God bless the intrepid souls who go on to Chatroulette! to do video chat with totally random strangers. Without their brave explorations, we’d never get screenshots like these:

The 24 Best Chat Roulette Screenshots

A video game where you play by screaming:

So apparently between Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’m basically a full-on Atlantic fanboy now. TNC has a pretty great takedown of Chris Matthews saying that during the State of the Union, he forgot Obama was black. Does that say more about Obama, or about what Chris Matthews thinks it means to be black?

Around these parts, we’ve been known, from time to time, to chat about the NFL. We’ve also been known to chat about the intricacies of beer. If you hang around you’ll notice that there are no shortage of women in these discussions. Having read a particularly smart take on Brett Favre, or having received a good recommendations on a particular IPA, it would not be a compliment for me to say, “Wow, I forgot you were a woman.” Indeed, it would be pretty offensive.

The problems is three-fold. First, it takes my necessarily limited, and necessarily blinkered, experience with the fairer sex and builds it into a shibboleth of invented truth. Then it takes that invented truth as a fair standard by which I can measure one’s “woman-ness.” So if football and beer don’t fit into my standard, I stop seeing the person as a woman. Finally instead of admitting that my invented truth is the problem, I put the onus on the woman. Hence the claim “I forgot you were a woman,” as opposed to “I just realized my invented truth was wrong.”

Ditto for Chris Matthews. The “I forgot Obama was black” sentiment allows the speaker the comfort of accepting, even lauding, a black person without interrogating their invented truth.

James Fallows’ cover story in The Atlantic, How America Can Rise Again, is worth a read. He talks about the current round of historical declinism, and notes that in many measures the culture of the U.S. is still a strong asset:

The simplest measure of whether a culture is dominant is whether outsiders want to be part of it. At the height of the British Empire, colonial subjects from the Raj to Malaya to the Caribbean modeled themselves in part on Englishmen: Nehru and Lee Kuan Yew went to Cambridge, Gandhi, to University College, London. Ho Chi Minh wrote in French for magazines in Paris. These days the world is full of businesspeople, bureaucrats, and scientists who have trained in the United States.

Today’s China attracts outsiders too, but in a particular way. Many go for business opportunities; or because of cultural fascination; or, as my wife and I did, to be on the scene where something truly exciting was under way. The Haidian area of Beijing, seat of its universities, is dotted with the faces of foreigners who have come to master the language and learn the system. But true immigrants? People who want their children and grandchildren to grow up within this system? Although I met many foreigners who hope to stay in China indefinitely, in three years I encountered only two people who aspired to citizenship in the People’s Republic. From the physical rigors of a badly polluted and still-developing country, to the constraints on free expression and dissent, to the likely ongoing mediocrity of a university system that emphasizes volume of output over independence or excellence of research, the realities of China heavily limit the appeal of becoming Chinese. Because of its scale and internal diversity, China (like India) is a more racially open society than, say, Japan or Korea. But China has come nowhere near the feats of absorption and opportunity that make up much of America’s story, and it is very difficult to imagine that it could do so—well, ever.

But Fallows is far less sanguine about the state of the federal government, noting that “one thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is ‘I wish we had a Senate like yours.’” The government’s stability and continuity, he argues, as ironically part of why it is so subpar today:

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation…

Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

Fallows cites specific problems, not that novel to people who care about such things: The fact that Senate votes are absurdly nonproportional to population, the overuse of the filibuster, the stasis of gerrymandering on state and federal levels. I would add to that a massive top-down complexity. Democracy is not well-served when the country’s highest governing bodies routinely pass laws that are too long for any one person to read.

What I find disappointing in all this is that some of these problems routinely disadvantage the left, but the left by and large doesn’t have much to say about them. If Senate representation actually gave enough votes to people living in large cities, we would’ve passed health care reform by now. But the left also generally loves centralized government solutions, so I suppose that makes it hard to argue that the centralized government we have now is deeply flawed.

As for how to fix these massive structural problems: Fallows doesn’t seem to believe it can be fixed, just that we’ll muddle through. And maybe that’s realistic, but it’s also pretty depressing to contemplate. Personally, I’d be happy if people in the more populous states continued a modified version of Grover Norquist’s work, shrinking the federal government and working to supplant as many services as possible at the state and inter-state level. The goal would not be to drown the federal government in Grover’s bathtub, but simply to participate less in a federal government that takes a lot of their taxes and gives them way less votes than Wyoming. That could conceivably lead to some Constitutional amendments that might rejigger the Senate somehow. It’s a pipe dream, obviously. But given enough time, the rot in U.S. government could destroy what’s special about U.S. society, so it’s probably not a bad time for a little brainstorming.

So, yeah, in case there was any question: My dry cleaners are Korean.

Sorry about the glare in the second picture. The text on the bag says:

For the last 2,000 years, the body of water between Korea and Japan has been called the “East Sea”. Dokdo (two islands) located in the East Sea is a part of Korean territory. The Japanese government must acknowledge this fact.

Well, not quite. But Justin Timberlake and Matt Morris’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is phenomenal:

The talk I gave at CUSEC last year, Blind Men and an Elephant, compares computer programming to a number of other types of work, with an eye towards finding both similarities and differences. In order, I compare writing code to: math, engineering, writing, law & politics, business, and … art.

I almost left that last one out. Whether or not computer programming is an art form is a subject that attracts a lot of attention among certain groups of people, and I see this more acutely than most since I know a lot of hackers and a lot of people in the new media arts field. But I find the resulting discussion can generate a lot more heat than light. And certainly for computer programmers I dare say that it’s not a very important question. There are plenty of other questions to ask yourself instead, such as “how can I get better at writing code?”, “how can I make sure the work I’m doing is worthwhile?”, and “should I be a programmer at all?”

Perhaps it is worth a discussion, but it would probably be most useful for us to speak from some specific experiences, and not steer ourselves into a morass of vague metaphors.

So let me start, with something I’d written in a comment to Tom earlier today: I don’t think computer programming is an art form. That doesn’t make programming better or worse than art, just different. And the specific experience that leads me to say this goes something like this: In all my years writing code, and in all my years making artistic work, I can’t think of a single time when it was useful to treat one like the other. Even when I was writing code to build net-art, during that the time that I was writing code I was putting on my software engineering hat, and really not thinking artistically at all. Because when I try to write code like I’m an artist, it ends up being buggy, mysterious, and unmaintainable. And when I try to make art like I’m a computer programmer, it ends up static and inorganic.

But maybe other people have had different experiences.

Programmers: If you believe computer programming is an art form, how has that made you a better programmer? What has art taught you about programming that you couldn’t have learned from anything else?

Artists: If you believe computer programming is an art form, how has that made you a better artist? What has programming taught you about art that you couldn’t have learned from anything else?

Good thing this War on Terror isn’t a Crusade or anything. That would be bad.

One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

Other references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as “the light of the world.” John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions “have always been there” and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is “not Christian.”

ABC News: U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes