geekchick | (no subject)

First, a shameless plug: please go vote for

snipeyhead in Animal Planet's "Hero of the Year" contest.

Now, on to a couple of links from today's round of blog-skimming and web-wandering:

Politics:

aroraborealis writes about Guatemala and the Bush administration's detainee legislation: "Hearing all of this made me realize how delicate the line between a merely corrupt government (ours) and one that's outright evil (Montt's dictatorship) seems to be. Looking at the history of many Latin American countries, I saw the US poised on a cusp that has not led anywhere good for the average person. I had many occasions to be thankful for the rights that we have in the US, things like due process, (relatively) fair trials, and habeas corpus. I may hate the direction that the current administration is taking us in terms of social programs, but at least the basics still stand.

"So, you will probably not be surprised to hear that today is not a good day for me, in terms of feeling okay about a whole lot of anything. I can't decide if I should throw up or just weep in the corner."

In case you've been in Outer Mongolia with no access to US news sources and are scratching your head in puzzlement: "Along the way to approving the Bush administration's detainee legislation today, the Senate has rejected Arlen Specter's amendment that would have preserved the right of noncitizen detainees to file writs of habeas corpus in federal court. The vote was 51-48, with Republicans Lincoln Chafee, Gordon Smith and John Sununu joing Specter in voting for the amendment and Democrat Ben Nelson voting against it. Republican Olympia Snowe did not vote." (http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/09/28/vote/index.html)

Wil Wheaton: a statement of conscience

Former Army interrogators weigh in on the torture question (via vvalkyri). pecunium, also an interrogator, has very strong opinions on the matter; hammercock has collected a few links to some of his posts.

As jmhm says, "And maybe ask yourself if the party which is rushing to enshrine torture and the end of legal protections which go as far back as the Magna Carta in our laws really ought to control any of the branches of the federal government."

On that note, Pat collects information on voter registration deadlines for all 50 states and DC.

Electoral-Vote.com's current map based on current polling data predicts an evenly-divided Senate (50/50). Also, the projected new House: 216 Democrats, 219 Republicans.

Tech:

Steve Yegge's Good Agile, Bad Agile (via Dare Obasanjo), which both talks a bit about working at Google and includes this nugget of joy:
So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: "This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where the real money is at? You start your own religion." And that's how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born.

Theme day: The BileBlog has something to say about agile development too. It's seems like an uncharacteristically restrained post, but the comments section is being staffed by plenty of people with very strong opinions either way.

Today's Daily WTF (Define Failure As Success) made me snarf my Diet Coke, and then made my head hurt. From now on, perhaps I'll try that trick in my code too. Should make testing go much faster.

Coding Horror on testing. Make sure to check out the Did I Remember To testing checklist.

Creating Passionate Users on when ease-of-use goes wrong. Kathy's also looking for a web designer/developer to do some work on her Typepad-hosted blog.

Random stuff:

An old post, but I kept meaning to link to it: chap_eye writes about his experience backpacking in Cuba.

Stereogum has new Rufus Wainwright and Paul Westerberg tracks. If you liked "All Shook Down", you'll probably like the Westerberg track (from the "Open Season" soundtrack).

Post-"Talk Like a Pirate Day", a mathematical analysis of the number of "R"s in the canonical pirate interjection "Arrrr"

NPR's interview with Maurice Sendak and why he puts kid characters in danger. (audio)

The Chicago Manual of Style is now available online for a relatively small subscription fee.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Also check out http://www.electionprojection.com/, same idea as http://electoral-vote.com/ but updated a lot more frequently and I think it has better analysis.

You know, it's weird how the whole debate is about whether torture works or not. If I was given the authority to use genocidal methods against Muslims, I'm sure it would be effective in eliminating al-Qaida (along with the rest of the Muslim world), but it would still be wrong.

Torture isn't that effective at getting good intelligence, but that shouldn't be the issue.

I think it's embarassing that a World War II German interrogator had a better sense of the ineffectiveness and immoral nature of torture than a lot of people high up in our government (http://www.amazon.com/Interrogator-Luftwaffe-Schiffer-Military-History/dp/0764302612).

I think there are a lot of arguments being advanced which remind me quite a bit of the things Cleon said when trying to convince his fellow Athenians to massacre the population of Mytilene (http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.3.third.html).

Ariel Dorfman recently had an opinion piece in the Post that I think gets to the real point of the debate:

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress -- such as that extracted from the heaving body of that poor Argentine braggart in some Santiago cesspool in 1973 -- are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments -- and there are many more -- to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?