Ever get the feeling that the US election is designed for those with a short memory?
Archive for October, 2008
Mideast Youth is an essential Bahrain-based portal for news, views and activism about online freedom in the Muslim world.
I was interviewed this week about my book, The Blogging Revolution, and what online players can do to highlight ever-tightening censorship.
Iraq isn’t what it used to be.
Barack Obama appears to have personally benefited from funds originating in Saddam Hussein’s regime.
What, you didn’t know this gem (courtesy of an increasingly frightened neo-con fringe)?
The Global Network Initiative is a new idea designed to tackle the growing issue of censorship:
From the Americas to Europe to the Middle East to Africa and Asia, companies in the information and communications industries face increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies that require censorship and disclosure of personal information in ways that conflict with internationally recognized human rights laws and standards.
The Initiative is founded upon new Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy – supported by specific implementation commitments and a framework for accountability and learning – that provide a systematic approach for companies, NGOs, investors, academics and others to work together in resisting efforts by governments that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance that violate international standards.
The devastating face of militant Islam, courtesy of Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper:
Parents of 18-year-old Tasleem Solangi, who was killed in an extremely inhumane manner allegedly by some elders of her tribe, have appealed to President Asif Ali Zardari and Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah to provide them protection as the killers are still at large and have not been arrested because of their connections with police.
Tasleem’s mother told reporters at the Karachi Press Club on Monday that her daughter was first thrown before hungry dogs and when she was mauled by them and in the jaws of death, she was riddled with bullets.
The act was staged before the girl’s father who was specifically brought from a house where he had been under detention for about a year.
How is blogging affecting the narrative and public image of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt?
Alexander Cockburn, co-editor of Counterpunch, on a necessary reality check:
Obama invokes change. Yet never has the dead hand of the past had a “reform” candidate so firmly by the windpipe. Is it possible to confront America’s problems without talking about the arms budget? The Pentagon is spending more than at any point since the end of the Second World War. In “real dollars” – an optimistic concept these days – the $635bn (£400bn) appropriated in fiscal 2007 is 5 per cent above the previous all-time high, reached in 1952. Obama wants to enlarge the armed services by 90,000. He pledges to escalate the US war in Afghanistan; to attack Pakistan’s territory if it obstructs any unilateral US mission to kill Osama bin Laden; and to wage a war against terror in a hundred countries, creating a new international intelligence and law enforcement “infrastructure” to take down terrorist networks. A fresh start? Where does this differ from Bush’s commitment on 20 September 2001, to an ongoing “war on terror” against “every terrorist group of global reach” and “any nation that continues to harbour or support terrorism”?
The arms industry remains a deadly killer:
From Nobel laureates to human rights activists to former military commanders, calls are on the rise for the international community to stand up against those who are making billions of dollars by selling illicit arms around the world.
“It is time to end the slaughter,” said Desmond Tutu, the Noble Peace Prize winning archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, in a statement urging the 192-member UN General Assembly to adopt the proposed Arms Trade Treaty…
Studies show that at least a third of a million people are killed every year with conventional weapons, many of which are used by human rights abusers due to the poorly regulated international arms market. That’s the equivalent of about 1,000 deaths each day.
Crikey’s Guy Rundle on the political divide (as only he can write it):
…Your average urban left-liberal is a (non-Arab) keffiyah-wearing Sezuan-cuisine cooking yoga attendee, busy carbon-neutralising their retrostyled Altona brick veneer, ahead of that big Latin American hiking trip - but they tend to have better lives than the Right, who eat steak and go home to bare walls and have no alternative to victory but gut cancer.
The New York Times provides the rationale for this week’s US strike against “terrorists” in Syria:
…American officials said the Bush administration was determined to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provided a rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.
Such actions are illegal under international law and a profound violation of a nation’s sovereignty. But of course, what the US says, goes.
New, interesting voices in the blogosphere should be celebrated.
Danielle Ali Shah is an “Australian living in Rawalpindi, Pakistan with my husband, three children and extended family.”
A recent post, “Digging through the land in the land of the pure“, discusses the rawness of life in Pakistan.
Former CIA agent “Werther” explains what a likely Obama victory would do to the usual suspects in the US political and media establishment:
The American political system also perceives cases of countries “testing” or “challenging” the United States in many instances where the country in question has a perfect right to pursue its own policies as an expression of political sovereignty. The Washington Consensus is inextricably linked with globalized financialism; it is an implicit assumption of the Consensus that other nations must accept the requirements of globalized financialism; otherwise, they will be treated as troublemakers, if not rogues. Typically, being a nation in good standing involves allowing its financial sector to be controlled from New York or London; privatization of local utilities and transport; giving multinational corporations favorable terms to exploit the country’s mineral resources; and subjection to International Monetary Fund austerity policies. Those who do not play ball, whether tiny Ecuador or mighty Russia, are “challenging” the United States and, accordingly are “testing” a new president.
All that having been stipulated, yes, it is true that Pearl Harbors do happen. But their rarity no less than their catastrophic nature should impel us to be more discriminating about perceiving real “threats” and “challenges” and “tests” from the background events of ordinary international conduct. Evo Morales in Bolivia is not testing anything other than his domestic popularity, no matter how much American energy companies may dislike him.
It is to be expected as a matter of course that should Obama be elected president, the noise machine of the Murdoch press will jump on every remote terrorist attack in Indonesia, every diplomatic incident or cross-border incursion anywhere in the world, every friction in the workings of the international system as a deliberate action on the part of sinister forces to test the President of the United States. Should an incident occur on Obama’s watch like that of the Chinese internment of a U.S. EP-3 spy plane as happened early in the Bush presidency, we can only imagine how the Kristols, Krauthammers, and Victor Davis Hansons would work themselves into a demented fury about the president’s manifest unfitness to be commander in chief.
How an Egyptian blog is lifting the veil on Arab marriage traditions.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Sleepwalkers, Les Temps Modernes, April 1962:
“… For seven years, France has been a mad dog dragging a saucepan tied to its tail, every day unaware that we have ruined, starved and massacred a nation of poor people to bring them to their knees. They remained standing. But at what a price! While the delegations were putting an end to the business, 2,400,000 Algerians remained in the slow death camps; we have killed more than a million of them ….”
Just what the Americans have done to Iraq.
Will the financial crisis generate anti-Semitism?
Andrew Sullivan, despite being a blogger evangelist, like myself, knows trouble when he sees it:
The latest data are more than worrying. These declines in circulation have come during one of the most riveting campaign stories in modern times. If the news of the last twelve months cannot sell papers, nothing can. And online advertizing is also flattening. One looks at the looming depression and wonders if the media landscape will survive in any recognizable form by the end of it. And I take no pleasure in this: we need papers for the kind of reporting every democracy requires to survive.
Is blogging dead? (asks a bemused BBC writer.)
Of course it’s not; it’s simply adapting to new frontiers.
Journalism is being forced to better report the news and not rely on the outdated language of producing an article.
The solution? I agree with Jeff Jarvis, writing in the Guardian, who advocates for a more inclusive form of news-gathering:
I want a page, a site, a something that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will include articles. But it’s also a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides curated and annotated links to experts, coverage from elsewhere, a mix of opinion and source material. Finally, it’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but tries to add value. It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organised.
Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter. Everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room - and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information.
How could the human body adjust itself to the design of products?
Artist Marcia Nolte imagines such a development, including, below, an extended shoulder for holding a phone:
Marrying a pirate is every Somali girl’s dream. He has power, money, immunity, the weapons to defend the tribe and funds to give to the militias in civil war.
