Nice piece by Andrew Brown in today’s Guardian on the madness of the current mania for intellectual property.
Monthly Archives: November 2005
Robert Mugabe: Internet expert
Comic relief time. Robert Mugabe made a ponderous speech to WSIS on the subject of “How Western states abuse the Internet”. Zimbabwe was concerned, he said,
that information communication technology (ICT) continues to be used negatively – mainly by developed countries – to undermine national sovereignty, social and cultural values.
The President also challenged the still undemocratic issue of Internet governance, saying one or two countries insisted on being world policemen on the management and administration of the Internet, a worldwide network of computers which facilitates data transmission and exchange.
The admiring report of his speech in the Harare Herald (written by the appropriately named Innocent Gore) goes on to say that
the Internet was developed by an American company called Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the company managed it in consultation with the United States Department of Commerce.
Developing countries were proposing that this function be managed by an inter-governmental authority, but the US government was against such an arrangement as this would result in it losing control of the Internet and all revenue associated with the information superhighway.
African countries wanted the composition and role of the present governing body to be a fully representative authority and wanted to be accorded the opportunity to actively participate in international organisations dealing with Internet governance.
Truly, you couldn’t make this up. I wonder if the aforementioned Innocent is by any chance related to Al Gore, who famously once claimed to have invented the Internet.
I particularly like Mugabe’s concern about the “still undemocratic issue of Internet governance”. Myself, I am concerned about the still undemocratic issue of Zimbabwean governance.
[Thanks to Richard Synge for the link.]
Correction… Bill Thompson writes to say that Al Gore never made that assertion. It was, he says, “a slander put about by the Republicans – see Seth Finkelstein’s analysis“.
Once Upon a Time…
Extraordinarily perceptive essay by Arthur Silber on the pathological mindset of those now ruling the US. He starts from Dick Cheney’s vicious outburst the other day about those who dare to criticise the Iraq adventure.
The Bush-Cheney attack, at this moment and in this context, reeks of desperation. They behave like cornered rats. Their tactics are not wise in terms of any political strategy. They are no longer convincing, and they are no longer believed. And without much trouble, they could have taken another course entirely. They could have admitted that certain of the information they relied upon turned out to be inaccurate. They could have expressed their deep regrets on that issue, and their determination to correct what led to the errors. And then they could have said that since we are now in this situation, however much we might regret it, we must persevere, at least to the extent of making Iraq reasonably stable within a reasonable period of time.
Why can’t Bush-Cheney (and, by implication btw, Tony Blair) admit this? Silber continues:
Their behavior is completely unreasonable. It serves no purpose whatsoever that is comprehensible to any degree. So we can fairly and justifiably say this much: they are behaving completely irrationally, even on their own terms and if their stated aims are in fact their aims. So those aims cannot be the real ones. The purpose lies in another direction. From all the evidence, I would say that the refusal to admit error is the key. These people cannot bear to contemplate even the possibility that they’ve been wrong. The threat appears to be experienced as one to their entire worldview, and to their deepest view of themselves. This is the faith that Ron Suskind described in his article about Bush, but it is faith of a particular kind. It is absolutist, entirely and with regard to every specific. To admit error in one part, is to admit error about the whole. If a single beam is removed, the complete structure collapses.
The faith must be maintained, no matter what. All the negative consequences of the Iraq disaster don’t matter; all the deaths and destroyed lives don’t matter; the weakening of our military doesn’t matter; the mounting and increasingly ominous financial costs don’t matter. None of it matters. The faith itself is everything. You see the identical phenomenon in the most dedicated of the administration’s defenders.
This is not normal, says Silber; it doesn’t come within even the outermost boundaries of what is normal.
This is pathological, in that it deliberately discards huge parts of reality and pretends that they don’t exist. It does all this not out of a commitment to a provably reasonable alternative or anything close to it, but out of a psychological imperative.
This kind of pathology is extraordinarily dangerous. Facts don’t matter and, in the worst case, deaths don’t matter. More deaths and on a still wider scale don’t matter. This is why I continue to believe that these people are entirely capable of unleashing Armageddon. You can raise all the objections indicated in that post and many more, and they won’t matter. The faith must be maintained. But this faith is a lethal one as we continue to see every day, and we may not have seen its worst results yet. Pray that we never do.
Amen. This is a fine piece, reminding one of the extent to which the US now seems to be stuck, and it’s not clear how it will extract itself from this mess — which encompasses not just Iraq, but the country’s media, its Congress and even its judiciary.
To what Google Base uses may we return, Horatio!
This is the headline on a lovely story. Some time ago, Paul Ford created an amusing cartoon about Google and world domination on his Blog. When Google Base launched, B2Day, the official blog of the magazine Business 2.0, put up a piece about the news and included a link to Paul’s cartoon — without consulting him, or even bothering to copy the image (which meant that the browser of anyone clicking on the B2Day story would be collecting the image from the link and thereby eating into Paul’s bandwidth). Instead of getting mad, however, he decided to get even, and replaced the image with other ones, while keeping the filename (and therefore the link) unchanged. Now read on…
Gmail as a word processor
Vic Keegan has a novel use for Google Mail.
bin Laden 1 – democracies nil
From Timothy Garton-Ash’s column today…
The erosion of liberty. Four words sum up four years. Since the attacks of September 11 2001, we have seen an erosion of liberty in most established democracies. If he’s still alive, Osama bin Laden must be laughing into his beard. For this is exactly what al-Qaida-type terrorists want: that democracies should overreact, reveal their “true” oppressive face, and therefore win more recruits to the suicide bombers’ cause. We should not play his game. In the always difficult trade-off between liberty and security, we are erring too much on the side of security. Worse still: we are becoming less safe as a result…
Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy
A learned article by Benjamin Barton in the Michigan Law Journal. Who says lawyers have no sense of humour? (One of my favourite legal scholars hails from Michigan btw; but that’s probably a coincidence.) Anyway, here’s the Abstract:
This Essay examines what the Harry Potter series (and particularly the most recent book, The Half-Blood Prince) tells us about government and bureaucracy. There are two short answers. The first is that Rowling presents a government (The Ministry of Magic) that is 100% bureaucracy. There is no discernable executive or legislative branch, and no elections. There is a modified judicial function, but it appears to be completely dominated by the bureaucracy, and certainly does not serve as an independent check on governmental excess.
Second, government is controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat. The most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait of a government captured by special interests and motivated solely by a desire to increase bureaucratic power and influence.
Consider this partial list of government activities: a) torturing children for lying; b) utilizing a prison designed and staffed specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; c) placing citizens in that prison without a hearing; d) allows the death penalty without a trial; e) allowing the powerful, rich or famous to control policy and practice; f) selective prosecution (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); g) conducting criminal trials without independent defense counsel; h) using truth serum to force confessions; i) maintaining constant surveillance over all citizens; j) allowing no elections whatsoever and no democratic lawmaking process; k) controlling the press.
Google Base…
… is online. Lots of speculation in the Blogosphere about What It Means. I like the view that it’s basically early Yahoo! in reverse: where Yahoo! had Directory first, then Search, Google now has Search first, Directory second. And users build the directory, whereas Yahoo! had to pay people to do it for them. But it’s too early to say how this will pan out.
The complete New Yorker archive
Yep. The entire shooting match on eight DVDs.
4,109 issues. Half a million pages. And only $70. I want it. Now. Transatlantic shipping is $65 though. Hmmm… who do I know in the US who’s contemplating a trip?
Pure talent…
… is a wonderful thing. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik has it in spades. I’ve just read two beautiful pieces by him in the same week. First his lovely preface to the new edition of Molly Hughes’s Victorian memoir, A London Child of the 1870s, and then a startlingly good New Yorker essay on C.S. Lewis.