RHODE ISLAND
Rhode Island's Emergency Management Agency held a press conference on Thursday. Officials urged residents to put together emergency kits to tide them over for up to three days.There were no immediate plans for evacuations. Lt. Col. Denis Riel, spokesman for the Rhode Island National Guard, said personal preparedness is important. "It's not a matter of if it hits us it's when," he said.
Saturday's Newport Bucket Regatta, a yachting event in Rhode Island, has been canceled. A gala dinner was moved up to Friday.
Showing posts with label "the media". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "the media". Show all posts
Friday, August 26, 2011
This is no dream, this is really happening
CNN, State-by-state developments related to Hurricane Irene:
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Actual New York Times headline
Afghans Fear West May See Death as the End
There are at least two reasons it's hilarious, and I can't decide which is funnier.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Also
The repressed cultural critic in me loves Aaron Bady's essay on "The Twitter Can't Topple Dictators article" as a genre. One of many money quotes:
the Western generalist (Gladwell) gets to retain Serious Authority. The man who knows nothing about Egypt still gets to Seriously Know, precisely because it‘s only a dialogue between two Western speakers. And this, I think, is the real key. It isn’t just that really “hard” questions get skirted; it’s the fact that Egyptians are driving this narrative — and that if we want to understand it, we have to know something about Egypt in its particularity – that makes these people nervous.
Friday, February 11, 2011
A perfect symbol of how hard the fight is
I've got Al Jazeera English on. In general, their coverage is fantastic. The reporters are ecstatic. At one point, the anchor asked correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin to drop his journalistic remove for a moment and talk about his personal feelings at the moment as an Egyptian himself, and it was all he could do to keep himself from crying. Another correspondent, whose name I haven't caught, just said as I type that she keeps feeling like she's missing the party being a few floors up from Midan Tahrir, and all but said that she can't wait until she's off duty and can go down and join it.
And about half an hour ago, the anchor was on the phone interviewing a revolutionary who was down in Tahrir (I think it was Hossam el-Hamalawy ). He had just said "We got rid of Mubarak; now we have to get rid of the Mubarak dictatorship," and, emotionally, was halfway through another sentence when the anchor interrupted him because Catherine Margaret Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, PC, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union, was available to be interviewed.
...yeah.
When the very, very, very best, most sympathetic media coverage that there is thinks that it needs to make the actual people who did this wait so that some fucking poobah can equivocate, instead of the other way around, that right there is a perfect symbol of how goddamn hard the fight is.
And about half an hour ago, the anchor was on the phone interviewing a revolutionary who was down in Tahrir (I think it was Hossam el-Hamalawy ). He had just said "We got rid of Mubarak; now we have to get rid of the Mubarak dictatorship," and, emotionally, was halfway through another sentence when the anchor interrupted him because Catherine Margaret Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, PC, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union, was available to be interviewed.
...yeah.
When the very, very, very best, most sympathetic media coverage that there is thinks that it needs to make the actual people who did this wait so that some fucking poobah can equivocate, instead of the other way around, that right there is a perfect symbol of how goddamn hard the fight is.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Philip K. Dick, "The Android and the Human" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.), several excerpts
(Cross-posted from Commonplace)
Speaking in science fiction terms, I now foresee an anarchistic, totalitarian state ahead. Ten years from now a TV street reporter will ask some kid who is president of the United States, and the kid will admit that he doesn't know. "But the president can have you executed," the reporter will protest. "Or beaten or thrown into prison or all your rights taken away, all your property--everything." And the boy will reply, "Yeah, so could my father up to last month when he had his fatal coronary. He used to say the same thing." End of interview. And when the reporter goes to gather up his equipment he will find that one of his color 3-D stereo microphone-vidlens systems is missing; the kid has swiped it from him while the reporter was babbling on.
If, at it seems we are, [sic] in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at night when you're permitted to turn it off--rewire it in such a way that the police flunky monitoring the transmission from your living room mirrors back his house. When you sign a confession under duress, forge the name of one of the political spies who's infiltrated your model-airplane club. Pay your fines in counterfeit money or rubber checks or stolen credit cards. Give a false address. Arrive at the courthouse in a stolen car. Tell the judge that if he sentences you, you will substitute aspirin tablets for his daughter's birth control pills. Or put His Honor on a mailing list for pornographic magazines. Or, if all else fails, threaten him with your using his telephone-credit-card number to make unnecessary long-distance calls to cities on another planet. It will not be necessary to blow up the courthouse anymore. Simply find some way to defame the judge--you saw him driving home one night on the wrong side of the road with his headlights off and a fifth of Seagram's VO propped up against his steering wheel. And his bumper sticker that night read: Grant Full Rights to Us Homosexuals. He has, of course, torn off the sticker by now, but both you and ten of your friends witnessed it. And they are all at pay phones right now, ready to phone the news to the local papers. And, if he is so foolish as to sentence you, at least ask him to give back the little tape recorder you inadvertently left in his bedroom. Since the off-switch on it is broken, it has probably recorded its entire ten-day reel of tape by now. Results should be interesting. And if he tries to destroy the tape, you will have him arrested for vandalism, which in the totalitarian state of tomorrow will be the supreme crime. What is your life worth in his eyes compared with a $3 reel of Mylar tape? The tape is probably government property, like everything else, so to destroy it would be a crime against the state. The first step in a calculated, sinister insurrection.
pages 194-5
Sudden surprises, by the way--and this thought may be in itself a sudden surprise to you--are a sort of antidote to the paranoid . . . or, to be accurate about it, to live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems--that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about--are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving--total so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust and make guesses toward.
page 208
[N]o android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me fully human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:
One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free--and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.
To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passive infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike--may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread never did live. But she and her friends--they, our human future, are our little song.
pages 209-10
Speaking in science fiction terms, I now foresee an anarchistic, totalitarian state ahead. Ten years from now a TV street reporter will ask some kid who is president of the United States, and the kid will admit that he doesn't know. "But the president can have you executed," the reporter will protest. "Or beaten or thrown into prison or all your rights taken away, all your property--everything." And the boy will reply, "Yeah, so could my father up to last month when he had his fatal coronary. He used to say the same thing." End of interview. And when the reporter goes to gather up his equipment he will find that one of his color 3-D stereo microphone-vidlens systems is missing; the kid has swiped it from him while the reporter was babbling on.
If, at it seems we are, [sic] in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at night when you're permitted to turn it off--rewire it in such a way that the police flunky monitoring the transmission from your living room mirrors back his house. When you sign a confession under duress, forge the name of one of the political spies who's infiltrated your model-airplane club. Pay your fines in counterfeit money or rubber checks or stolen credit cards. Give a false address. Arrive at the courthouse in a stolen car. Tell the judge that if he sentences you, you will substitute aspirin tablets for his daughter's birth control pills. Or put His Honor on a mailing list for pornographic magazines. Or, if all else fails, threaten him with your using his telephone-credit-card number to make unnecessary long-distance calls to cities on another planet. It will not be necessary to blow up the courthouse anymore. Simply find some way to defame the judge--you saw him driving home one night on the wrong side of the road with his headlights off and a fifth of Seagram's VO propped up against his steering wheel. And his bumper sticker that night read: Grant Full Rights to Us Homosexuals. He has, of course, torn off the sticker by now, but both you and ten of your friends witnessed it. And they are all at pay phones right now, ready to phone the news to the local papers. And, if he is so foolish as to sentence you, at least ask him to give back the little tape recorder you inadvertently left in his bedroom. Since the off-switch on it is broken, it has probably recorded its entire ten-day reel of tape by now. Results should be interesting. And if he tries to destroy the tape, you will have him arrested for vandalism, which in the totalitarian state of tomorrow will be the supreme crime. What is your life worth in his eyes compared with a $3 reel of Mylar tape? The tape is probably government property, like everything else, so to destroy it would be a crime against the state. The first step in a calculated, sinister insurrection.
pages 194-5
Sudden surprises, by the way--and this thought may be in itself a sudden surprise to you--are a sort of antidote to the paranoid . . . or, to be accurate about it, to live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems--that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about--are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving--total so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust and make guesses toward.
page 208
[N]o android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me fully human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:
One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free--and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.
To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passive infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike--may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread never did live. But she and her friends--they, our human future, are our little song.
pages 209-10
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Egypt catchup
Apparently at some point this morning (in my time zone, that is), Egypt shut down Al Jazeera's Egyptian bureau and revoked their licenses; their broadcasts in English and Arabic have been taken off the air within the country.
An hour ago my twitter stream lit up with people talking about low-flying fighter jets buzzing the protesters (150,000 according to some reports) gathered in Tahrir Square. No attacks as of yet. And the protesters didn't move an inch.
Should I keep using the word "protester" or should I switch to something more appropriate?
This AJE interview with PJ Crowley is near eight minutes long, but trust me, the time will fly by because it's one of the most entertaining things you'll ever see. The interviewer, Shihab Rattansi, is wonderful, and I want to send him a present. I would pick out a favorite moment ("That's interesting," perhaps), but really it's the momentum of it all, the blow after blow to Crowley's insipid metaphors and non-answers, that is so magical.
(Source)
Yasmin Hamidi on Twitter (via a retweet from Aaron Bady) says "Think colonialism is dead? Turn on @CNN & watch white men in suits debate wat role US shud play in deciding the fate of Egyptians."
UPDATE: It is of course entirely possible--likely, even--that I'm missing some subtleties here, but AJE is pissing me off with its attempts to organize this. They keep saying that the protesters need a "figurehead" or a "leader" to make their demands, and it's clear they want it to be ElBaradei (who is about to speak, apparently)--but, hello, this is what people making their demands looks like:
And then they keep saying that the protesters "need" the Muslim Brotherhood. At one point one reporter said that the Brotherhood can "organize people on the streets, and no one else can." But, hello, this is what people organizing themselves on the streets looks like:
The Muslim Brotherhood didn't do that. ElBaradei didn't do that. People did that.
UPDATE II: I don't find Fox News any more or less propagandistic than any of the other American networks, nor do I think their propaganda is in favor of anything different. I do, however, admire their methods, particularly their regular habit of "accidentally" mislabeling things:
An hour ago my twitter stream lit up with people talking about low-flying fighter jets buzzing the protesters (150,000 according to some reports) gathered in Tahrir Square. No attacks as of yet. And the protesters didn't move an inch.
Should I keep using the word "protester" or should I switch to something more appropriate?
This AJE interview with PJ Crowley is near eight minutes long, but trust me, the time will fly by because it's one of the most entertaining things you'll ever see. The interviewer, Shihab Rattansi, is wonderful, and I want to send him a present. I would pick out a favorite moment ("That's interesting," perhaps), but really it's the momentum of it all, the blow after blow to Crowley's insipid metaphors and non-answers, that is so magical.
(Source)
Yasmin Hamidi on Twitter (via a retweet from Aaron Bady) says "Think colonialism is dead? Turn on @CNN & watch white men in suits debate wat role US shud play in deciding the fate of Egyptians."
UPDATE: It is of course entirely possible--likely, even--that I'm missing some subtleties here, but AJE is pissing me off with its attempts to organize this. They keep saying that the protesters need a "figurehead" or a "leader" to make their demands, and it's clear they want it to be ElBaradei (who is about to speak, apparently)--but, hello, this is what people making their demands looks like:
And then they keep saying that the protesters "need" the Muslim Brotherhood. At one point one reporter said that the Brotherhood can "organize people on the streets, and no one else can." But, hello, this is what people organizing themselves on the streets looks like:
The Muslim Brotherhood didn't do that. ElBaradei didn't do that. People did that.
UPDATE II: I don't find Fox News any more or less propagandistic than any of the other American networks, nor do I think their propaganda is in favor of anything different. I do, however, admire their methods, particularly their regular habit of "accidentally" mislabeling things:
Friday, January 28, 2011
Your friends are advertisements
And if you're worried about whether or not they're increasing brand lift and ad recall, don't worry: they really are.
Compare what these people are very excited about with what the guy in the red shirt in the post below is very excited about.
Compare what these people are very excited about with what the guy in the red shirt in the post below is very excited about.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
TWO SUNSMAGEDDON
This here is a screenshot of CNN's home page at one point on Friday afternoon. Clicking will give you the full-size image.
The big horrible wretched mess is of course that main article, about Ben Roethlisberger's "road to redemption," which is just as awful as it looks and really is about how winning the Superbowl would totally make up for his "bad behavior," aka raping lots of people. The awfulness of this is obvious enough, and unfunny enough, that I will leave it at that. (Though I will pause to note the second story listed on the "latest news" feed off to the left; apparently when it's a reason for deporting Mexicans, rape can be called rape.)
Currently one of my favorite features on the CNN homepage is the "popular on Facebook" sidebar on the right, mostly because of its regularly hilariously infelicitous phrasing. For example, here we see that "23,081 people recommended Singer-songwriter Teena Marie dies at 54." One wonders if, absent the unimaginable cruelty of those 23,081, Teena Marie might still be alive today. The last one on the list, though, is perhaps the very best of them all: "116,510 people recommended Funeral protests to be met by 'angels'" which I admit made me laugh for longer than it probably should have. Interestingly, when I clicked on the link it took me to an article about lawmakers making it illegal to protest at their funerals, featuring only a glancing mention of that whole Fred Phelps counter-protest trend of wearing twinky angel wings rather than doing the sensible thing and ignoring them until they run out of people to sue for assault (or battery? whatever) and starve to death.
Moving along, we come to the reason for the post title. Direct your eyes, if you will, to the item five from the bottom of the "latest news" list: "Will Earth have 2 suns by 2012?"
Being big nerds, the Baronette and I (we were reading together) already knew just from reading the headline that the article would be about the imminent supernova of the star Betelgeuse, which when it occurs will briefly be as bright to a (naked eye) observer here on Earth as a second sun. Considering that Betelgeuse could, according to our understanding, go supernova anytime between now and about a million years from now ("imminent" means different things in human and universe scales), the 2012 shoehorning is of course silly, stupid, pandering, and entirely predictable.
When we actually read the article, we discovered that while the pandering had reached approximately its zenith in the headline, the silliness and stupidity had only just begun, and would soon reach levels that just moments before we never would have predicted. In the interest of brevity (too late!), here's a list of things the article says or implies rather than a discussion of them:
All this is delightfully demolished in the comments, which for once on a mainstream news article are an absolute joy to read. My favorite (it was hard to pick) was one that Echo's incredibly annoying comment management system won't let me get to at the moment, so I can't credit it or quote it directly, but it was something along the lines of "Just because Betelgeuse's name comes from Arabic doesn't mean that it has to do with the devil."
Anyway, after we read the article (which, I should point out, was featured on CNN's home page but was actually hosted on Time's site), the Baronette and I saw that the story came to the attention of the writer via the Huffington Post, and, curious, we followed the link to that article, which we discovered was about 2% less completely misguided and misleading, but featured most of the same claims (Huffy at least had the decency to issue corrections about the goofy neutrinogold claim rather than just pretending it never happened) and also featured a bizarrely unnecessary Star Wars reference. Not only that, but it was actually drawing on an article from news.com.au. So we followed the rabbit to that article, which, we discovered, was about 2% less stupid than the Huffer article, but featured many of the same claims, joked about 2012, and mentioned Tatooine by name in the headline.
OK, maybe you had to be there, but neither of us could breathe for like an hour because we were laughing too hard.
So, some innocent scientist guy (whether you think "innocent scientist" is an oxymoron or not, he's an innocent in this situation) gives an interview. The interviewer, misunderstanding a lot of what the scientist says, writes up a flawed article, makes a weird Star Wars comparison, and jokes about 2012. A Huffing Hack copies and pastes the article and shifts the words around enough to make it technically not plagiarism, in the process misunderstanding the joke and taking the 2012 stuff seriously, because it's the Huffington Post and their charter requires all articles to feature credulous references to the worst aspects of New Agery. A Time writer picks that article up, copies and pastes, rearranges to avoid plagiarism, misunderstands things and gets all confused, and passes along the 2012 claim unquestioned, adding in a whole lot of other some-people's-weird-ideas-presented-as-fact claims for good measure, because it's Time and they exist to not question things and turn weird ideas into fake facts. And then CNN, too lazy to even rearrange the words, just links to that article because it's also too lazy to pretend that Time and CNN are two different news sources. Each of these steps maintains the Star Wars reference, because god forbid information get distorted.
Your news media, everybody. And if they do this with sciencey fluff pieces, just imagine what they do with everything else!
MORAL OF THE STORY: You will always, always, always be better served by not reading, listening to, or watching major news services, even if you don't replace them with anything.
PS I know it's extraordinarily unlikely, but I would love it if Betelgeuse went supernova within my lifetime.
PPS One of the funniest things about the whole thing, at least for me, is that the Baronette and I had been looking at the cheesy Gawker sci-fi blog, io9, before she jokingly said "Now let's see what's going on in the real world" and clicked over to CNN. And we found this.
The big horrible wretched mess is of course that main article, about Ben Roethlisberger's "road to redemption," which is just as awful as it looks and really is about how winning the Superbowl would totally make up for his "bad behavior," aka raping lots of people. The awfulness of this is obvious enough, and unfunny enough, that I will leave it at that. (Though I will pause to note the second story listed on the "latest news" feed off to the left; apparently when it's a reason for deporting Mexicans, rape can be called rape.)
Currently one of my favorite features on the CNN homepage is the "popular on Facebook" sidebar on the right, mostly because of its regularly hilariously infelicitous phrasing. For example, here we see that "23,081 people recommended Singer-songwriter Teena Marie dies at 54." One wonders if, absent the unimaginable cruelty of those 23,081, Teena Marie might still be alive today. The last one on the list, though, is perhaps the very best of them all: "116,510 people recommended Funeral protests to be met by 'angels'" which I admit made me laugh for longer than it probably should have. Interestingly, when I clicked on the link it took me to an article about lawmakers making it illegal to protest at their funerals, featuring only a glancing mention of that whole Fred Phelps counter-protest trend of wearing twinky angel wings rather than doing the sensible thing and ignoring them until they run out of people to sue for assault (or battery? whatever) and starve to death.
Moving along, we come to the reason for the post title. Direct your eyes, if you will, to the item five from the bottom of the "latest news" list: "Will Earth have 2 suns by 2012?"
Being big nerds, the Baronette and I (we were reading together) already knew just from reading the headline that the article would be about the imminent supernova of the star Betelgeuse, which when it occurs will briefly be as bright to a (naked eye) observer here on Earth as a second sun. Considering that Betelgeuse could, according to our understanding, go supernova anytime between now and about a million years from now ("imminent" means different things in human and universe scales), the 2012 shoehorning is of course silly, stupid, pandering, and entirely predictable.
When we actually read the article, we discovered that while the pandering had reached approximately its zenith in the headline, the silliness and stupidity had only just begun, and would soon reach levels that just moments before we never would have predicted. In the interest of brevity (too late!), here's a list of things the article says or implies rather than a discussion of them:
1. George Lucas invented the idea of binary star systems, and it's actually a far-fetched notionAll in an article of about 350 words. Numbers six and seven (which are, together, wrong in more ways than there are letters in this post), by the way, were in the article when I first read it, but have since been removed without comment, the cowardly fuckers.
2. A supernova being sun-level bright temporarily would be the same as us being in a binary star system
3. The Mayan calendar really really predicts the end of the world in 2012
4. This is relevant to supernovas somehow
5. Betelgeuse's name has "strong associations with the devil"
6. Betelgeuse is the second biggest star in the universe
7. The supernova will launch neutrinos at Earth, and since neutrinos are the building blocks of heavy elements like gold and uranium this will be beneficial to us, as it will enrich the planet with more valuable elements
All this is delightfully demolished in the comments, which for once on a mainstream news article are an absolute joy to read. My favorite (it was hard to pick) was one that Echo's incredibly annoying comment management system won't let me get to at the moment, so I can't credit it or quote it directly, but it was something along the lines of "Just because Betelgeuse's name comes from Arabic doesn't mean that it has to do with the devil."
Anyway, after we read the article (which, I should point out, was featured on CNN's home page but was actually hosted on Time's site), the Baronette and I saw that the story came to the attention of the writer via the Huffington Post, and, curious, we followed the link to that article, which we discovered was about 2% less completely misguided and misleading, but featured most of the same claims (Huffy at least had the decency to issue corrections about the goofy neutrinogold claim rather than just pretending it never happened) and also featured a bizarrely unnecessary Star Wars reference. Not only that, but it was actually drawing on an article from news.com.au. So we followed the rabbit to that article, which, we discovered, was about 2% less stupid than the Huffer article, but featured many of the same claims, joked about 2012, and mentioned Tatooine by name in the headline.
OK, maybe you had to be there, but neither of us could breathe for like an hour because we were laughing too hard.
So, some innocent scientist guy (whether you think "innocent scientist" is an oxymoron or not, he's an innocent in this situation) gives an interview. The interviewer, misunderstanding a lot of what the scientist says, writes up a flawed article, makes a weird Star Wars comparison, and jokes about 2012. A Huffing Hack copies and pastes the article and shifts the words around enough to make it technically not plagiarism, in the process misunderstanding the joke and taking the 2012 stuff seriously, because it's the Huffington Post and their charter requires all articles to feature credulous references to the worst aspects of New Agery. A Time writer picks that article up, copies and pastes, rearranges to avoid plagiarism, misunderstands things and gets all confused, and passes along the 2012 claim unquestioned, adding in a whole lot of other some-people's-weird-ideas-presented-as-fact claims for good measure, because it's Time and they exist to not question things and turn weird ideas into fake facts. And then CNN, too lazy to even rearrange the words, just links to that article because it's also too lazy to pretend that Time and CNN are two different news sources. Each of these steps maintains the Star Wars reference, because god forbid information get distorted.
Your news media, everybody. And if they do this with sciencey fluff pieces, just imagine what they do with everything else!
MORAL OF THE STORY: You will always, always, always be better served by not reading, listening to, or watching major news services, even if you don't replace them with anything.
PS I know it's extraordinarily unlikely, but I would love it if Betelgeuse went supernova within my lifetime.
PPS One of the funniest things about the whole thing, at least for me, is that the Baronette and I had been looking at the cheesy Gawker sci-fi blog, io9, before she jokingly said "Now let's see what's going on in the real world" and clicked over to CNN. And we found this.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
News from the corporate world #7: What are you waiting for, women?
It's been a long time since I did one of these!
I don't recall where I came across this CNN article, but it's pretty funny, right? "8 ways women can get ahead in the workplace." The whole article is hilariously depressing, a list of shitty advice on how women can make their lives more shitty so that the Man in Charge will think they're almost as important as the men they work with. I say that the way women should get ahead in the workplace is by tearing the fucking workplace down and strangling the boss with his own tie, but that's, I suppose, where me and CNN are different.
Item number two, What are you waiting for?, is what I want to focus on, though. It quotes this Lois P. Frankel person, who they describe as a "psychologist," and who wrote a book called Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office, which I'm just sure is a must-read. "Many women believe if they do what they are told, they will be noticed and rewarded," CNN tells us. And then this sentence
I mean, really: even if some poor soul were to come across this article and take it at face value as an advice column, what advice is she supposed to take away from this? "Working hard won't get you noticed, it'll just make you have to work harder, so you'd better work harder!"
Fuck you. Tear it down.
I don't recall where I came across this CNN article, but it's pretty funny, right? "8 ways women can get ahead in the workplace." The whole article is hilariously depressing, a list of shitty advice on how women can make their lives more shitty so that the Man in Charge will think they're almost as important as the men they work with. I say that the way women should get ahead in the workplace is by tearing the fucking workplace down and strangling the boss with his own tie, but that's, I suppose, where me and CNN are different.
Item number two, What are you waiting for?, is what I want to focus on, though. It quotes this Lois P. Frankel person, who they describe as a "psychologist," and who wrote a book called Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office, which I'm just sure is a must-read. "Many women believe if they do what they are told, they will be noticed and rewarded," CNN tells us. And then this sentence
In fact, Frankel warns that "hard work typically begets more hard work."is separated from this sentence
Asking for assignments that can help build your career is another way to get your manager's attention, Frankel says.by two sentences. Frankel, and the CNN writer through whom her words are filtered, clearly realized that they had accidentally said something that could be interpreted in a way other than "You're lucky just to have a job so you better work your pretty little ass off to keep it, and make me some coffee while you're at it" and scrambled to fix that mistake.
I mean, really: even if some poor soul were to come across this article and take it at face value as an advice column, what advice is she supposed to take away from this? "Working hard won't get you noticed, it'll just make you have to work harder, so you'd better work harder!"
Fuck you. Tear it down.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Tasteless, perhaps
but it's what I thought of.
From what I can gather, it's not really known yet how serious Rep. Giffords' injuries are, but the various news outlets are reporting that she's "in surgery."
What I imagine won't ever be reported on is whether, and to what extent, her treatment was prioritized over that of the others injured and killed at the same time.
From what I can gather, it's not really known yet how serious Rep. Giffords' injuries are, but the various news outlets are reporting that she's "in surgery."
What I imagine won't ever be reported on is whether, and to what extent, her treatment was prioritized over that of the others injured and killed at the same time.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Evil as the sincere non-ironic attachment to a belief
I'm still sorting through stuff that accumulated in the past few weeks. Back before Christmas, Aaron linked to this comment on Metafilter*. The poster, AlsoMike, responding to that silly Bruce Sterling piece about Julian Assange, makes some very good points about Wikileaks' actually stated goals (boiled down: justice), rather than the ones people state (in this case: transparency for transparency's sake), though I wish he wouldn't conflate Wikileaks with Assange, since that's almost as serious a misconception as the ones he's debunking.
*Which is one of those very internetty sites that I never look at because I don't understand them** so I'm glad of the link. I also admit I haven't bothered to read any of the rest of the thread. If you do and it's worth reading, point me at it.
**And, probably, vice versa.
Anyway, right now I'm more interested in this part (disregarding the embarrassingly worshipful opening), which comes after:
I don't know, maybe it's not that big a deal to anybody else, but I love it when I read something like this. When I do, it's like there's almost an audible click of things falling into place.
For further reading on related matters, an excellent addition to my favorite of Justin's modes: the multi-subject, stream of consciousness, lucidly discursive essay. This one is about New Years, drugs, identity based in consumption, hipsters, irony, judgmentalism, conformity, nonconformity, not taking other people's abstentions personally, sincerity, and much much more.
*Which is one of those very internetty sites that I never look at because I don't understand them** so I'm glad of the link. I also admit I haven't bothered to read any of the rest of the thread. If you do and it's worth reading, point me at it.
**And, probably, vice versa.
Anyway, right now I'm more interested in this part (disregarding the embarrassingly worshipful opening), which comes after:
Assange sticks his head above this bland crowd of empty slogan-chanters and dares to stand for something, and this cannot stand, liberals and progressives shout him down because they've accepted Hollywood's ideological framing of evil as the sincere non-ironic attachment to a belief. Every movie villain believes in a cause, the good ordinary people ultimately defeat him, but not in the name some other true belief, but simply to preserve the status quo, so that the neoliberal capitalist system should continue unmolested.Hah! Wonderful bit of cultural criticism! I'd like to meet that man, shake his hand.
I don't know, maybe it's not that big a deal to anybody else, but I love it when I read something like this. When I do, it's like there's almost an audible click of things falling into place.
For further reading on related matters, an excellent addition to my favorite of Justin's modes: the multi-subject, stream of consciousness, lucidly discursive essay. This one is about New Years, drugs, identity based in consumption, hipsters, irony, judgmentalism, conformity, nonconformity, not taking other people's abstentions personally, sincerity, and much much more.
Friday, December 31, 2010
WHO LOOKS AT THIS AND THINKS IT'S NEWS?!?!?!
- How to ring in the new year with apps
- No pardon for Billy the Kid
- Ticker: New Palin DVDs revealed
- John Mellencamp splits with wife
- Kathy Griffin: queen of dropping the ball
- Hangover remedies: what works?
- Town rings in new year with giant bug
- Bring in the new year happy and single
- Where the stars will be as 2011 dawns
- Resolution no. 1: Lose weight
(Thanks to the Baronette, who is
Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks especially to everyone involved in the recent wave of ridiculously nice things being said about me, to me, in comments. I almost feel bad having people say such nice things while this blog lies semi-fallow in shitty music reviews and images of CNN's front page. The new year will bring with it a return to more of the hard-hitting analysis that has made me so famous, respected, and beloved.
And now, to get smashed.
Friday, December 17, 2010
I'll say this for the internet
Jody McIntyre and Emily Henochowicz. The apparatus of the state attacked them brutally, in Henochowicz's case damaging her permanently. The result? People know who they are now. Googling either of their names comes up with their personal sites as the first result. Anyone who sees the Israeli government and sympathetic media saying Henochowicz deserved to have her eye shot out* can, if they're so inclined, google up her gentle and whimsical art and her simple, but radical, view that humans should be treated like people. Anyone impressed with McIntyre's performance in front of the most hostile interviewer imaginable--or, more importantly, anyone seeking confirmation of the interviewer's terrifying claim that McIntyre self-describes as a revolutionary--can google him up and hear it from his own perspective--with all of his extraordinarily well thought out and explained reasons for describing himself thus. In other words, when presented with State organs' negative portrayals of these people, there is a whole body of their own work readily available contradicting it. I don't know how many people avail themselves of it, but at least some small number must. And there is a chance that some tiny number of people who would not otherwise have been exposed to this kind of thinking now have. That is a good fucking thing.
*Still the best (or at least my favorite) comment on that is hist's on a SMBIVA post: "If I wrote a fictional villain who put out a young art students eye and laughed about how she deserved it, I'd be accused of laying it on too thick."
More, different: Aaron Bady and Barnaby Raine. Neither of them are known now for violence done to them by the state (though Raine, at least, has had some experience of that; I don't know if the same can be said for Bady or not). Instead, they're known for putting opposition to what the state is doing into lucid, eloquent words. Bady's article on the philosophy behind wikileaks was linked to from all over the place, including The Atlantic and The New York Times. Even people who take what the fucking NYT says seriously have been given the easy opportunity to click around his site and see other recent writing like "when it suits the imperial hegemon to give a shit about death and suffering, they do so because it suits them to do so." Raine hasn't, to my knowledge, been quite so widely linked, but, hell, I came across him at Digby's blog of all places. And so again we see people with a body of thought out there available for reviewing getting eyes directed to that work.
The Baronette has alerted me to the fact that Gang of Four's "Natural's Not In It" (opening lyrics: "The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure") is currently being used in commercials for some sort of XBox product; the commercial can be seen here. This is of course horrifying in many ways, and in other ways there is of course a kind of dark hilarity to it. The glimmer of possibility mixed in, though, is that someone, somewhere might see the commercial, think, "That guitar riff sounds great! I wonder what it's from," look it up, listen to Gang of Four, and learn something. Or maybe one or two of the 141,671 people who have watched the commercial on youtube as of this writing read some of the comments about how terrible it is that this song is in this commercial and looked into it a bit. Who knows. It seems unlikely to me that this hasn't happened at least once. And that's a hell of a lot better than nothing.
This is the kind of thing that makes me persist in seeing the internet, in the context of the shit civilization that is the only kind of foundation that could support such a thing as the internet, as a good thing, and why I think it's terrible that the internet as currently composed is surely about to come to an end while the civilization still marches on strong. I've got my eye on what The Pirate Bay is up to. It's not much, yet, but as I keep saying, it's something. And something is better than nothing.
*Still the best (or at least my favorite) comment on that is hist's on a SMBIVA post: "If I wrote a fictional villain who put out a young art students eye and laughed about how she deserved it, I'd be accused of laying it on too thick."
More, different: Aaron Bady and Barnaby Raine. Neither of them are known now for violence done to them by the state (though Raine, at least, has had some experience of that; I don't know if the same can be said for Bady or not). Instead, they're known for putting opposition to what the state is doing into lucid, eloquent words. Bady's article on the philosophy behind wikileaks was linked to from all over the place, including The Atlantic and The New York Times. Even people who take what the fucking NYT says seriously have been given the easy opportunity to click around his site and see other recent writing like "when it suits the imperial hegemon to give a shit about death and suffering, they do so because it suits them to do so." Raine hasn't, to my knowledge, been quite so widely linked, but, hell, I came across him at Digby's blog of all places. And so again we see people with a body of thought out there available for reviewing getting eyes directed to that work.
The Baronette has alerted me to the fact that Gang of Four's "Natural's Not In It" (opening lyrics: "The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure") is currently being used in commercials for some sort of XBox product; the commercial can be seen here. This is of course horrifying in many ways, and in other ways there is of course a kind of dark hilarity to it. The glimmer of possibility mixed in, though, is that someone, somewhere might see the commercial, think, "That guitar riff sounds great! I wonder what it's from," look it up, listen to Gang of Four, and learn something. Or maybe one or two of the 141,671 people who have watched the commercial on youtube as of this writing read some of the comments about how terrible it is that this song is in this commercial and looked into it a bit. Who knows. It seems unlikely to me that this hasn't happened at least once. And that's a hell of a lot better than nothing.
This is the kind of thing that makes me persist in seeing the internet, in the context of the shit civilization that is the only kind of foundation that could support such a thing as the internet, as a good thing, and why I think it's terrible that the internet as currently composed is surely about to come to an end while the civilization still marches on strong. I've got my eye on what The Pirate Bay is up to. It's not much, yet, but as I keep saying, it's something. And something is better than nothing.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
More London protest footage
China Miéville's commentary (via) is worth a read:
The scene: a mass demonstration in Tehran/Harare/Rangoon/Pyongyang/&c. The police are filmed shoving a 20-yr-old demonstrator with cerebral palsy from her/his wheelchair & dragging her/him across the pavement, to the horror of onlookers. Footage of this event is sneaked out & publicised. Accordingly, Iranian/Zimbabwean/Burmese/North Korean/&c state broadcasters cannot ignore it. Forced to report it, they stress, however, that there ‘is a suggestion’ that said demonstrator was ‘rolling towards the police’.If you haven't seen the BBC interview with Jody McIntyre, the man in (and then out of) the wheelchair, the video and an excellent transcript are here (note: I know nothing of that blog in general, but just having the transcript is a great resource). The interviewer is even more ludicrous than you might expect (even primed by Miéville's commentary), but McIntyre keeps his cool and says some really remarkable things that hopefully had some impact on at least a few people watching. McIntyre's blog, Life on Wheels, also seems like good reading.
The British & American media response can be imagined. Shock. Disgust at such overt & disgraceful victim-blaming. Sympathy for the young activist, who becomes an international hero. Revulsion at the outlet’s patently ridiculous claims of ‘objectivity’. Bitter humour, perhaps, at the sheer Leviathan absurdity of the implied justification.
‘Rolling towards the police’ might become a media meme, this year’s Comical Ali, a shorthand for any self-evidently ridiculous & tasteless claim by the media apparatchik of a repressive regime. Hipsters begin to wear t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase & the face of the ‘journalist’ who spoke it.
Now relocate that attack.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Wikileaks intermission
A few things.
First, the "cyberattacks" on companies and organizations that have done shitty things in regards to Wikileaks--Paypal, Mastercard, etc. I just want to say that these are wonderful and make me giddy. Boycotts are nice and all, if you can do it, but fucking taking that shit down, even briefly, is just delightful.
This CNN article talks about that briefly (and ineptly), and then goes on to some interesting quotes from goofy Kevin Rudd:
Then there's this, from Joe Lieberman*:
At this point, I'm thinking I'm going to take a wikibreak. Barring any really startling developments I'm gonna write about other things until at least Friday.
*Quoted from the same article, by the way, that quotes Eric Holder using the word "misimpression," which I'm sure won't get the same response as Palin's "refudiate." And, OK, maybe there's an argument that "misimpression" can be considered a real word, but only in terms of weaselly politspeak. "Refudiate" at least has the advantage of being a) a funny play on an overused term, b) immediately clear, and c) not from the Handbook of Corporate Dehumanization in Language.
First, the "cyberattacks" on companies and organizations that have done shitty things in regards to Wikileaks--Paypal, Mastercard, etc. I just want to say that these are wonderful and make me giddy. Boycotts are nice and all, if you can do it, but fucking taking that shit down, even briefly, is just delightful.
This CNN article talks about that briefly (and ineptly), and then goes on to some interesting quotes from goofy Kevin Rudd:
"I have been pretty consistent about where the core responsibility lies in this entire matter and that lies with the release of an unauthorized nature of this material by U.S. personnel," Rudd told Reuters.Which, you know, politicians say what they will say and they have reasons for what they say, but this cracks me up. Things seem to be going nicely. P.J. Crowley, spokesman for the U.S. of A.'s State Department, responded:
"Mr. Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorized release of 250,000 documents from the U.S. diplomatic communications network," Rudd told the agency. "The Americans are responsible for that."
Foreign Minister Rudd is correct, in that the first responsibility rests with us. Someone in the U.S. government leaked these documents. That said, what Julian Assange is doing harms not just our interests, but has placed real lives at risk.This I like because of that word real. Crowley is being pretty clear here, in his obtuse way. The lives that Wikileaks could possibly, kinda, sorta, maybe, be seen, if you squint, to potentially be placing at risk are real. The lives that the US government is definitively bringing to an end are, by contrast, fake.
Then there's this, from Joe Lieberman*:
“I certainly believe that WikiLleaks has violated the Espionage Act, but then what about the news organizations — including The Times — that accepted it and distributed it?” Mr. Lieberman said, adding: “To me, The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, and whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.”With all of this, I have to wonder how much of it is theater, and how much of it is actually the system eating itself. I'm having trouble thinking of a third option for what it could be.
At this point, I'm thinking I'm going to take a wikibreak. Barring any really startling developments I'm gonna write about other things until at least Friday.
*Quoted from the same article, by the way, that quotes Eric Holder using the word "misimpression," which I'm sure won't get the same response as Palin's "refudiate." And, OK, maybe there's an argument that "misimpression" can be considered a real word, but only in terms of weaselly politspeak. "Refudiate" at least has the advantage of being a) a funny play on an overused term, b) immediately clear, and c) not from the Handbook of Corporate Dehumanization in Language.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Wikileaks #3: A decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt
[I wrote the bulk of this before I saw that Assange has been arrested. I don't think it changes anything I say here, but it's definitely worth mentioning.]
Towards the end of #2, I brought up the criticism that Wikileaks is useless, because no matter how shocking the information it reveals may be (in leaks that have already been released or any that may be in the future), the system can easily withstand these shocks with the ol' in one ear and out the other trick. I also briefly mentioned the "this is nothing new" argument (which is deployed at times in opposition to, and at times in support of, the "it doesn't matter anyway" argument*) against the specific, released leaks themselves. I'd like to expand on that a little.
*By which I am not cattily suggesting that the people who make these arguments are inconsistent. Each use on its own, and even a combination of both at the same time, makes perfect sense to me. Anyway, inconsistency is great. I'm inconsistent, you're inconsistent, we're all inconsistent.
I'm never a fan of the "this is nothing new" attitude. My reasons for this are primarily a combination of my sentiments expressed here and here (and I promise I won't keep linking to myself, because don't you hate that?). Briefly, a) what's old news to one is not necessarily old news to another, and b) those of us who reject the worship of "progress" that capitalism depends upon should not be so quick to dismiss anything just because it's not novel to us. In fact, as I mentioned in the last essay, I'm starting to think that continuous cynicism can only end up being another method by which the system absorbs these shocks: this is no big deal, we say, and in so saying we help make it true.
Regardless, though, this is all micro-level stuff: talking about the impact of just the contents of just one specific leak, rather than the endeavor as a whole.
At this point I doubt there are many people reading this who haven't read the wonderful essay Aaron of zunguzungu wrote a week or so ago examining the aims of Wikileaks as stated in a four-year-old essay written by Julian Assange. If you've somehow missed it, I urge you to read it. I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that I read zunguzungu before it was cool.
A brief, brief, very brief summary would be something like this: because knowledge of its activities creates its own opposition, authoritarianism requires secrecy. It also requires communication between its secretive elements. The more secrecy, the harder it is for those elements to communicate. The more leaks in the secrecy, the more the authoritarians tighten their security, and hence the more difficult it is for them to communicate with one another. The more difficult it is for them to communicate with one another, the more difficult it is to hold on to authority.
In other words, by providing a mechanism by which it is extremely easy for any one member of an authoritarian conspiracy to make secrets public, Wikileaks hopes to change the environment in which those conspiracies work in order to make it more difficult for them to function effectively.
The moment where I have to change my pants is this, from Assange's original essay:
But this? Call me naive, but I can almost believe it has a chance of working.
But before I get carried away with my excitement, allow me to circle back to my opening. We can see now that any objection to Wikileaks based on the actual information content of the leaks--either in specific, as with the "nothing new" argument, or in general, as with the "in one ear" argument--is essentially moot. The content of the leaks is important in some senses, but is irrelevant to the underlying strategy, which is only concerned with the existence of leaks. There is one other major objection I've seen that I considered valid, which goes along the lines of "these releases will just make Power dig in its heels even more--tighter security means we'll know even less of what's going on." When I first saw that objection being thrown around, my perspective was that it was a fair price to pay. Looking at it in light of this whole anti-conspiracy strategy, though, increased secrecy is a win.
I'm far from the smartest person in the world, but I have yet to think of a flaw in the logic. One of the very few counterarguments I've seen that strike me as anything close to damning comes from Doctor Science (another is BDR's, which I actually think is stronger and will try to discuss soon). Doctor Science points out, simply, that we don't have to look far to come across dozens of examples of authoritarian evil that didn't require secrecy at all. And it's true--a great portion of the horrifying things our ruling class does, it does out in the open.
However, it is trivially easy to show at least that the ruling class, in practice, relies very heavily on secrecy--just look at the leaked cables to see the crap they felt the need to classify! Greenwald pointed out that the very banality of a good portion of the cables is in itself a scandal--because what the fuck is a government that claims to be democracy doing making all this trivial nonsense secret? (Note, please, that this behavior does not come as a surprise to people with the perspective that I and most of you bring to things, but note also what I said about how not everything needs to be surprising to be important.)
So, yes, I do take Doctor Science's point, and I will admit that she did manage to temper my excitement slightly by pointing out the obvious (there's that word again) that hadn't occurred to me. But the fact remains that even if the ruling class doesn't actually require all that much secrecy to get away with its fucking of the world, it still currently relies on secrecy as a primary tool. At the very worst, Wikileaks is screwing with their ability to use one of their favorite tools.
And now I'm excited again, so I'm going to return to that quote that got me all hot and bothered. Specifically, to the money shot. Let's see it again, in slow motion:
Towards the end of #2, I brought up the criticism that Wikileaks is useless, because no matter how shocking the information it reveals may be (in leaks that have already been released or any that may be in the future), the system can easily withstand these shocks with the ol' in one ear and out the other trick. I also briefly mentioned the "this is nothing new" argument (which is deployed at times in opposition to, and at times in support of, the "it doesn't matter anyway" argument*) against the specific, released leaks themselves. I'd like to expand on that a little.
*By which I am not cattily suggesting that the people who make these arguments are inconsistent. Each use on its own, and even a combination of both at the same time, makes perfect sense to me. Anyway, inconsistency is great. I'm inconsistent, you're inconsistent, we're all inconsistent.
I'm never a fan of the "this is nothing new" attitude. My reasons for this are primarily a combination of my sentiments expressed here and here (and I promise I won't keep linking to myself, because don't you hate that?). Briefly, a) what's old news to one is not necessarily old news to another, and b) those of us who reject the worship of "progress" that capitalism depends upon should not be so quick to dismiss anything just because it's not novel to us. In fact, as I mentioned in the last essay, I'm starting to think that continuous cynicism can only end up being another method by which the system absorbs these shocks: this is no big deal, we say, and in so saying we help make it true.
Regardless, though, this is all micro-level stuff: talking about the impact of just the contents of just one specific leak, rather than the endeavor as a whole.
At this point I doubt there are many people reading this who haven't read the wonderful essay Aaron of zunguzungu wrote a week or so ago examining the aims of Wikileaks as stated in a four-year-old essay written by Julian Assange. If you've somehow missed it, I urge you to read it. I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that I read zunguzungu before it was cool.
A brief, brief, very brief summary would be something like this: because knowledge of its activities creates its own opposition, authoritarianism requires secrecy. It also requires communication between its secretive elements. The more secrecy, the harder it is for those elements to communicate. The more leaks in the secrecy, the more the authoritarians tighten their security, and hence the more difficult it is for them to communicate with one another. The more difficult it is for them to communicate with one another, the more difficult it is to hold on to authority.
In other words, by providing a mechanism by which it is extremely easy for any one member of an authoritarian conspiracy to make secrets public, Wikileaks hopes to change the environment in which those conspiracies work in order to make it more difficult for them to function effectively.
The moment where I have to change my pants is this, from Assange's original essay:
If total conspiratorial power is zero, then clearly there is no information flow between the conspirators and hence no conspiracy. A substantial increase or decrease in total conspiratorial power almost always means what we expect it to mean; an increase or decrease in the ability of the conspiracy to think, act and adapt…An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.This is what I meant when I said the other day that I'm more excited about Wikileaks than I have been about anything in a good long while. Despite my dislike of cynicism, I've grown accustomed to feeling like there is nothing that anyone can effectively do to fight Power. Any solution I'd ever been able to think of requires such a critical mass of people as to be effectively impossible.
But this? Call me naive, but I can almost believe it has a chance of working.
But before I get carried away with my excitement, allow me to circle back to my opening. We can see now that any objection to Wikileaks based on the actual information content of the leaks--either in specific, as with the "nothing new" argument, or in general, as with the "in one ear" argument--is essentially moot. The content of the leaks is important in some senses, but is irrelevant to the underlying strategy, which is only concerned with the existence of leaks. There is one other major objection I've seen that I considered valid, which goes along the lines of "these releases will just make Power dig in its heels even more--tighter security means we'll know even less of what's going on." When I first saw that objection being thrown around, my perspective was that it was a fair price to pay. Looking at it in light of this whole anti-conspiracy strategy, though, increased secrecy is a win.
I'm far from the smartest person in the world, but I have yet to think of a flaw in the logic. One of the very few counterarguments I've seen that strike me as anything close to damning comes from Doctor Science (another is BDR's, which I actually think is stronger and will try to discuss soon). Doctor Science points out, simply, that we don't have to look far to come across dozens of examples of authoritarian evil that didn't require secrecy at all. And it's true--a great portion of the horrifying things our ruling class does, it does out in the open.
However, it is trivially easy to show at least that the ruling class, in practice, relies very heavily on secrecy--just look at the leaked cables to see the crap they felt the need to classify! Greenwald pointed out that the very banality of a good portion of the cables is in itself a scandal--because what the fuck is a government that claims to be democracy doing making all this trivial nonsense secret? (Note, please, that this behavior does not come as a surprise to people with the perspective that I and most of you bring to things, but note also what I said about how not everything needs to be surprising to be important.)
So, yes, I do take Doctor Science's point, and I will admit that she did manage to temper my excitement slightly by pointing out the obvious (there's that word again) that hadn't occurred to me. But the fact remains that even if the ruling class doesn't actually require all that much secrecy to get away with its fucking of the world, it still currently relies on secrecy as a primary tool. At the very worst, Wikileaks is screwing with their ability to use one of their favorite tools.
And now I'm excited again, so I'm going to return to that quote that got me all hot and bothered. Specifically, to the money shot. Let's see it again, in slow motion:
An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think is powerless to preserve itself against the opponents it induces.We know what that means, right?
Friday, December 3, 2010
Wikileaks #1: Warm-up
There's a lot to say about Wikileaks, so I thought I'd start gently and easily, by making fun of liberals.
A lot of the more radical blogoëlements recently have been talking about how many liberals are frothing mad about Wikileaks, revealing yet again their basic fealty to Power. And it's true--many liberals are reacting that way.
What's more surprising to me is the number of otherwise deeply bland liberals who are all for it. Take PZ Myers, who, the day before the start of the recent round of releases, was thrilled. He doesn't even equivocate about how governments must be allowed to keep some secrets, like even some of his commenters do, and when he says that "we're about to discover the degree of skullduggery that's been going on" he doesn't bother to specify "during the Bush administration," like he and most of his ilk normally would reflexively. For this, and for the present perfect progressive construction of the verb in the last clause of that sentence, he deserves a (teensy) little bit of credit.*
The last part of his post, though, is a pretty hilarious return to form:
*Incidentally, I don't mean to imply here that viewing Wikileaks entirely positively is the only stance on the issue I am willing to accept. I do view them very positively--in fact, I'm more excited about them than I have been about pretty much anything in a good long time--but I can definitely understand some types of objections. I should be discussing all of this soon, but it's more complicated; hence this warm-up.
TANGENT linked only by liberal-mocking: it appears that digby has finally figured out that the Democrats actually want to do the terrible things they do. But don't worry: the understanding doesn't go even a centimeter deeper than that, and anyway I'm sure she'll forget by tomorrow. You'd think that the motives of a bunch of millionaires deciding not to raise taxes on millionaires would be pretty easy to figure out, but apparently not!
A lot of the more radical blogoëlements recently have been talking about how many liberals are frothing mad about Wikileaks, revealing yet again their basic fealty to Power. And it's true--many liberals are reacting that way.
What's more surprising to me is the number of otherwise deeply bland liberals who are all for it. Take PZ Myers, who, the day before the start of the recent round of releases, was thrilled. He doesn't even equivocate about how governments must be allowed to keep some secrets, like even some of his commenters do, and when he says that "we're about to discover the degree of skullduggery that's been going on" he doesn't bother to specify "during the Bush administration," like he and most of his ilk normally would reflexively. For this, and for the present perfect progressive construction of the verb in the last clause of that sentence, he deserves a (teensy) little bit of credit.*
The last part of his post, though, is a pretty hilarious return to form:
It is to be hoped that every major newspaper with some respect for its job has got people going over these documents carefully. The description above is correct: if we're to deserve the title of democracy, we must have an informed citizenry.Leaving aside the deliciously meaningless cliché salad in the second sentence, do you see how, even when given a huge cache of primary resources, the scientist and the liberal prefers to "hope" (and I've written--or, more accurately, juxtaposed quotes--about that kind of hope before) that he can trust newspapers to sort through it for him and tell him what parts are important?
*Incidentally, I don't mean to imply here that viewing Wikileaks entirely positively is the only stance on the issue I am willing to accept. I do view them very positively--in fact, I'm more excited about them than I have been about pretty much anything in a good long time--but I can definitely understand some types of objections. I should be discussing all of this soon, but it's more complicated; hence this warm-up.
TANGENT linked only by liberal-mocking: it appears that digby has finally figured out that the Democrats actually want to do the terrible things they do. But don't worry: the understanding doesn't go even a centimeter deeper than that, and anyway I'm sure she'll forget by tomorrow. You'd think that the motives of a bunch of millionaires deciding not to raise taxes on millionaires would be pretty easy to figure out, but apparently not!
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