stargeek
Right-Leaning Media Barons Black Out ABC's Airing of War DeadRight-Leaning Media Barons Black Out
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 Ton Zijlstra is on to something. He describes blogs as "personal presence portals", and then goes on to describe the "awkwardness" that we feel when we go from 'knowing' someone through their blog to meeting them in person. His solution to that is simple: acknowledge the awkwardness explicitly in the first face-to-face conversation, and then work through it. Jon Husband chimes in with the observation that on-line 'presence' is still foreign to us, and we need to learn how to use it, much as at one point in our lives we first learn to use the telephone. So why is it that learning to use the telephone is childsplay, while learning to use blogs, especially when 'enriched' with Skype VoIP telephony, IM, wikis and webcams is so awkward, so hard? It all comes down to the subject of Ton's post: presence. Ton refers to this article that defines presence as a high-quality simulation of actual personal existence, high-quality implying socially rich, perceptually and socially realistic, transporting (in both senses of the word), immersing, and natural. Do blogs, with or without add-on multimedia tools, provide a high-quality simulation of the author's existence, do they have presence? To understand why this question is meaningless, we need to turn to the guru of media, Marshall McLuhan. In his landmark book Understanding Media, almost half a century ago, he explained the difference between media and tools. Communications media are place holders for content, for the message ("the medium is the message"). Communication tools are technologies that deliver the content, the message . In today's electronic age, he said, the two have become blurred together. So my communication media decision tree from last year, reproduced above, while useful, is somewhat flawed, in that it mixes the two together. But if we want to understand blogs, which are part media, part tools, we need to unblur these distinct characteristics. The best way to do this is to understand what, in McLuhan's terminology, the constituent parts of blogs are extensions of. The telephone, a communication tool, is an extension of the ear and the voice. Radio is a communication tool, likewise an extension of the ear and voice, but the radio program is a communications medium, an extension of the programmer's memory (and, if we tape it, an extension of our memory as well). Blogs, like newspaper columns or news digests, are essentially communications media, extensions of our memories, place holders for our ideas and messages. They are not really extensions of our brains, because they capture, like a snapshot, our thinking at one point in time. Although we can try to make them conversational and describe our thought processes in a blog article, they do not, in their simplest form, allow the reader to truly engage our brains in real or close-to-real time. Now, blogs also have two communication tools included: a publishing and subscription tool (RSS), which does transmit our messages (very well), and the rudimentary comments 'thread' functionality which, like a poor web forum, does allow some dialogue with the author and with other readers. The thread is a (lousy, and because it's asynchronous, jerky) extension of our brains. To some extent the Internet itself is a communication tool that disseminates our blog comment; it is the blog's 'printing press'. And by that analogy, RSS is like the delivery truck that takes the newspaper to the subscriber's house -- both are communication tools, though RSS is clearly the superior delivery vehicle. So what? Well, there is a huge amount of discussion about how to make blogs better, how to use them in business, and what their future is, none of which makes the essential distinction between their role and value as communication media and their role and value as communication tools. I would argue that the critical functionality of blogs, both in personal and business use, is as a personal communications medium i.e. a storage space for everything of consequence in our memories, and everything of consequence in that other extension of our memory, the filing cabinet (and its electronic analogue, the 'My Documents' folder). As I've said in my posts on the future of blogs and in my future state visions, I think blogs will eventually (and properly) morph into purer, simpler versions of this one critical functionality -- they will become the proxies, the substitutes for our memories, for use by friends and business contacts when we're busy or away from the high-presence communication tools, by vendors to ascertain our need for their offerings, and by ourselves as a place to organize, store and access our own thoughts and memories, thus freeing up more of our real memories for new ideas and perceptions. There have been some interesting articles lately by people who say that making and keeping huge numbers of dynamic lists and notes, instead of trying to keep all that in our memories, we can actually enrich our brain's power, our intellectual effectiveness and even our intelligence by 'freeing up memory and brain CPU'. Next-generation blogs could be perfect for that, not only freeing up our memories but also allowing others access to our ideas and learnings. So to that limited extent, blogs have presence -- they can be excellent simulations, surrogates, proxies for our personal memories. But what if we need more context to be able to properly understand the message, or effectively use or build on the content of this virtual memory? Then we need high-quality, high-presence communication tools, not communication media. We are rapidly moving towards a convergence of several 'online' communication tools: telephony, e-mail, IM, and potentially voice-mail and videoconferencing. Right now, the content, the stored messages of these various tools are unintegrated, but voice recognition and transcription is quickly improving and we will soon be able to 'record' conversations in any of these media in one simple, intuitive way, and with Simple Virtual Presence we will also have a simple intuitive way to connect with people using any or all of these media. Then we'll need a 'bridge' to allow each of the participants in a conference to see anything in the blog/virtual memory of any of the participants. Until that day arrives, blogs get high marks as a communication medium, but barely a passing grade as communication tools. If the technology developers understand the distinction, and start building tools that are properly engineered for simple, seamless connectivity, then one day the blurring won't matter, and the integration between media and tools will be complete. |
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DAPReview has shots of a couple of small, hard
drive-based video players, both with planned release dates around
September. The first is the JoyToGo (pictured left, and which I could
have sworn we'd seen before, but Google says otherwise), built around
either a 20 or 30GB 1.8" hard drive, with a 480 x 234 2.5" LCD screen,
as well as built-in speakers and SD slot. It will also allow direct
recording of video in MPEG-4 at rates of 640x480 at 25fps -- not bad,
consider that's larger than its own screen.
And even though it's only a mock-up at the moment, I can't help but be excited by the 'Black Diamond' player, built around a tiny 1" hard drive with an as-yet-unspecified capacity. It only has a 294 x 228 resolution (with the same 2.5" screen size as the JoyToGo), and no speakers or anything like that, but if they could bump the resolution of the Black Diamond up to 480 x 234, I would be happy -- honored, even -- to carry around the little player in my pocket.
Both players are from S-Media, the makers of the moderately
successful CoCoPod hard disk player.
Read
[DAPreview]
Related
CoCoPod Music Player Reviewed [Gizmodo]
Shimy Shimy Cocopod [Gizmodo]
Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest is "Vintage Products" -- lots
of nice steampunk and dead-media licks here.
Link
 In yesterday's post, I quoted Stan Goff as saying that conservation is the only solution to the coming energy crisis. The word 'conservation' is an ambiguous one, which is one reason why politicians can get away with saying they support it without doing anything. At its root, 'not doing anything' is, after all, what the word implies. Until about a century ago, it referred to protection of artworks and other cultural artefacts. More recently it has come to refer to protection of nature, in four senses:
A more generous definition of conservation is used by most environmental organizations, a definition which includes conservation of land as wilderness, where other creatures are relatively free from human interference, and recognizes that heavy human activity, even in the interests of recreation, degrades the land. But even these defenders of conservation are utilitarian, and carefully couch their defense of wilderness as necessary for "human self-discovery" and, again ambiguously, for "posterity". And then there are those, like David Suzuki for instance, who value wilderness and biodiversity for its own sake, who see nature as sacred and believe that as much of the Earth as possible should remain in ecological balance, with a human footprint so light (e.g. eco-tourism) that it does not upset that balance. With most of the temperate and arable land of Earth already developed for human uses, there are now four types of wilderness that could still be protected:
Humans aren't the only adaptable creatures on Earth, and most 'wildlife' (non-agricultural, non-domesticated plants and animals) now lives in areas that have been moderately or heavily encroached upon by human activity, areas where the natural balance is constantly disrupted but wildlife makes do. So anti-wilderness forces can argue that wilderness isn't necessary to protect wildlife -- it can go on living on the margins of human development, and provide entertainment for humans in the process ("Look, Mom, a fox!", or, more likely, "What's that squished on the road, Mom?") This leaves conservation organizations in a bit of a quandary. They want donations from those with a George Bush definition of conservation (like the Ducks Unlimited folks) and also from those with a David Suzuki definition of conservation (like the Green Party). Beggars can't be choosers, and the former group of donors are, on the whole, much wealthier than the latter. So policies must be designed to waffle as much as possible, so as not to alienate either gun-lovers or tree-huggers. Occasionally, as in the recent Sierra Club blow-up, one faction or another insists that the organization take a stand that would clearly define what 'conservation' means to them. In that case, tree-hugger conservationists ran a slate of candidates calling for zero population growth and immigration curbs to achieve that end, on the basis that conservation (in the wilderness protection sense) is impossible with a population that will more than double or triple in this century. The gun-lover conservationists cried foul, accused the opposing faction of racism, and orchestrated a successful campaign to discredit and defeat the tree-huggers, using tactics so outrageous the result of the vote is now in the courts. But ultimately they can't have it both ways. Organizations with such utterly irreconcilable factions are as anachronistic as the old racist Southern 'Democrats' who opposed everything in their party's platform. Eventually, the Sierra Club and other conservationist organizations will split into two groups -- gun-lover conservationists, who want animals to kill for amusement and well-groomed trails for their power vehicles, and tree-hugger conservationists, who want wilderness and biodiversity preserved. The latter group will be the losers, financially, but there will then, finally, be some candid, honest discussion and advocacy for wilderness and biodiversity. And maybe then, there will be some non-hysterical, non-xenophobic discussion of population 'stabilization', or even population reduction, in North America, and of the need for drastic conservation of natural resources (commercial and non-commercial), the former because current consumption is unsustainable and destroying the atmosphere, the environment and the third world, and the latter because, just like peace and democracy and human rights, the protection of wilderness and biodiversity is to some of us also a moral imperative. Not only is this different from the 'conservation' represented by the atrocious private fenced hunting preserves that Dick Cheney and his psychopathic cronies so enjoy, it is their absolute antithesis. So now we get into the Lakoffian issue of how to 'frame' conservation in a way that the vast majority of first-world people, inculcated with the 'value' system of Christian religious orthodoxy, consumerism and 'regulation is bad' untrammelled corporatism, can appreciate and even support. Lakoff suggests that progressives need to stress 'policy directions' such as "Let's have a sustainable environment" and "Working people shouldn't be living in poverty" and "Everybody should have health care and a good education." These statements of principle appeal to basic American, and global, human values. The only way you can argue with them is to change the frame ("People who are poor are just not working hard enough") and progressives are finally learning not to allow conservatives to frame everything in these manipulative, demeaning, elitist terms. But it's a long way from progressive anthropocentric principles like "Let's have a sustainable environment" to ecocentric principles like "Let's protect wilderness and biodiversity". I've even heard neocons quite sincerely accuse radical environmentalists (when they're not calling them "eco-terrorists") of religious, pantheistic zealotry, saying that wilderness protection laws are as much violations of the separation of church and state as anti-abortion or sharia laws. I've also heard labour leaders say that wilderness protection laws are un-progressive, because by restricting human activity they reduce jobs. Is there some way to frame the need for conservation (in the 'protection of wilderness and biodiversity' sense) in secular, non-anthropocentric terms, or is this oxymoronic? After all, Suzuki himself describes the ethos of wilderness conservation as preserving "a sacred balance". And if we cannot frame this conservation in secular terms. must we acknowledge, as Peter Singer has said, that politics and law are inherently and irretrievably anthropocentric, and that protection of animal rights and wilderness and biodiversity and all other things non-human are outside their jurisdiction? Does that mean that, exactly as devout anti-abortionists can only shake their heads and fists as they pass by abortion clinics, conservationists of the tree-hugger variety can only stand by helplessly as the last wilderness areas, and the last wild animals on earth, are destroyed, as animals are carelessly and indifferently run down on the roads, and as truckloads of helpless animals are driven from horrendous factory-farm prisons to their ghastly death in slaughterhouses? There are two arguments advanced by wilderness conservationists and animal rights activists for saying their cause is different from religious causes, and hence deserve legal protection rather than just hands-off treatment. The first is that man, under most anthropocentric worldviews, both progressive and conservative, is the 'steward' of the Earth, and therefore has a responsibility for its welfare. That's a nice principle, but one that doesn't stand up to much challenge: "When we have to choose between human needs and wilderness needs, there's not really a choice, is there?" The second argument is that humans are part of nature, and therefore the welfare of man depends on the welfare of the natural world, so the natural world needs legal protection. This, too, is a nice principle, but its application to law runs immediately into semantic minefields: Who's to say cities and golf courses and all other human uses of the land aren't 'natural'? What's the line between a bird's nest and a condominium? This argument at its heart is anthropocentric, since only when it can be demonstrated that some 'unnatural' activity actually hurts human welfare can it then be made illegal. That's no change from the law as it stands now. So the wilderness conservationists and animal rights activists and anti-vivisectionists (those opposed to animal torture for science or commercial research) are backed into a corner: Their cause, like the cause of anti-abortionists and those that abhor the eating of certain meats, is deemed ultimately one of personal faith, and, while each of us has the right to exercise his or her personal faith, we will find the law unwilling to impose it on the rest of humanity. Even practitioners of religions that entail bloodthirsty religious animal sacrifices now have the right to practice their personal faith, so long as it does not overtly harm other humans. There is a crack in this legal armour, and that is the existing animal cruelty laws in many (but not all) nations. Weak as they are, they represent important anomalies in our legal and political codes. Agribusiness, more than aware of the horrendous cruelty that occurs behind the walls of factory farms, have effectively exempted farmed animals from such laws, and religions whose 'purification' rites require torture of animals at the point of slaughter are also exempted. Ambiguous animal rights laws are furiously opposed by hunters, laboratories, factory farmers and other 'users' of animals. Yet some of these laws remain, carefully couched as laws governing human 'property'. Why have these not been struck down as ultra vires, outside the law's jurisdiction? Probably for the same reasons that laws prohibiting suicide, or the taking of unauthorized drugs, remain on the books: The law has no compunction about passing laws that support a prevailing moral view when they do not 'unduly' interfere with human freedoms, including commercial freedoms. Here's where it gets dicey: A law prohibiting suicide, or a law prohibiting the mainlining of heroin, is not substantively different from a law prohibiting abortion, or a law prohibiting all forms of animal cruelty by anyone, or a law prohibiting any further development of wilderness areas. All five are strictly moral issues, issues of personal faith, in which the law has, by action or inaction, taken a stand. Suicide and heroin use are illegal, with severe fines, abortion is illegal in some countries and under some circumstances but legal in others, while animal cruelty is mostly legal, and wilderness development is (except in a few small areas temporarily afforded legal protection) completely legal. Why do we make these distinctions? Let's take a look at a couple of areas where we have made an about face on the law in the last two centuries: Slavery and Corporate Personhood. At one time slavery was legal in much of the world, and defended as essential to commercial success. And at one time corporations had no rights whatsoever except for the shareholders' right to limited liability in the case of financial demise or legal wrongdoing arising from circumstances over which they had no control. Today slavery is mostly illegal, and corporations have substantially the same rights as humans, and in some cases even more rights than humans. And cigarette smoking remains legal and highly commercial, though it is increasingly restricted -- largely on the dubious arguments about the health effects of second-hand smoke -- and viewed as morally and socially repugnant. And the emission of dioxins into the atmosphere, horrendous toxins with major, known health consequences, while restricted, is also legal and highly commercial.  Here's a table that shows, then,
that, contrary to prevailing wisdom, anthropocentrism is not
a central determinant of the domain of law. I've added in a few more
illegal things to complete the chart: Wiretapping (without reasonable
cause), polygamy, and dangerous driving. Things that are (mostly)
illegal are shown in red, and those that are (mostly) legal are shown
in green. If you believe the domain of law is restricted to issues of
human rights and responsibilities, then there should be no laws
against
suicide or heroin, and corporations should never have been granted
'personhood'. And if you believe the domain of law, under the
principle
of separation of church and state, does not concern itself with issues
of personal faith, then there should be no laws against suicide or
polygamy. The chart shows a very different hypothesis about the law: That it concerns itself with non-commercial issues, and refuses to pass laws banning or significantly restricting commercial activities. Why, then, is heroin illegal, when it could be a huge commercial success? Because it interferes with the commercial productivity (labour and consumption) of workers, with a higher commercial cost than the benefits of commercial heroin production would produce. Why isn't abortion, which is not a lucrative commercial business, illegal? In much of the world it is, and if Bush is re-elected and continues to stack the Supreme Court, it probably will be in the US soon as well. And what about slavery -- doesn't its illegality mean that human rights trump commercial interests? I would argue that while physical slavery is finally illegal in much of the world, economic slavery is rife and growing. More than half of first-world workers believe they are significantly under-employed, have wages that in real terms have been dropping for over two decades and a debt load that yokes them to the corporate machine most of them are part of. And don't even get me started on working conditions in the third world. So, despite all the historic protestations that the law doesn't get into wilderness or biodiversity conservation or animal rights issues in any serious way because these are personal, moral issues not connected with human rights, the reality is that the law is heavily into such issues -- banning suicide, polygamy, and heroin use, for example -- and its criteria for refusing to get involved are strictly commercial, which is why tobacco production, manufacture and sale of semi-automatic weapons, and release of toxic poisons into our air and water, are all legal, why corporations today have more rights than people (and keep most of us as wage slaves), and why laws to conserve wilderness and biodiversity, or to protect animals from cruelty, don't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever being passed. It's even worse than that: Bush is busy selling off the people's lands to private commercial interests (mostly his campaign financiers) so that, not only will there be no wilderness or endangered species left, there will soon be no recreation land or non-renewable resources left either. Recreation is almost never the most lucrative commercial use (called "the highest and best use" by economists) of land, so Bush is freeing it for more intensive purposes: logging, mining, dam reservoirs, high-density residential and commercial development. Only then will it have value. And the natural resources on these lands only have commercial value when they're consumed. Conservation, like long-term planning, is an absurd concept in the acquisitive capitalist economy: By using up what you have quickly, you create scarcity, which increases the value of what is left and motivates commercial interests to dig even deeper (like burning tons of coal, and building hundreds of new nuclear reactors) to capitalize on that scarcity. So no matter which of the four definitions of conservation listed at the start of this article you adhere to, it just ain't going to happen in this economic system, in this political system, in this legal system. Adam Smith said, famously, "the real purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens", and the law is their principal tool for doing so. Back to Lakoff: Now we have a much greater, and more important challenge, in framing our message to the people. Our message must be ecocentric rather than anthropocentric, but "Let's protect wilderness and biodiversity" won't do the job. Most progressives don't even think in that frame-set. We need to create an entirely new frame-set that engages universal human values at a much more fundamental, less selfish, more instinctive way. A third way, different from both the anthropocentric 'manifest destiny' moralizing of conservatives and the anthropocentric 'sustainable growth' rationalizing of progressives. Or, putting it another way, as Thomas King and Thomas Berry have said, we need to invent a new story about ourselves and our role on Earth. This is what the Green Party has tried to do, but, as you can tell from the opinion polls, it isn't catching on very quickly. Part of the reason for this is that, in their endeavour to win converts and be inclusive, they have tried to explain their position using conservative moral frames and progressive rational frames. Lakoff would tell them this is futile. You can't get there from here. As Einstein put it, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking that created them." What would an ecocentric values frame-set look like? What would some of its principles and 'policy directions' be? We should probably start by listening to the stories and lessons of Earth's last remaining tribal peoples. And listening to the land, the wilderness itself. Perhaps my novel, if I'm truly imaginative enough, and listen carefully enough, will be the new story. But that won't be enough. We need the new ecocentric frame-set as well. We need to show people, billions of us, the third way. |
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 Yesterday I
received a delightful note* from Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Support Economy, which
describes what I listed as one of the most
important political & economic ideas of 2003. Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria, who
wrote The Future of Freedom,
wrote to me last fall about my review of his book on these pages. And
I've communicated recently with one of the editors at Fast Company. I didn't take the
initiative in any of these communications.The fact that leading writers and journalists know we bloggers exist, and take the time to thank us and clarify their thoughts (and ours) in correspondence with us, comes as something of a surprise to me. It is at once sobering and flattering that we even appear on their radar screens -- there are, after all, millions of us, and, at least in this corner of the blogosphere, we're not even A-listers. I think in fact we play a much more important role in the media than we might think. That role is a result of the power of our networks, which are more dynamic, sensitive and agile than those of print journalists and book writers. We can sense quickly and effectively when there's something happening -- a shift in public consciousness or attitude, a new issue or idea gaining traction -- because of our connectedness, because of the strength of weak ties and those ties' ability to create at least small tipping points. If the mainstream media are the stomach of the media beast, its power plant, we are its antennae. This role provides us with both opportunities and responsibilities we might not realize. The opportunity depends, of course, on what your blog is about, but there should be some general principles that apply to any of us in this periphery of the information society. Here are a few ideas on how bloggers could connect better with other media, and perhaps raise our profile and expand our role in the process:
 * I wrote: Idea #8: The next economy will support consumers holistically to solve their problems, not just sell them products - In her book The Support Economy, Shoshana Zuboff argues that what is needed is a new economic layer, a 're-intermediation', between the producer and consumer, which consists of 'federations' of businesses and 'advocates' who work collaboratively to look after the busy consumer's needs cradle-to-grave and deal with the multiple suppliers in the product/service delivery process. I confess I don't share the author's exuberance that such 'support' will be affordable by any except the rich elite. Professor Zuboff replied: Federated support networks are not intended as a reintermediation or as an additional "layer". If that were the case, then your skepticism would be well founded. It would cost too much. You can't preserve the status quo and just add another layer, we will all drown in cost and administration and end up further away from the support we desire. Sometimes even the book's most avid fans think of advocates as some kind of super concierge. I suppose because that's the closest model we know that can help us imagine "support". But concierge services exist to buffer us from the adversarial DNA of the enterprise system. Our argument is that the conditions are ripe for the emergence of a new system with wholly different DNA. It won't need buffers, or layers, because it is either fundamentally aligned with my needs, or it fails. Federated support networks exploit the digital medium to eliminate the administrative hierarchy we just spent 100 years building and expanding. That's what we call "infrastructure convergence", and without it there is no way to think radically about new cost structures. We needed that hierarchy, or at least some of it, when these integrative technologies didn't exist. We don't need it now.(this is the history of the literature on transaction costs, and Chandler's basic point.) The key issue now is the way in which a distributed model, now made possible by technology, can subsume the old models based on concentration. That is the step function that can eliminate massive cost and allow the whole enterprise system to be reconceived and reorganized around the needs of individuals and families, instead of around products or services. As Seymour Melman demonstrated half a century ago, managers are never going to stand in line to give up all the stuff that reports to them. These institutions probably can't be rescued from the downward spiral in their entirety (some assets will survive, but reconfigured). We need new ways of starting, just like Ford did a century ago. I also really appreciated the Fast Co. Wal-Mart piece, and especially the way it vividly illustrated this endgame. |
 Some interesting stories this week, that, for
the most part, escaped major media
attention. They're all about complex issues with long-term
implications, so maybe the big media didn't want us worrying our
pretty
little heads about them.Republicans break into private Democrat databases, use and leak what they find for partisan purposes: First up, via Atrios, another Bush Republican scandal, this one very reminiscent of Watergate. What these clowns, including Novak, did, is completely illegal, and they should all be in prison. Here's the lead from the Boston Globe, with a link to the full story: Republican staff members of the
US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for
a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on
copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics. The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November. [More] Canadian sues Ashcroft & Ridge for knowingly & illegally sending him to Syria for torture sessions: The US Torture Victim Protection Act, ironically passed by Bush I to extend Americans' ability to sue for torture overseas, makes illegal the practice of 'extraordinary rendition' -- the practice of using other countries to extract information through torture and other methods illegal in the US. Maher Arar, who was intercepted at an airport stopover on his way home to Canada from vacation, deported by US authorities without evidence, due process, or notification of Canadian authorities, and then tortured by Syrians for over a year before being released without charge, wants to prevent others from being subject to extraordinary rendition. In his case, Arar makes it clear his release was a Syrian screw-up -- he was supposed to 'disappear' in Syria's prison system to keep his case from coming to light. The second irony is that, although never charged with anything, he's banned from entering the US for five years so he can't testify personally in the case. Sixty Minutes has covered the story but the US print media have hardly mentioned it. [Full Story] Senior CIA advisors tell Bush of high probability of Iraq degenerating into civil war I've only made two major predictions on this blog and this was one of them -- that regardless of what Bush tries to do to 'impose' order, democracy and constitutional liberalism on Iraq (and Afghanistan), the people of those countries will determine their own future on their own terms and in their own time -- and that will inevitably be by way of further bloodshed, totalitarianism and civil strife. It's encouraging to see that someone in a position to get Bush's attention is saying the same thing. Not that he's likely to listen. Here's the lead from Knight-Ridder, picked up by Common Dreams and not many others: CIA officers in Iraq are warning
that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former
U.S.
officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment
that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address. The CIA
officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this
week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because
of the classified information involved.
The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned. Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue. "Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before." These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity. Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council. [Full Story] Photo above: Tens of thousands of Shiites demonstrate in Baghdad for an end to foreign occupation Oh, and my other major prediction? That the crushing Bush debt will plunge the world into economic collapse. The IMF are my strange bedfellows on that one. It's going to be a fun year. Environmental groups grapple internally with the explosive issue of population -- and immigration Last but not least, a story from the LA Times about how environmental groups like the Sierra Club are waking up to the terrifying prospect of One Billion Americans, with the consequence of coast-to-coast sprawl, eco-catastrophe and zero green space. The debate pits two core liberal values: environmentalism and openness to immigration, head-to-head. The result, not surprisingly, is a headache. The discussion is long overdue and important. The LA Times did a great job on this story, and since it's passed into the archives, I'm posting it, courtesy of the Ecological Weblog, in its entirety: An unusual alliance of
anti-immigration advocates and animal rights activists is attempting
to
take over the leadership of the Sierra Club, America's oldest national
environmental group, in what is emerging as a bitter fight over the
future of the 112-year-old organization founded by Scottish immigrant
John Muir. Leaders of a faction that failed to persuade the club to
take a stand against immigration in 1998 are seeking to win majority
control of the group's 15-member governing board in a spring election
-- this time, as part of a broader coalition that includes
vegetarians,
who want the club to denounce hunting, fishing and raising animals for
human consumption. In response, 11 former Sierra Club presidents have written a letter expressing "extreme concern for the continuing viability of the club," protesting what they see as a concerted effort by outside organizations to hijack the mainstream conservationist group and its $95-million annual budget. Some of the insurgent candidates vying for the five available seats on the governing board only recently joined the Sierra Club. If they win, they will control eight of the 15 seats. Members will vote in the board elections in March, with the results tallied in April. People who join the club by the end of January should be able to vote. The election has attracted the interest of anti-immigration groups, which are encouraging their members to join the club to help elect the insurgent candidates. "What has outraged Sierra Club leaders is that external organizations would attempt to interfere and manipulate our election to advance their own agendas," said Robert Cox, a past Sierra Club president. Moreover, club officials argue that members of the two insurgent groups share fundamentally anti-human views, in their opposition to immigration and in their belief that people should take a backseat to other species. The Sierra Club's "dominant perspective has been to protect nature for people," said Executive Director Carl Pope. "But by pulling up the gangplank on immigration, they are tapping into a strand of misanthropy that says human beings are a problem." Pope noted that 18% of Sierra Club members like to fish or hunt, and he worried they could be driven out by the new agenda from animal-rights advocates. "It's important to have hunters and fishermen in the Sierra Club," Pope said. "We are a big-tent organization. We want the Sierra Club to be a comfortable place for Americans who want clean air, clean water, and to protect America's open spaces." The list of insurgent candidates features some high-profile names, including former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, Cornell University entomology professor David Pimentel, and Frank Morris, former director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. All three have been outspoken advocates of controlling population growth or restricting immigration. Lamm is coauthor of "The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America." Club officials say the campaign got underway quietly with the recent election of three activists, including UCLA astronomy professor Benjamin Zuckerman, a longtime champion of curbs on immigration; and Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a marine environmental group perhaps best-known for ramming whaling ships. During their campaigns, the candidates downplayed the views they are now advancing. Club members who support the insurgent candidates accused the organization's old guard of trying to demonize them as radicals to head off the increasingly popular efforts to win a new majority. "I really think we ought to be judged on our merits and what we've done in the past, and not divide the Sierra Club," Pimentel said. Political squabbles are hardly new to the 750,000-member Sierra Club, whose members squared off just last year over whether to take a stand against the war in Iraq. But the dispute over this spring's elections is becoming especially rancorous. Some longtime Sierrans worry that a takeover by the insurgents would brand the organization as bigoted and xenophobic. "I don't think that Lamm, Pimentel and Morris are racists," Pope said. "But they are clearly being supported by racists." Zuckerman and Watson call those claims ludicrous. They argue that the club has a responsibility to take strong positions on the issues affecting the health of the planet. "Everything else the Sierra Club is doing is doomed to fail if the United States continues on its rapid population growth," said Zuckerman, 50, who was the leading vote-getter in the Sierra Club board election two years ago. "There are people who are being born today who will see a California that has more people than the entire United States when I was born," he said. Asked what the Sierra Club could do to curb population growth, Zuckerman said the group must "talk about the numbers -- how much immigration we should have and how many babies -- so the mix of fertility and immigration is debated and we can come to a level where the population will stabilize." Watson, who was a co-founder of Greenpeace but who broke ranks with that organization because he advocated more aggressive tactics, said he did not expect the Sierra Club to adopt the confrontational methods of Sea Shepherd. But the club, he said, should promote eating habits that protect Earth's other inhabitants. "Human beings are literally stealing resources from all the other species on this planet," said Watson, a Canadian immigrant. In an e-mail response to the letter by the 11 former presidents, Watson wrote, "Is the advocating of low-impact vegetarian diets a cause for concern? I guess it is if you have a vested interest in grazing or the beef or poultry industry. I fail to see how vegetarianism in the age of Mad Cow Disease, E. coli, PCBs in fish, etc., can be considered anything but practical and realistic." Sierra Club President Larry Fahn and the other prior presidents have pointed out that the club's members already voted to remain neutral on immigration in 1998 after a lengthy public debate, and said that revisiting the divisive dispute would detract from what board members have agreed is the most immediate action needed to protect the environment: unseating President Bush. The presence of the anti-immigration candidates has led civil rights leader Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks what it considers hate groups, to join the Sierra Club and run for its board. Dees said he decided to throw his hat into the ring to generate publicity after his staff found that anti- immigration groups were urging members to join the Sierra Club and help swing the vote. "I'm not running to win a seat on the board," Dees said. "I'm running to sound the alarm of an attempt to take over this organization by the radical element of anti-immigration people. They are interested in keeping this country white." Earlier this month, VDare.com, an anti-immigration website founded by former Forbes senior editor Peter Brimelow, author of the book "Alien Nation," ran an article discussing the Sierra Club elections. The article referred to Dees as a "left-wing smear artist" and urged immigration-control activists to join the Sierra Club and vote for like-minded candidates in its upcoming elections. The article in turn was picked up by an anti-Semitic website and topped with a homophobic, anti-Semitic headline. The author of the article, Brenda Walker, said she was dismayed at that, but Sierra Club officials cited the recycled article as evidence of extremist support for the anti-immigration candidates. Roderick Nash, a retired UC Santa Barbara historian who has tracked the environmental movement, noted that since its early days, the Sierra Club has struggled with tensions over humanity's imprint on the environment. Gentlemen hikers and climbers -- who wanted to preserve America's beautiful places so the privileged could visit them -- wrote diatribes in the early 20th century about Anglo Americans being overrun by unsavory immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, he said. Nor is it the first time the Sierra Club has been the target of a supposed takeover. In the late 1970s, when the club was embroiled in a battle with Walt Disney Co. over a proposed ski resort in Mineral King near Sequoia, the ski industry ran a slate of candidates to push for support of more ski resorts, Pope said. Those candidates lost. |
 Ira Basen, a producer
with the CBC and a friend of mine from Carleton University days, is
writing a book on media spin,
a term often used interchangeably with bias. But Ira says spin is actually subtler and more
insidious. It is the shading of
meaning or interpretation of events in favour of a particular point of
view, and it is sometimes inadvertent or even unconscious.
There are several ways spin will creep into a story, including:
Finished? Did you shudder a bit when you read, in an article written about Clinton in 1998, "Is bin Laden's new assignment perhaps to be a bogey-man of convenience whom the U.S. government can link to any government it wishes to bomb?" With the benefit of hindsight (and the opposing political party in power) it's easy to see the incredible spin in the venerable Times' reporting in 1998, and to see that to some extent this ubiquitous media spin contributed to the overwhelming bipartisan approval for the US to launch a war against Afghanistan, against precisely the people we had supported and financed earlier in their war against the USSR, the enemy of that earlier day. I confess that I had few misgivings about war with the Taliban, despite the fact that I am a life-long pacifist. Why? Because nowhere (except the discredited extreme conspiracy-theorist papers) were we presented with spin-free reporting (or opposite-spin reporting, if you think spin-free reporting is an oxymoron) on what exactly was, and had been, going on in Afghanistan, and why things were the way they were. There is almost always a rational explanation for things that appear absurd or unreasonable in the absence of the facts. We are just now beginning to realize the degree to which our money and support made the Taliban both popular and tyrannical in Afghanistan. And still we are missing most of the facts about that country, and about Iraq. The facts, alas, are not the same as the news. The media's job is to report the news, not to dig up the facts. Investigative journalism is what we desperately need, but there is no money in that, surprisingly little demand for it, and precious few willing to take the enormous risks to pursue that thankless career. It's easy to take sides, especially when the current US administration is so unapologetically propagandizing (i.e. deliberately and systematically spinning) every issue it deals with, to a degree not seen since the Vietnam War. But the reality is that the media, taken as a whole, are neither liberal nor conservative. The political position of each media outlet on any given issue is somewhere in the middle of (a) the position of its editorial board, (b) its perception of the position of the 'average' reader/viewer, (c) the position of the reporters covering the story, and (d) the position of the people presenting the story (usually the administration of the day). That means that to right-wingnuts like this guy, the media will always appear liberal, and to unabashed left-wingers like me, the media will always appear conservative. But the truth is, at least in their story reporting (editorials and schlock talk radio aside), there is no vast media 'conspiracy' at either end of the political spectrum. Most people in the media are doing their best to do their jobs in a way that balances the views of the above four 'interest groups'. They are vulnerable to the spin techniques listed above -- if you've ever interviewed someone, you'll appreciate that unless you're really treated abusively there's an earnest desire to represent what they had to say clearly, favourably, but above all objectively. To the extent they get it right, they deserve a lot of credit -- it's a difficult, thankless, often dangerous and tedious job. To the extent they, and their editors, let spin creep into their stories, we have a duty as readers and viewers and citizens to recognize it, and discount it accordingly. The fact that so many of us are using the Internet to learn more, to check out other interpretations of events, and to get behind the stories so we can understand and talk about the issues facing our world more knowledgeably, we are contributing to the democratic process, and helping to reduce spin. At the same time, there is a tendency in the blogosphere to frequent sites authored and populated by like minds, and some of the hysterics of extremists of every stripe are quite frightening. My blog wears its left-spinning, overtly editorial stripes quite proudly and unapologetically, but I make a point of reading a few of the more moderate conservative blogs on each new issue, and occasionally some of the bizarre extreme leftist blogs -- because the danger of exposing yourself to a lot of spin is that, if you're not careful, you can find yourself permanently off-balance. And as we all know, "fair and balanced" is another term that's subject to a lot of spin. George O. must be 'spinning' in his grave. |
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News source: The InqBoingBoing noted yesterday that JibJab, the creators of the hilarious Bush/Kerry/Guthrie parody were facing threat of a copyright lawsuit by the current copyright holders for "This Land is Your Land." Now, the Home Recording Rights Coalition has issued a press release pointing out that when the television news broadcasts promoted the flash animation they were likely "inducing" people to violate copyright, assuming that the animation isn't fair use. Under the INDUCE Act, that could make the broadcasters liable for literally millions of copyright violations. Heh.Link
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