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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Via Mayerson on Animation

Here’s a video by Clay Shirky, author of the recent bestseller “Here comes Everybody”. He gives a little more detail to the kind of changes that are happening to mass media. I love it when he describes the Great Fire Wall of China as the Maginot line of the digital age. If you think about it, any countermeasures against transmitting or processing data are ultimately just as avoidable as the Maginot Line was. It goes against the basic tenets of what a computer is supposed to do, kind of like trying to stop an internal combustion engine using a fire extinguisher.  It’s especially ironic considering that China manufactures most of the devices that it’s so desperately trying to hobble.

The wording of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech last Friday was so earnest that I almost believed it myself. He really believed that the election was a divine assessment. He also believed that he could blame the recent troubles on Iran’s enemies, who were all living a higher standard of living despite never having heard of such things as a secret morality police. From the hard-liner’s perspective, the regime still seems to be doing all the right things. They are manufacturing reports on state television, throwing out dissenting foreign journalists, confiscating cameras, and applying truncheons to anyone who gets in their way. The methods may seem harsh, but it’s all in a day’s work for defending the Islamic Republic. The only problem is that they are trying to fight an information war in 2009 with techniques that belong in 1979.

Back when the Islamic Revolution was young, print was still the primary source of information. Radio and Television were transmitted through massive antennae using machinery that would fill a small room. Media was still thought of as infrastructure back then. If you had control of it, legitimacy came by default. Today, that sort of centralization of media power doesn’t exist. Your average Best Buy has at least enough media creation equipment to start a revolution. All it took was the video from a single camcorder to set an entire city on fire in the 1992 LA riots. The Iranian Revolutionary regime now faces devices 1/10th the size, with 1000 times the storage capacity, and the ability to connect to a global network that not even President Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions could threaten.

Iran Expert Afshin Molavi claims that if Khamenei were to call for another election, it would be an extreme blow to the regime’s credibility. In my opinion, all hope of the regime’s credibility was dashed in Friday’s speech. He didn’t realize that he had brought a knife to a gun convention. In days passed, his was the only channel on TV. Now he is but a single voice among millions. One of the great myths of the 20th century was that if the footage going through the camera or the sound coming through the microphone didn’t lie, then anyone that had such equipment wouldn’t lie either. Even if the imagery was obviously false, individuals couldn’t come up with something vivid enough to compete with the propaganda. When that kind of power is the hands of all instead of the hands of the few, we begin to see that reality is once again decided by the agreement of people, not by an appeal to any authority, divine or otherwise. So now, along with the Divine Right of Kings before it, the myth of ultimate truth through mass media has been dashed, hopefully forever.

#iranelection was for many people the top news source for the aftermath of incumbent President Mahmoud Amedinejad’s so-called victory over reformer candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi last Friday. It’s not a new cable news channel, or even a news website. It’s what is known on twitter.com as a “trending topic”, a self-declared association of posts on the micro-blogging site. Every post with the word “#iranelection” self-identifies as having something to do with the Iran situation, be it opinions, links to mainstream news articles, or even first hand reports. It’s a new form of primary historical document, one that combines the intimacy of personal letters, the immediacy of video or sound recordings, and the openness of a mass media broadcast.

Twitter is by no means new technology. I find it very similar the web-based chat rooms I myself used in highschool. What is different about it is that it has repurposed current technology to be used in a unique way. Where other systems wanted to emphasize privacy and security, Twitter emphasizes publicity and openness. Most of the 140 character “tweets” are meant for the rest of the Twitter community and the internet at large. It’s easy to write it off as some kind of narcissistic toy, I’m guilty of that myself. However, Twitter’s status as a toy rather than a serious social networking site probably kept it from being blocked in Iran within the first few hours of the protests. Other aspects of the site, like the 140 character limit and interoperable architecture have allowed bloggers in Iran to deal with shoddy connectivity and the government’s attempts to block communication from within the country.

The result is a riveting stream of human emotion, rumor, and anonymous people from across the globe communicating like they never could before. Take a look at this feed from @Change_in_Iran

from the looks of it they are waiting to arrest all the students! it’s also explains the vans9:14 PM Jun 13th from web

some people are now parking their cars in middle of the street trying to block the vans. #iranelection9:16 PM Jun 13th from web

Police is trying to stop people from gathering around while Intel guys still holding a line in front of the gates #iranelection9:05 PM Jun 13th from web

police demanding people to move their cars and start crashing car windows. more people are coming. I will try to get a better view9:18 PM Jun 13th from web

Down with the dictator! Mousavi, Karoubi; support us! #iranelection9:30 PM Jun 13th from web

my eyes are burning hard to keep them open #iranelection9:46 PM Jun 13th from web

I’m dizzy but ok. some people are getting shelter in the nearby unfinished bank building. police arresting a middle aged man10:11 PM Jun 13th from web

@ahmadinejad no wonder you are OK Mr president 24.5M10:13 PM Jun 13th from TwitterFox in reply to ahmadinejad

it’s 9:54 AM -Amirabad street near Pasargad bank and to be honest I don’t have the courage to leave the roof right now #iranelection10:27 PM Jun 13th from web

There are more accounts like this on #iranelection interspersed with rumors of riot police stings disguised as Moussavi rallies and burning ballot boxes. Some tweets supply the Iranians with lists of proxies to get around the government’s internet filters. A hacker’s toolkit of programs to shut down Iranian propaganda websites is making the rounds. From the rest of the world, there are notes praying for the safety of the protesters, “retweets” of some of the more vital bits of news for fellow bloggers, and criticism of mainstream media outlets for their lack of coverage on the events. To see people communicate like this on such a personal level, the future of totalitarian regimes is doubtful. Any government that oppresses its own people on the basis of the threat of an external enemy cannot survive like this. The Great Satan has no horns or pointed tail, and he’s able to send a twitpic to prove it.

This is not to say that Twitter and services like it are going to replace more mainstream froms of news gathering. CNN doesn’t deserve its own #CNNfail channel for the coverage of the Iran Election. The network has to tread carefully to get the kind of access it has. President Obama had just recognized the USA’s involvement in the 1953 installment of the Shah only a week before. The US would do well to keep its distance and establish that it has nothing to do with the current unrest. Besides, it doesn’t matter whether True Blood is the higher trending topic or the mainstream media has to wait a few dozen hours to report on what it finds. That’s not what this is about. We all have an opportunity now to witness history. If we can’t take to the streets, if we can’t tend to the wounded, if can’t tweet from our laptops on the roof, the very least we can do is watch and pray that freedom wins out.

Hummingbird604.com‘s Raul Pacheco had the opportunity to ask all three BC provincial party leaders the same three questions about the election. One of the questions was, “Give me three reasons to vote for each one of the other parties (NOT to vote for yours).” The answers were quite telling.

No leader would directly answer the question. All three used the question as an opportunity to re-iterate their party’s platform. Gordon Campbell almost had an answer by acknowledging the Green Party’s commitment to the environment. The Green Party mentioned the governmental experience of the other two parties, but used that as a basis for their argument that the Liberals and the NDP were too beholden to special interests to properly serve the public. The NDP did not make any mention of the other parties at all.

Of course, it is counter-intuitive for political parties to say anything nice about their opponents. However, shouldn’t they at least know why certain sections of the population vote for their opponents? Wouldn’t that be the whole reason they are traveling the province, shaking hands and kissing babies? I hope for their sake that they were simply providing their answers for the benefit of a popular local blog. If BC-STV referendum passes, they’ll have to be able to acknowledge why people vote for their opponents if they are going to get anything passed in the legislature. Canadians have demonstrated, at least at the federal level, that they prefer the compromise and negotiation of a minority government over the sweeping mandates and agendas of a majority. Bit by bit, we’ll all have to consult each other over which direction this country is going.

My name is James Strocel. I have been a card-carrying Transformers fan ever since Generation 1 in the 1980′s. I say the following of my own free will. I will not be spending any money to see “Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen” this Summer. If I do so, I would be positively reinforcing actions that are a detriment to the world economy and my enjoyment of giant fighting robots. I would like to present the following as evidence in support of this stance.

While I did pay money to see the first transformers movie, I came away with a number of caveats. First of all, the story seemed to revolve around the human sidekicks more than it did the Transformers who I actually paid to see. Don’t get me wrong, history is full of examples where robots play prominently in a human-centred story-arc. The anime serials Gundam and Macross come to mind. However, the human story in this case surrounded Shia Lebeouf getting to first and a half base with Megan Fox. It seemed as though the writers felt that people would have trouble relating to the titular robots of Transformers, so they added all this extraneous filler to entice people who had already paid their ticket to watch a movie about robots. I was hoping that for the sequel, the good folks at Paramount would get their act together and give the Transformers the screen time they deserve. This will not be the case. The trailer at screened at the Showest film festival spent over one and a half minutes of a two and a half trailer explaining how Shia wanted to leave his transforming corvette at home so he can go off to college and be “normal”. Words cannot begin to describe what’s wrong with that statement.

The first Transformers film grossed over 700 million dollars worldwide. Anyone poke holes in my rationale by saying that Michael Bay is just giving the fans what they want. He doesn’t have to listen to me, an actual fan, because he has the numbers to tell anyone who doesn’t like his human interest stories to go to hell. If that’s the case, then I have some numbers of my own to show.

The Dow Jones has lost 50% of its value over the past year. The cascading effects of bank insolvency and freezing on lending has led to over $14 trillion dollars worth of companies being shut down. How did we get to this point? By pleasing two sets of people, prospective homebuyers unable to pay their mortgages, and investors looking for high risk and high return investments. Banks made billions by giving sub-prime mortgages to the first group and selling to the latter. People got what they wanted, but did they get what they need? Not by a long shot.

Designing our entertainment or any other product around “giving people what they want” is killing industries left and right. Pontiac finds out that people “want” extra plastic and spoilers on their cars, so they make a car like the Aztec. Papers make more money from advertising than from actual paper sales, so the pages are stuffed to foie-gras goose proportions with ads. If you run a business and are just “giving people what they want” you are abdicating your responsibility as an entrepreneur. When you try to engage all this marketing mumbo-jumbo by testing random samples with no vested interest your business, you are only fooling yourself. Entrepreneurs have a duty to make their products the best they can be, no matter what the polls say. People’s needs have remained the same for thousands of years, but what an entrepreneur does is take a small piece of the universe, be it coffee, toothpicks or even the laws of physics that allows your iPod to work and fashions it into a new frontier to satisfy those age-old needs. It’s like being in a tribe of hunter-gatherers and knowing which ridge leads to the best wild game. It would put you on the fast track to becoming chief hunter-gatherer. The very best entrepreneurs educate people. They know how to get the most benefit out of their products and they pass that knowledge on for a nominal fee.

I realize the philosophy of “giving people what they want” is not going to die over night. My absence at the theatre will be bearly noticed, and I have little hope of getting others to join me. However, we keep saying over and over that we need leadership to get us out of this crisis. We think that the leadership is going to come from our elected officials. I think that we’ll find that leadership in a decent cup of coffee, a well-made camera, or movies that don’t insult our intelligence. If we support decent leadership where we find it by our simple consumer choices, we support the very ideas and strategies that will get us out of any economic crisis.

There was an article on esquire.com recently about how the US Republican Party cannot survive in it’s current form. The author posted this video of RNC chairman Tom Price as evidence.

In that shaky, distorted video, Price derides the Democratic party for making “shady back-room” deals by daring to write their bills behind closed doors like every other political party in the free world. Now, the tone and format of that video sound familiar. Where have I seen it before?

If there is a sign of a party on the run these days, it’s the shaky video confessional. (To be fair, Stephan Dion’s video had higher production value. It just goes to show you what kind of shape the Republican Party is in.) In institutions where the flow of ideas is key, the muddying of communications is a sin of the worst kind. No matter what their stances on the issues are, I hope the Republicans and the Liberals both clean up their act in delivering their ideas to their respective countries. If they fail, their ruling government parties get a mandate to make laws that fit an ideology rather than reality. Debate is the lifeblood of Democracy, and it is just as bad for one side to cede control as it is for the other to dominate the discourse.

Call it the Credit Crunch, Depression 2.0, or whatever. The fact is, due to a set of cascading financial circumstances, businesses all over the world are now dealing with the problem of no money. It’s not that labour and capital are too expensive, there is just no money to pay for it all. Since I belong to a relatively high turn-over industry, I’ve been watching out for the stimulus packages that are being passed to get the world’s industries humming again.

The Canadian government’s plans did not produce much in the way of debate. The Liberals and Conservatives simply agreed to disagree and Jack Layton was left alone with a torch and pitchfork in his hands and a stunned expression on his face. Granted, with the regulatory environment our banks have, there seems to be much less at stake in Canada. In America, the numbers are bigger, the stakes are higher, and the tempers shorter.

I understand the debate as the gross generalization that I am about do describe. We have one side in favor of the stimulus package. They want the 800 billion to go into projects that will pay workers who will in turn spend that money again in the general economy. This way of thinking subscribes to the Keynesian school of economics. The other side is against government spending of any kind, and states that such a package will bankrupt the country and they’ll all be cleaning trillion dollar bills out of the gutter by the year’s end. The people saying this proudly say they hail from the Austrian school of economics.

I find the Austrian Solution for the problem very interesting because it seems to consist of the following:

Stage 1: Let Companies Fail.

Stage 2: ???

Stage 3: Profit.

Of course, that’s not the whole plan, but out on the internet I heard a lot about of the doom-saying about runaway inflation and not much in the way of an alternative plan. It turns out that many followers of the Austrian School of economics are supporters of Republican Congressman Ron Paul, who has come up with what I suppose is the vision for their philosophy. This includes abolishing of many government institutions, including the Federal Reserve. Military bases would be closed all over the world, and the US would pull out of the UN and NATO. Drug regulation would be turned over to the states, who could legalize and criminalize as they pleased.

While that leaves out the interesting question of the power vacuum that would be left behind if the US Military were to take its ball and go home, I can see this strategy’s appeal. It certainly is different, and it challenges many assumptions of value in the US structure of power. However, it completely enshrines the idea that government never does anything right, spends taxpayer’s money on hookers and blow, and kicks puppies for good measure. As a product of a government-run medical system, I have a problem reconciling that with the successes of government institutions around the world. It would be destruction for its own sake if the stimulus packages aren’t passed and unemployment is just allowed to increase. Furthermore, these packages include projects like roads and bridges that the market depends on, but can’t reasonably benefit from in the short run. Radical ideas are attractive because they encourage debate and lead up to things that are truly creative. However, we have to be aware that we sometimes cling to these ideas simply because they allow us to believe that we are right and everyone else is wrong.

It’s a common phrase on the front lines of class conflict: “Why don’t you just get yourself a job?” It comes up when people talk about employment, poverty, or wages. I am often surprised by the amount of glee taken when people complain not just about the homeless or the unemployed, but about people working for minimum wage. The question is often asked, “Why am I paying their tax bill?” “What do you mean I should pay for public transit? I have my own car”, “Why should they get anything more than they already have? I worked hard for what I have. I deserve it. They don’t. I’m a self made man”

I hear that and I think to myself, maybe they’re a manager who just had to fire somebody. Maybe they’ve just passed one too many strapping young panhandlers on the street. Maybe they’ve just had a look at their T4 slip. However, all the maybes in the world doesn’t make them any less wrong.

No one, not one single solitary person, “gets themselves a job”. Every job is dependent on someone else. In order to have a job, you need a company to work at. In order to have a company you need customers to sell to and suppliers to buy from. In order to keep using the labor and capital that your business depends upon, your customers will need to give you money. Money is little else but a giant confidence game we invented to distribute goods and services. Those Good and services are worth what people will pay for them, but the opposite is also true. A dollar is only worth what you’re willing to trade for it.

We’re in an economic crisis right now because a lot of financial institutions suddenly had to stop lying to themselves about how much they were worth. Pretty soon, more and more people will also have to stop lying to themselves. Companies are shutting down right now because they can’t pretend they’re making anything anybody will buy. All that is left will be thousands or even millions of people re-evaluating their place in society. I think that’s where the solution to the crisis lies. Premier Gordon Campell wrote on Twitter today that he was looking for unfiltered ideas on how to create jobs in this new economic landscape. I believe I have one. Find out what we have to offer the world, and also find out what we want from the rest of the world. If anything comes from the myriad of stimulus packages being passed in parliaments and senates all over the world, I hope that at least some of those funds go towards creating new markets. This will require us to answer this question: What are we all doing here? When North and South America were discovered, people made their fortunes creating new societies there and bringing resources back. When the industrial revolution started, we made machines that could make items like clothes and fine china at rates previously unheard of. In the 20th century, we connected the whole world with automobiles, satellites, and computers. In this new century, we must decide what the next chapter of the human endeavor is. If we can find a challenge that can speak to our souls, it is there that we will find our future.

Yes, yes, I know. I’m going along with the crowd and making a post about the Obama inauguration. There are times when you have to be an individual, and this is not one of those times. There is a Black US President. No one can ignore that. It’s also a change in power in one of the darkest economic times in recent memory. Any way you look at it, it was history. My wife had the inauguration on the TV in her classroom and one of her students asked, “Are my kids going to learn about today in Social Studies?”

I don’t believe there is anyone who heard that inauguration speech and didn’t feel like kicking ass. Obama painted a picture of the future, and for the duration of that speech it sounded like an exciting place to live. True, there would be hardship and problems, but he reassured that heroes would be made in overcoming them. He also treated America’s enemies differently in his speech. No longer were they the numberless hordes who “hated freedom”. They were actual people, misguided in their ventures, but people nonetheless. I think that approach inspires courage more than it does fear. If Obama does nothing else in his term of office, he will at least be a treat to hear at all of his speaking engagements.

I think the people who were incensed by the appearance of Rick Warren at the inauguration need to grow up. Obama let him lead a prayer, he didn’t make him Secretary of putting-the-government-in-people’s-bedrooms. He will be as much a part of the American Religious landscape after Gay Marriage is allowed as he was before. He will also have to deal with it just like everyone else. The real work of of obtaining the right to marry for all will be done by proving that such a thing is good for society, not just by attacking some figurehead priest. Make no mistake, those bans will be lifted. It’s a when, not an if, and the years of social progress beforehand stand as evidence. After all, as the inauguration today proved, anything is possible.

It wasn’t the only bastion of intolerance in the city, but it was a good place to draw the line. Everywhere else in BC, Social Justice 12 was just another elective class for high school seniors. Students would learn how to analyze issues of intolerance in their world, as well as some strategies to combat that intolerance. The Abbotsford school board, however, voted to postpone the course and censor certain sections that dealt with homosexual rights. The irony was not lost on the 96 students who had already signed up for the course.

Over 300 people gathered in the rain at the University of the Fraser Valley last Saturday in response to the School Board’s decision. Some were indeed homosexuals, some of them were families, some of them were fellow students, and others were just tired of seeing this kind of thing happen in their town. Religion is kind of a big deal in Abbotsford. There’s practically a church on every corner, and the local editorial page usually has a letter every week advertising the book of Leviticus. There are people with the same approach to faith who make no qualms about injecting themselves into the local political process, hoping to turn this town into an idyllic version of something it was when there were 75,000 less people and it didn’t take up 5 highway exits. Intelligent people see something like this and they get scared. Nothing can wash away scruples like the belief that God is on your side, never mind that the same God has been known to have it out for those who practice religion without scruples, and never mind that the United Church flew a banner at the rally saying “We are all God’s Children”. Indeed, the people who supported the school board’s decision would see a rally like this as a form of persecution, further evidence they need to keep “people like that” out of the public sphere. That’s okay. This rally wasn’t for them, anyway. It’s for those who value tolerance and freedom of speech, yet are afraid to speak out themselves. It’s for the thousands who make their home in this town, yet feel shut out by the rhetoric they hear. This rally stands to prove that it’s not religious fervor that drives this town, it’s passion for our beliefs. Anywhere else in Canada, having passion is only a human right. Around here, it’s your duty as a citizen.