errors made in the past four years and vote accordingly. The morning of the 3rd, we woke up to a new reality: that it wasn’t the President that was the problem, but the entire nation. We can no longer defend you as a people because we no longer know what Americans are, our image being shattered literally overnight.

So I only half-joke when I say I now hate all Americans. Of course I can’t hate an entire country; I simply cannot generalize in such a manner. But when a third of the population shows its true stripes as “warriors of Christ” and votes based on “moral issues;” when eleven percent of Democrats voted for Bush because they somehow thought the Bush doctrine on terror was successful; when another third of the country couldn’t convince more people to vote in the better candidate, despite widespread recognition of Bush’s abysmal record on terrorism and the economy; when the last third of the country didn’t even care enough to vote, apparently having no opinion on one of the most divisive elections in years; you tell me, how am I not supposed to hate you at least a little bit?