Blacknell.net

Politics, open government, and safe streets. And the constant incursion of cycling.

Category: Society Page 33 of 69

Friday Notes: Monday Edition

By

On December 8, 2008

In EU, Law, Politics, Society, Virginia

You’ve almost certainly heard the news already if you’re interested in Virginia online politics, but I’ll repeat it here – the New Dominion Project is open for business.  It’s a collaborative effort by three  . . . hmm, I can’t exactly call them “fresh” voices, considering that each of them has been at this for a while.  Let’s go with “refreshingly youthful” voices.  I expect good things from them.

~

Ah, the holiday season, where we all get to reflect upon and celebrate our priorities and values.

~

I had forgotten that Italy will be taking the EU G8 Presidency [ed. note – d’oh] in short order, making the corrupt disaster that is Silvio Berlusconi [slightly] more relevant to our lives

Italian president and media baron Silvio Berlusconi said today that he would use his country’s imminent presidency of the G8 group to push for an international agreement to “regulate the internet”.

Speaking to Italian postal workers, Reuters reports Berlusconi said: “The G8 has as its task the regulation of financial markets… I think the next G8 can bring to the table a proposal for a regulation of the internet.”

Thanks, Italy.

~

Vivian Paige laments the loss of her weekly milk & eggs delivery from Yoder Dairies.  I’m with her, if only in spirit.  The last place I had milk delivery was in Nottingham in the mid-80s.

~

I am shamed to say that I didn’t lift a glass in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition last Friday (to be clear, I was lifting several glasses in celebration of other things – the anniversary just got lost in the shuffle).  Amit Singh had a brief note about it up at Bearing Drift.  That post kicked off a discussion that turned into an amusing reminder that the (remaining) Republican rank and file are more concerned with the fact that someone somewhere may be enjoying themselves than actually living up to that small government and personal freedom gloss they love to claim.

~

Oh, and a begrudging congratulations to the dolts in Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional District, who finally ousted that crook, Rep. William Jefferson (D).  It’s begrudging because that district’s voters apparently weren’t smart enough to do it the last time they had the opportunity.  Anyway, it’s good to see him gone, and terribly amusing to see Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner hold up the Republican winner of that race as “the future” of the Republican Party.   If relying on the Democratic incumbent to get found with a freezer full of cash and indicted is the Republican plan to win, well, I can live with that.  Note also that the winner – Ahn Cao – will be gone in two years.  He may be an entirely competent and decent fellow, but there’s no way a Republican wins reelection in a D+28 district.

Creative Commons and Non-Commercial Use

By

On December 4, 2008

In Distribution, Law, Society

Creative Commons is an organization dedicated to ensuring the free exchange and flow of culture by providing ease to understand and use licenses by which creators (such as you and me) can release their works.  Creators can choose to make their work freely available for any kind of use by anyone, or they can limit that use so that it must give them credit (attribution), and/or may only be used for non-commercial purposes.

On general principle, I put most of my posted work on the web – including this site – under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license.  I’m quite happy to say that people all over the world have found my work useful for their own projects.  My photos help illustrate wikipedia entries, university programs, and news stories.  All because the CC licenses made it clear and easy for others to understand that I wished them to be used for those purposes.

Occasionally, however, I’ve had some problems with others understanding the concept of “non-commercial”.  It’s not a big deal to me in terms of dashing my own hopes for commercial sales, and the exact definition of non-commercial is certainly unclear.  It does bother me greatly, however to see a business abusing the ambiguity of the CC non-commercial license clause.  That’s why I’m happy to see that the folks at Creative Commons are working on clarifying that issue.  Part of that work is surveying creators and users on exactly what *they* think non-commercial use is.  If you’re still reading, you should jump over and take the survey.  It’s for the common good.

Proof that “We Won” in Iraq?

By

On December 2, 2008

In Distribution, Policy, Society

Because only the victors get to (re)write history, no?

This really isn’t complicated. President Bush was not being “blunt” or showing “candor” when he told ABC News in an interview published yesterday that his biggest regret was the failure of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Rather, he was whitewashing away his own role in the fisaco by promoting the demonstrable falsehood that there was no available evidence or information that argued against war and that he was merely fooled into invading Iraq solely by the bad intel.

The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel — ignored by the Bush administration — saying that Saddam wasn’t the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing — something that also went ignored.

These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush’s efforts to falsify history in yesterday’s interview. Yet they went unmentioned in reports by Reuters, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times.

Or maybe losers get to write history, too.

Even Kids (Advocates) Get It: Censorship Doesn’t Save The Children

By

On December 1, 2008

In Distribution, Policy, Society, Tech

Boing Boing highlights this story concerning children’s groups pushing back against the Australian government’s plan to filter the country’s access to content on the Internet:

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children’s rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was “fundamentally flawed” because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.

Watching India

By

On December 1, 2008

In Politics, Society

Blake Hounshell, at the Foreign Policy magazine’s blog, captures the political forces in play right now in India and Pakistan:

It’s amazing how quickly India appears to be falling into the terrorists’ trap.

It seems obvious that Pakistan’s civilian government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, has no interest in stirring up trouble between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. And it seems equally obvious that any elements of the ISI, Pakistan’s notorious intelligence service, who might have been in some way involved in the attacks in Mumbai would have done so in order to undermine rapprochement between Islamabad and New Delhi.

[ . . . ]

Yet one can already see public anger in India leading political developments in a direction the terrorists wanted. Some Indian politicians have been less than careful in saying the terrorists were sent by Pakistan, the state, rather than that they came from Pakistan, the country (which hasn’t even been confirmed yet, anyway). India is considering halting talks over Kashmir and ending the five-year cease-fire along the Line of Control. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to “go after” those responsible for the attacks, which could box him into the dangerous step of taking action against Lashkar-e-Taiba within Pakistan-held territory.

The whole thing is worth a read (as is his earlier penned piece on the contradictory accounts of the attacks themselves).

Update: Juan Cole offers a good companion piece to the article above, focusing on what Pakistan needs to do (and putting it in useful historical context).

On Mumbai

By

On November 30, 2008

In Personal, Society

Like many of you, I spent much of the past few days glued to coverage of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.  Like a number of you, the places I saw burning on the screen were spaces I’ve moved through.  Taken in.  And as with millions and millions of others, Mumbai was made a part of my time on this planet.   It is, at once, a completely foreign and utterly familiar place.  It is against that backdrop – and the experience of terrorists attacking my own city – that I found myself very much agreeing with this piece by Suketu Mehta:

The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips.

But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder.

If the rest of the world wants to help, it should run toward the explosion.

Run toward it.

Update: Leopold Cafe is open for business.  This is how you do it.

Responsibility, Personal and Otherwise

By

On November 23, 2008

In Law, Society

Scott Horton has a short piece at Harpers that I hope everyone at the Department of Justice will read.  I also invite you to read the whole thing.  In case you don’t feel like clicking, though, I’m going to borrow a little more than I should:

The most remarkable part of the [new report entitled “Guantánamo and Its Aftermath , as prepared by The Human Rights Center of the University of California] is certainly the forward written by Patricia Wald, one of the nation’s most respected retired federal appellate judges. Judge Wald has a credential that few of her colleagues share: she left the court of appeals to serve as a war crimes tribunal judge for Yugoslavia and she also served as a member of the Commission President Bush constituted to look at the false allegations of WMDs in Iraq. Judge Wald compared the current allegations surfacing about detainee abuse authorized by President Bush with the cases she examined coming out of the war in Yugoslavia—that resulted in the indictment and conviction of a number of political leaders in the Balkans. Here’s what she has to say:

There are bound to be casualties when any nation veers from its domestic and international obligations to uphold human rights and international humanitarian law. Those casualties are etched on the minds and bodies of many of the 62 former detainees interviewed for this report, many of whom suffered infinite variations on physical and mental abuse, including intimidation, stress positions, enforced nudity, sexual humiliation, and interference with religious practices.

Indeed, I was struck by the similarity between the abuse they suffered and the abuse we found inflicted upon Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serbian camps when I sat as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, a U.N. court fully supported by the United States. The officials and guards in charge of those prison camps and the civilian leaders who sanctioned their establishment were prosecuted—often by former U.S. government and military lawyers serving with the tribunal—for war crimes, crimes against humanity and, in extreme cases, genocide.

There should be no confusion about what is being said here. One of America’s most prominent judges–and one of our few judicial experts on war crimes–is saying that the factual basis exists to charge officials of the Bush Administration. The test is fairly simple: is the United States now prepared to apply to itself the same legal standards that the United States applied to political leaders in the former Yugoslavia? It is in the end a simple question of justice. And a question of whether the United States is prepared itself to live by the standards it imposes on others.

This is fundamental.

Globalization . . .

By

On November 23, 2008

In Policy, Society

means that you should worry about this:

China’s job outlook is “grim,” and the global financial crisis could cause more layoffs and more labor unrest until the country’s economic stimulus package kicks in next year, the nation’s minister of human resources and social security said Thursday.

[ . . . ]

China is most concerned about the growing labor unrest, the human resources minister, Yin Weimin, said at a news conference. The increase in unrest has paralleled the increase of business and factory closings and job losses.

Guns Don’t Kill People, Presidents Do

By

On November 21, 2008

In Policy, Society

A thoughtful column from Cenk Ungyar that jumps off from this Newsweek graf:

As NEWSWEEK reported last summer, President Bush approved more relaxed rules of engagement for U.S. forces along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Pentagon once required “90 percent” confidence on the part of intelligence agencies that a “high-value target” was present before approving Predator strikes inside Pakistan. Under the revised rules, U.S. officials on the ground now need only 50 to 60 percent confidence to shoot at compounds suspected of sheltering foreign fighters, according to knowledgeable U.S. sources who would speak of sensitive matters only anonymously.

Obama will be responsible for killing people in the next four years, too.  Here’s hoping* that he’s a more thoughtful human being about it than Bush.

*For the world’s sake, not his.  I suspect that the more thoughtful a human you are about that aspect of the job, the more you will personally suffer for it.

Security Theater (That Matters)

By

On November 21, 2008

In Policy, Society

Pakistan’s Army is practising shooting down unmanned drones.  You know, like the US military uses.  The Danger Room story notes:

The U.S. and Pakistan supposedly have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement when it comes to killer drone strikes on militant camps inside the country: American officials stay mum about the attacks, and their counterparts in Islamabad only complain a little — while sneaking peeks at the drone surveillance feeds.

Here’s hoping that that’s the case.  As I have said here – over and over again, I know – I don’t think there’s any role that the US can usefully play in the stabilising of Pakistan.  At the same time, I don’t begrudge the US taking very narrowly targeted action in certain cases (e.g., 110% verified, high value, strategic targets taking advantage of Pakistan’s borders).  No matter what, however, I think it is essential that the US not be seen as meddling in Pakistan’s internal affairs (which was one of the many reasons I was disappointed with Obama on the subject of Pakistan during the campaign).  If it takes a bit of lying on everyone’s part, that’s okay.

Page 33 of 69

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén