Antony Loewenstein

Just how screwed is the current Republican Party?

Old, white men only need apply.

Jonathan Zittrain writes in the New York Times about the web’s future:

Earlier this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online — also known as in “the cloud” — using whatever device is at hand.

Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail. With your stuff in the cloud, it’s not a catastrophe to lose your laptop, any more than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision. In addition, as more and more of our information is gathered from and shared with others — through Facebook, MySpace or Twitter — having it all online can make a lot of sense.

The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.

He’s absolutely right. Relying on any company to store all our personal information is foolish. For example, Google has assisted the Chinese regime in censoring its own search engine.

We trust any one firm at our peril.

Rory Stewart writes in the London Review of Books about the illusion of bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

In the meantime, latest reports suggest that US-backed prisons in the country are notoriously filled with human rights abuses.

Ah, democracy.

Brutality and censorship in Saudi Arabia is legendary. This news is therefore unsurprising:

A Saudi Arabian princess who had an illegitimate child with a British man has secretly been granted asylum in this country after she claimed she would face the death penalty if she were forced to return home. The young woman, who has been granted anonymity by the courts, won her claim for refugee status after telling a judge that her adulterous affair made her liable to death by stoning.

It’s ironic, though, that Britain gives asylum to this man while the British government works closely with the Kingdom. As Robert Fisk wrote a few years ago:

The sad, awful truth is that we fete these people, we fawn on them, we supply them with fighter jets, whisky and whores.

How to manage politically with the rise of the far right, an increasingly mainstream force in Britain and Europe?

Tony Karon writes in The National about the dangerous tendency of many in the political and media establishment to frame everything in terms of simple terms and good versus bad:

Last summer it was so much easier for Americans: “Today we are all Georgians,” John McCain declared at the height of the Russian offensive provoked by Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia. This year they’re having to work out if they’re Iranians or Uighurs. And it could get truly confusing if the conflict between Iraq’s Kurds and the government in Baghdad erupts.

This habit of presenting every foreign conflict through the prism of mythologised tales of great (and usually American or American-inspired) triumphs over “evil” has a way of distorting reality, sometimes with tragic effect.

The world is a complex place. Perhaps simpletons would care to think about that.

File this under the weirdest story of the week.

CNN reports on lobbyists recruiting homeless people to stand in line for them on Washington’s Capitol Hill.

An idea worth considering yet utterly ignored by most of the global, Jewish Diaspora:

Amateur legislators with internet connections and good Portuguese are invited to draft Portugal a new constitution, as part of a new experiment encouraging Web users to edit the document as if it were a Wikipedia entry. Some Portugese officials think Israel could benefit from the same scheme.

An extract from a 2,600-word article by recently murdered Russian human rights activist Natalya Estemirova on the situation in Chechnya written in August 2008 but never published:

The abductions in Chechnya started nearly a decade ago. In 2000, Russian forces took control of practically the entire territory of the republic, and started extensive mop-up operations in villages.

Thousands of murders and abductions took place; these operations were declared to be an efficient method in the fight against rebels. In reality, however, the troops and police were looting the houses of unprotected civilians, at times taking away everything from them, from cars and furniture to shampoos and female underwear.

Most horrifically of all, women were raped in front of their male relatives, and all the men were detained, from teenagers to old men: they were either cruelly beaten, or released for ransom, or else they disappeared forever.

A necessary reminder of a wonderful comment by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam:

The better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . . By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are.

Australian comedy team The Chaser take on one of the architects of the Bush administration torture program, John Yoo:

The brutality recently experienced by Sri Lanka will leave a lasting impression on the suffering Tamil population.

The country’s President, Mohinda Rajapaksa, tells the New York Times that he believes in reconciliation with the entire population.

That currently seems like a very long way away.