Winter tracery
Seen on a woodland walk this afternoon.
Net neutrality and the Schleswig-Holstein question
This morning’s Observer column.
Readers with long memories will recall the celebrated Schleswig-Holstein question. This referred to a bundle of thorny diplomatic and other issues arising from the relations of two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, to the Danish crown and to the German Confederation. It was the bane of diplomats' lives in the late 19th century, but we remember it nowadays mainly because of Lord Palmerston’s famous wisecrack about it. “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated,” he said, “that only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”
The issue of "net neutrality" is the Schleswig-Holstein question de nos jours…
My colleague, Ray Corrigan, has a written a very informative review of what is probably the most scholarly book to have emerged so far on the question of Net Neutrality — Christopher Marsden’s Net Neutrality: Towards a Co-regulatory Solution
Merry Christmas (if that’s your thing)
Music: better off on BitTorrent? And as for iTunes…
Fascinating TorrentFreak interview with Benn Jordan, one of the first musicians to release his stuff on BitTorrent. Excerpt:
TF: What are your thoughts on the big labels. Are they good or bad for the majority of artists?
Jordan: I have to be honest. Big labels that aren’t being innovative are little more than delusional laughing stocks at this point. Their numbers get worse and worse, and they push the artists to do dumber and dumber stunts to try and stay on top of things.
The shows and festivals they book are sponsored by 8 different alcoholic beverages and 10 different energy drinks, and they just punish their customers while validating their own demise. I’m not worried about them and neither should you. Its a dozen senior citizens trying to stop a stampede of fresh culture. Good luck boys.
TF: And what about Apple?
Jordan: Apple, love or hate their products, is fucking scary. On one hand, hats off. They’re business and marketing geniuses. On the other hand, they might single handedly be the worst thing that has happened to entertainment media in the last 3 years. The major record industry collapsing should also mean that artists are more free to do what they want.
For example, iTunes completely screwed up the track listing of my last album Arboreal. Their network is so influential that over half of the people who have bought the CD from my label now have botched track titles on their mp3 players. Apple doesn’t have ANY accessible artist support to deal with things like this.
They reject my cover art if I don’t have my name and the title in bold. If I want to sell a 30 minute long track (Louisiana Mourning, for example), they require me to split it up into a bunch of separate tracks. Their distribution system is so unorganized that artists have to pay business like Tunecore upwards of $40 per album (and annual fees) to do Apple’s job for them.
Again, its genius on the business side. But they’ve wedged themselves in so well that now, if I don’t have an album on iTunes (under their insane rules and lack of support), a large portion of my listeners simply won’t know how to put my music on their iPods/iPhones.
I know I sound preachy, but think about it, how is that any better than what existed 15 years ago? I still maintain that I’d rather have my stuff “illegally” downloaded than have to go down that path.
TF: What advise do you have for artists who consider giving away their music?
Jordan: That being a “consideration” is always funny to me. You either release it knowing it will be distributed for free or you keep it locked up on your hard drive. If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that no amount of bitching, threatening, lobbying, suing, or file protecting is going to stop information from being spread to those who want it.
The National Security State (contd)
Apropos my earlier post:
Afghanistan, child abuse and WikiLeaks
On December 2 the Guardian published a leaked cable dated 24 June, 2009 which reported on a meeting between the US Assistant Ambassador to Afghanistan and Hanif Atmar, then the Interior Minister of Afghanistan. One of the topics covered was the activities of a US contractor, DynCorp, retained by the Americans to train Afghan policemen.
Atmar was agitated about reports of what the American company had allegedly been up to. Here’s one account:
Prime among Atmar’s concerns was a party partially thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province.
Many of DynCorp’s employees are ex-Green Berets and veterans of other elite units, and the company was commissioned by the US government to provide training for the Afghani police. According to most reports, over 95 percent of its $2 billion annual revenue comes from US taxpayers.
And in Kunduz province, according to the leaked cable, that money was flowing to drug dealers and pimps. Pimps of children, to be more precise. (The exact type of drug was never specified.)
So what went on at this US-subsidised ‘party’? The HoustonPress account says that it was “bacha bazi”.
Eh?
Bacha bazi is a pre-Islamic Afghan tradition that was banned by the Taliban. Bacha boys are eight- to 15-years-old. They put on make-up, tie bells to their feet and slip into scanty women’s clothing, and then, to the whine of a harmonium and wailing vocals, they dance seductively to smoky roomfuls of leering older men.
After the show is over, their services are auctioned off to the highest bidder, who will sometimes purchase a boy outright. And by services, we mean anal sex: The State Department has called bacha bazi a “widespread, culturally accepted form of male rape.” (While it may be culturally accepted, it violates both Sharia law and Afghan civil code.)
For Pashtuns in the South of Afghanistan, there is no shame in having a little boy lover; on the contrary, it is a matter of pride. Those who can afford the most attractive boy are the players in their world, the OG’s of places like Kandahar and Khost. On the Frontline video, ridiculously macho warrior guys brag about their young boyfriends utterly without shame.
So perhaps in the evil world of Realpolitik, in which there is apparently no moral compass US private contractors won’t smash to smithereens, it made sense for DynCorp to drug up some Pashtun police recruits and turn them loose on a bunch of little boys.
In the tsunami of WikiLeaks coverage this cable has been largely overlooked. But it seems to me to be very revealing. This is not so much because it sheds light on the malign activities of some US contractors in Afghanistan (we know a lot about this already), but because of the light it sheds on the mores of the society that the US and NATO is attempting to shore up. One would have to be a deranged cultural relativist to regard as civilised a country which tolerates intolerable levels of female subjugation, and in which child abuse appears to be widely practiced and, in some cases, celebrated.
This was brought home to me in a conversation I had recently (before the WikiLeaks revelations) at a dinner party. The man sitting next to me was a retired British army Intelligence officer who had seen recent service in Afghanistan. We talked about the difficulties facing the US/NATO mission and about the impossibility of implanting democratic values in a country like that. At one point my companion told a story about a conversation he had had with an American General who was about to hold a meeting with a local Afghan warlord. The General requested a detailed briefing on his Afghan visitor. The officer asked how much detail was required. “Everything you’ve got”, replied the General. Well, said the Brit, the latest we’ve got is that he raped two young boys this morning”. And this was a guy that the Americans had decided they had to deal with.
Which brings me back to the real value of the WikiLeaks cache of leaked cables. It may be — as the Establishment maintains — that they don’t bring any earth-shattering revelations. But the steady drip-drip of cables like the one of June 24 is important not so much because the cables reveal the futility and immorality of the US/NATO mission in Afghanistan (though they do) but because they show that the US and NATO also know that it’s futile. Which means that the only reason we’re continuing to fund this doomed venture (at a cost of $2.8 billion a week, btw) is because our politicians cannot think of a way of extricating us.
LATER: Glenn Greenwald has an excellent piece in Salon on why the WikiLeaks are telling us things that we really needed to know.
The Assange interview
This and John Humphreys’s Radio 4 interview provide a fascinating case-study in the efficacy of different interviewing styles. Humphreys’s confrontational approach revealed interesting thngs about Assange’s personality. Frost’s softer style elicits much more information about WikiLeaks.
WTF?
Verily, you could not make this up.
We’re not quite sure what’s prompted all the hilarious names today, but the CIA has now formed a new group with an acronym of the likes we haven’t seen since the days of Nixon’s CREEP (or the Committee to Reelect the President). The WikiLeaks Task Force — yeah, WTF — has been charged with assessing the impact of the leaked cables on the agency’s foreign relationships and operations, and it seems that the acronym has unsurprisingly already become the normal parlance at HQ. No word if the CIA is planning on holding a WTF BBQ to mark the occasion.
And I thought nobody would ever, ever beat CREEP.
