Monday March 7th, 2011. Posted by Alex:
It could be worse. After all, although there is no reason to believe he is actually stupid, he is clearly not particularly bright. He was trained from birth to believe that he was a thick cut above almost anyone else. This putative superiority is inherent. It does not depend on the things the rest of us try to trade on: wit, intelligence, looks, charm, physical prowess, hard work, artistic accomplishment… That’s pretty much what “hereditary monarchy” means, isn’t it? He gets his £249,000 a year from the queen just for being, well, a cut above. After all, it is unlikely but not inconceivable that he could become King of England. So he really is a cut above, isn’t he?
If I may borrow a term from computer marketing, these “features” of his personality are probably just what’s needed for somebody who is going to swan around fixing arms deals with the oil-rich leaders of oppressive regimes. Correct me if that’s not what his job was. So, well done Andy for that. And if you think it’s immoral, as you may well, take it up with the British Government and the arms manufacturers, not the poor old Duke of York.
If the royal family actually had significant power, somebody with those features could be a tad more worrying. It could be worse.
Monday February 21st, 2011. Posted by Alex:
I love the Bourne trilogy. But I do know that it is a trilogy of, yes, films. Fiction. For entertainment. The real CIA, however, seems to want to live that lifestyle out.
Raymond Davis, initially said to have been an “administrative and technical official” attached to the American consulate in Lahore, is now supposed to have diplomatic immunity. It has become clear that he was a CIA agent – his wife referred reporters to an enquiry number in Washington, which turned out to be the CIA. The television company who made this discovery has, apparently removed the CIA reference from its website at the request of the US government. (The Guardian)
What does he want diplomatic immunity for? Well, stopping at traffic lights and shooting two men in the back several times, at least one of them as he ran away. I really didn’t know that “diplomatic immunity” gave “diplomats” licence to charge around foreign cities with a semi-automatic Glock and shoot people dead. I don’t doubt that “diplomatic immunity” is abused, but surely it doesn’t permit murder on the open streets?
Just to make matters worse, two armed Americans rushed out in a Land Cruiser with false number plates to try to retrieve this “diplomat”. They crushed a motorcyclist, killing him, in the course of this dismal, failed enterprise. I’m sure they felt like film stars at the time! Davis, at least, is for the moment in prison in Pakistan awaiting legal process. America would not allow the Pakistani authorities to question the two occupants of the land cruiser, who have now been spirited out of the country.
Okay, there are two unrealistic things about Jason Bourne: mostly he succeeds, and he is not devoid of morals. As far as we can tell, the real CIA agents here only have the running around and killing people to their credit.
Tuesday December 7th, 2010. Posted by Alex:
When Cyndi Lauper sang those lyrics it sounded like such a good idea. But the song did not have the politicians’ coda: “… but mine are a matter of National Security”.
The Guardian is currently carrying a piece by John Naughton, and I’d like to encourage anybody to read it. Here are a few lines that I found particularly to-the-point:
- The Wikileaks affair “represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.”
- “… the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly “discovering” that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks”
- The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.
- On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC … “Information has never been so free,” declared Clinton. “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”
Clinton stressed how Obama had said that ”the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity.
Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece. (My emphasis – AW)
- The attack on WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data … The terms and conditions under which they provide both “free” and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so.”
- What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq).
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As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, “Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure.” What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.
You would do better, of course, to read the whole article. But before I go, I’d also like to repeat one of the comments (yes, mine):
- Is this whole sex allegation business a dirty trick? I cannot possibly know.
What I do know, and know with certainty, is two things:
Firstly, it smells like a dirty trick.
Secondly, anybody who imagines that the secret services are NOT working on dirty tricks to bring down Julian Assange must have been living on another planet.
We can but assess the probabilities. It is clear to me what the probabilities are.
Wednesday December 1st, 2010. Posted by Alex:
I think I may have guessed why the police – the Metropolitan, for instance – appear to be so stupid.
From the Birmingham 6 through to the killing of Ian Tomlinson last year, we have long been aware that police forces contain some vicious thugs. The same incidents have shown us that only too often the response of police forces to charges of violence, intimidation and so on is simply to lie.
Now in the days of the Birmingham 6 things were different. The case of Ian Tomlinson is probably the best known example of how their first reaction was to deny everything, only to be forced further and further into retreat because, hey – there were a video recordings! The world is now awash with mobile phones that can take video recordings. Whereas what goes on in a police cell may be more difficult to establish, any fool knows that what happens out in the open, at a demonstration for instance, is likely to have been recorded on video.
The police rode their horses at speed into a crowd of demonstrators in London other day. If you like, you can read at the Guardian how Paul Stephenson, the Met’s commissioner, first denied that horses had been used at all, only to be forced further and further into retreat because, hey – there were a video recordings! (Also to be seen at the Guardian article.)
But my point is not that the police were using the dangerous, unnecessary and confrontational force on which Paul Stephenson does seem quite keen. It’s happened before, only too often. My point, rather is – how can they be so stupid? How can they not know that there is an extremely high probability that their actions have been recorded on video? Are they really that stupid?
My guess is this. It is not impossible that in some cases the PC Plod on the ground really is that stupid, and thinks that you can simply get away with denying it. The superior officers probably do have some brain cells to rub together, but they believe the word of PC Plod because the police still have a culture of believing that they can get away with it. A culture of believing that a policeman’s word is worth more than that of an ordinary citizen. A culture of closing ranks and turning a blind eye. A culture of stonewalling complaints. My guess is that it is this culture, rather than sheer stupidity, that blinds them to the truth. And the truth is that, for better or worse, video cameras are all around.
Friday July 30th, 2010. Posted by Alex:
This commentary by Dave Lindorff at Truthout might be worth a read.
Thursday February 4th, 2010. Posted by Alex:
A finance spokesman who can’t tell millions from billions – good grief!
See it on youtube.
Tuesday January 19th, 2010. Posted by Alex:
I hold no brief for Oliver Stone, I find those who would deny the Jewish holocaust to be stupid to the point of evil, and I am no moral relativist.
Nevertheless, Dvir Abramovich’s rant in the SMH is surely missing the point. He quotes Oliver Stone as saying, with reference to Hitler, Stalin and Mao:
“You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate.”
Abramovich then goes on to ask:
“So let us understand: The director of films such as Wall Street and Platoon wants to empathise with Hitler, and thinks the mass murderer was an easy scapegoat who needs to be put in context?”
Well, yes, if that’s what Stone wants, I support him. Empathy is (I quote the OED) “The power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.” It is vital that we attempt to do so.
What is the alternative? We might want to rest with Abramovich’s simple view that “When you have killed millions as Hitler did, you are going to be judged as bad and be vilified”. I would add that both Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao were involved in even more deaths, but the point is that none of these people acts in a vacuum; they do not spring out of nowhere as self-existent, singular generators of evil. They come into the world as babies, grow up in societies and operate in contexts. If we don’t empathise, if we make no effort to understand, then we will maintain the conditions that give them form.
Wouldn’t it be convenient if these people were “just” incomprehensibly evil! We could then just kill them, and all would be well! Let’s kill the evil bad guys! No need to worry about why they came to be like that, no need to care about the oppressed groups like Chinese or Russian peasants, Irish peasants, Palestinians, Jews, or about manipulation by the “military-industrial-financial complex”… Kill a few evil guys, and everything will be hunky-dory!
I recently came across a famous quote from Solzhenitsyn:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Tuesday December 22nd, 2009. Posted by Alex:
I recently pointed out that we have a civic duty to learn about encryption, anonymization and other such techniques that we should use, by default, to hide our information, however innocent, from unethical government intrusion. I would like to give some further reasons.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, more commonly known as ASIO, has the right to detain a person, even when they are not suspected of a terrorist offence, for at least seven days if it is believed that they can “substantially assist in the collection of intelligence”. The Attorney General (an entirely political appointee, be it noted, nothing to do with the judiciary – in the Prime Minister’s pocket, in essence) must consent to the application for a warrant. The application is made to certain magistrates and judges who have volunteered for this job, but these seemingly judicial persons do not act in their judicial capacity, just as designated persons. The application is made without the prospective detainee being present, and the detainee is not informed of the reasons for the application. If the detainee wishes to challenge the sufficiency of the grounds, their legal adviser is not allowed to see any of the supporting documentation; the detainee, in any case, does not in fact necessarily have a right to legal advice, or even to contact anybody at all.
On top of this vile law, it has been made an offence to disclose that someone is subject to such a warrant; journalists are not allowed to report the existence of a warrant, even when trying to expose abuse or misuse of the system. ASIO and the AFP have made themselves into laughing-stocks over, for instance, the Haneef case, so we can be quite certain that sooner or later these powers will be abused again.
In the face of such severe threats to our safety, it would be helpful if we all know how to publish anything that we know about such things, whether we are reporters, friends of the detained or just concerned about human rights. We should know how to publish any information anonymously, to do our best to ensure that ASIO and the AFP are held to account. It is, however, ethical but illegal.
See the Australian Human Rights Commission for more details.
But do remember, it is legal to know about these techniques, it is unethical for ASIO and the AFP to have such powers, but if you actually publish information such as the existence of the kind of warrant mentioned above, you are breaking the law. I cannot urge you to do it.
Monday December 21st, 2009. Posted by Alex:
”Australia is becoming the Iran of the South Pacific”
Crikey tells us that Reporters Without Borders has written to the PM urging him to abandon the invidious filtering scheme:
Quoting from Crikey:
The letter, signed by RWB Secretary-General Jean-Francois Julliard, spelled out the organisation’s disquiet with the broad criteria and uncertain goals of the censorship plan. In particular, they felt the lack of judicial oversight was a key problem:
Firstly, the decision to block access to an ‘inappropriate’ website would be taken not by a judge but by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Such a procedure, without a court decision, does not satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. The ACMA classifies content secretly, compiling a website blacklist by means of unilateral and arbitrary administrative decision-making. Other procedures are being considered but none of them would involve a judge.
Read more through the link above. Remember, this is not about the few unpleasant things they are talking about banning now – it is about the way they want to take power to secretly ban anything they feel like. Fascism is an easy insult, but it it not an exaggeration here.
You might also enjoy and learn from this spoof site.
Thursday December 17th, 2009. Posted by Alex:
So the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy has announced that he will introduce legislation before next year’s elections forcing ISPs to block a secret blacklist of “refused classification” (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.
The debate, thank goodness, has got vigorous. The issue, of course, is not the tiny number of sites – probably revolting and abhorrent in many cases – that are the ostensible target of this move. OK, there is indeed a question as to whether any information should ever be blocked – perhaps it should not. If we grant, for argument’s sake, that it should there is indeed a question as to whether we grant the little catholic boy Stephen Conroy the right to control the choice of what that blocked information is – in fact I don’t. And there are questions about whether it will bring any significant gains in terms of its ostensible target – probably it will be almost useless. And again, indeed, there is a question as to whether it will also block perfectly acceptable sites – the evidence suggests that it will.
But these are trivial questions. They suggest that the proposals are useless and stupid, and that makes us smell a rat.
The truly worrying thing is the proposal that the government will arrange, in secret, for otherwise public information to be banned, for reasons that it will keep secret. We will not be told what we are not allowed to see. An unelected committee will not tell us what is banned or why. We will be led to believe that, for instance, the blocks are being applied to child pornography. But further down the line, perhaps not under this government or even the next, you can just bet that some special circumstances will require a “small, temporary, provisional” extension of the blocked material. “National security” will demand, for instance, that sites explaining government involvement in environmentally unsound projects are blocked; or that sites that challenge the reasons for going to war will be seen as traitorous – WMDs, anyone? Perhaps sites with pictures of the PM cavorting naked with his/her illicit lover will be blocked; and we will not be allowed to know where it will end.
We therefore have a civic duty to learn about and use the technical tricks needed to circumvent these things. We should learn to encrypt the most innocuous e-mails, learn to anonymise ourselves when we wish our aunt a happy birthday. Otherwise we are conniving in the government cover-ups of the future. Does anybody believe they won’t want to?
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This isn’t the interesting, focussed blog you might have been looking for… "Pica Pica" is, as I'm sure you knew, the name for the common magpie. It's no more than a collection of bits and pieces I wanted to make available for friends and family. I have other blogs for dharma related material (at DangZang), and a small one for translation at my work site. Oh yes, it's by Alex Wilding |
