Left Behinds: Another good reason to knee Ed Towns in the balls

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Another good reason to knee Ed Towns in the balls

He voted with House Republicans on the House Telecom Subcommittee against net neutrality. This may seem like an arcane point, but the internet is really all liberals now have to counter right-wing talk radio and Fox News. The internet's ability to help people organize is only just becoming evident, and that ability will be largely lost if the barriers to participation are raised. Look what could have happened and didn't with micropower radio.

Unfortunately, it is in nobody's interest in either party to see more citizens engaged and empowered in politics. So I don't imagine anyone will stand up for us. The only real hope is that companies like Google hate the idea of being charged by the page-load, and supposedly they're pushing for net neutrality. Steve Gilliard argues that in fact companies like Microsoft, IBM, and even Ford will get on board to fight this bill. But I'm not optimistic. Telecoms are very, very good at getting what they want out of DC.

(Earlier reasons to knee Ed Towns in the balls.)

Tags: Ed Towns, net neutrality, politics, New York

2 Comments:

At 12:24 AM, Solomon Grundy said…

I'm not terribly worried about this for two reasons.

First of all, the internet is very important to my life, but it is the life of huge numbers of tech geeks. And those tech geeks are very, very smart. If it affects the freedom of their internet use, rest assured that they are on this in ways I could never imagine.

Second, take this paragraph from your link:

It is the millions of dull, everyday corporate e-mails which provide the bulk of the internet's traffic and drove the need for broadband. Not games, not blogs.

Those costs are very significant, and they'll only become more significant as globalization proceeds. A lot of the efficiencies of the past ten years are due to the drastic, drastic reductions in the costs of information gathering and communications. The fast and cheap '00s wouldn't be as fast and cheap without net neutrality.

If the geeks and corporate fatcats are on it, I'm happy to free ride on their efforts.
At 12:45 AM, Antid Oto said…

I hope you and Gilliard are right. Ed Towns remains a twat.

Post a Comment

<< Home

Best of Left Behinds

Ten Worst Americans Our group effort at coming up with the ten worst Americans of all time is our most heavily trafficked page. It's linked on many other sites as an example of "extreme leftist propaganda", but I (Solomon) am just happy to be getting the word out about number two on the list.

George Pataki, You Will Never Be President, So Stop Pataki's latest bout of pandering to the national right wing provokes AO to assess Pataki's viability as a presidential candidate. Sample: "In summary, you are dumb, uncharismatic, middlingly competent at best, not politically savvy, and somewhere between homely and plain."

Conversations I, An Atheist Jew, Had With God About How Jesus Was Crazy and a Big Jerk You may have thought the Sermon on the Mount was the "cool" part of the Bible, but AO looks closely and discovers that it is, in fact, batshit crazy.

Frank Gehry to Brooklyn: Drop Dead SG reviews Gehry's design for the Atlantic Yards project, concluding that "It's like some giant grey Transformer clomped its foot down on Park Slope. And imagine when in a few years all those pristine white beams get coated in soot from the neverending traffic jams that are projected as a direct result of this development (have you ever tried to drive through Flatbush or Atlantic during rush hour or on a weekend?). It'll be a Transformer's giant grey dirty foot."

Androphilia is the New Gay Didn't we learn anything from the pointless "queer" debates of the early 90s? SG gets all bitchy discussing butchness and some blogger's anti-gay gay neologism.

Why It Matters To Be Rational Part I and Part II In two excellent posts drawing on research from his day job, AO argues that the US is allocating our collective resources irrationally because of badly misjudged relative risks. "Terrorism is for the most part extremely unlikely ... Global warming, on the other hand, is 100% likely (it is already underway), and if left unchecked its damage will almost certainly dwarf September 11." Yet "the same people who believe in ghosts and ESP believe terrorists are gonna bomb their mini-mall. People cannot distinguish between real threats and fantasy."

The Most Annoying Person in New York Another of our very popular contests, this time for that person who just irks you. As AO writes, "'Most Annoying' is not the same as 'most evil' or 'worst.' We're looking for people who set your teeth on edge for no good reason, not Bruce Ratner."

The Science of Cuteness Think about a kitten staring up at you and cocking its little head as it blinks its big sleepy eyes. If you didn't just barf a little bit in your mouth, you're not trying hard enough to contradict the results of this study.

NYC Police Surveillance In this dispatch from the front lines (subsequently used by the Gotham Gazette), a Brooklyn activist discusses how years of police surveillance and harrassment almost succeeded in demoralizing her. Almost.

The War on Empiricism In a prelude to the risk posts above, AO argues that more people believe in haunted houses than in the scientific method. Somewhere in this post there must be some Dick Cheney jokes.

Why I am a Liberal, or, Napkins are a Stupid Place to Make Government Policy AO and the Congressional Budget Office force small-government conservatives to "defend low taxation on its merits: either taxes and government are evil and immoral in themselves (the idea the right-wing noise machine has been trying to cram down our throats for 25 years or so), or in utilitarian terms less government and lower taxes benefits everyone more than high taxes and more government."

Anya Kamenetz Says ... My Choice Is Yogurt SG gets his semiotics on while ridiculing the latest crackpot scheme of his Most Annoying Person in New York designee.

Connecting the Dots: The Transit Strike and the Ratner Land Giveaway SG inventories MTA misdeeds and the public and media backlash against striking transit workers and finds himself in "a Bizarro alternate universe where no one can make the simplest connections between events."

Left Behinds Gets Spanked Our greatest honor of 2005 was a takedown in the very popular MILBlogging.com, where the man behind the milblogs (a man who SG had called "unnecessary and annoying" in a previous post) noted graciously that LB "looks like some third-grade school project written by some Marilyn Manson-looking blogger named Solomon Grundy, a childhood friend of Cindy Sheehan, and a few other contributors." And that was just in his first paragraph. But by the end of the bashing we were not just friends, we were lovers.

Left Behinds

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Another good reason to knee Ed Towns in the balls

2 Comments:

"Very funny and very well written." - an editor at The Nation

"You are so funny." - Susie Bright

"You guys are really insightful and fun AND acknowledge NYC politics. We need that." - DMI Blog

Categories

"Sharp & Punchy Commentary by a Team of writers that know the funny side of life, too." -Daniels Counter

"Extreme leftist propaganda" ... "written by a childhood friend of Cindy Sheehan" ... "sniveling liberals" ... "Man-haters, too. One of the contributors must be the originator of the Girls Rule, boy-hating theme" - various right-wing blogs

Contact Us

Best of Left Behinds

Contributors