Holding Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld accountable

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Mark Anderson is asking who should be held to account for all the Iraqi civilians killed since the US invasion.

Using these techniques, IBC reports between 90,400 to 98,700 civilian deaths to date. This conservative floor remains much higher than Bush administration claims of somewhere in the 15K+ region.

When this argument has continued for awhile, it is likely that no single study will prevail, but that the method of counting by randomized, direct survey will be the most accurate method. It is hard to make the argument, outside of scientific circles, that ethics or war crimes tribunals will distinguish between whether there were 100K deaths officially recognized by media and government, or 600K civilians actually killed, or twice that figure.

Who is responsible for these deaths? Why did these people die? For what? Non existent WMDs? Non existent Iraqi Al Qaeda?

Let’s say George Bush’s idea of Pre-emptive War has just killed something like 500k-1MM innocent civilians in Iraq, and that the war itself was a mistake. Or, much more worrisome, along Clarke’s lines, it was not a mistake at all. According to one of Rumsfeld’s top aides, who took notes at a meeting on 9.11, Rumsfeld wanted to go after Saddam “whether or not he was relevant” to the 9.11 attack.

Now what happens? Golf in Dallas? Cheney speechifying in Jackson Hole? Rummy rewriting history?

Now what happens?

And what about our own Revd. Blair’s responsibilities in this matter?

UK Photographers’ Rights

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Paternoster Square (image from Wikipedia)

Paternoster Square (image from Wikipedia)

Given the increasing tolerance of security goonery in Mr Broon’s National Surveillance State, lots of photographers are reporting unpleasant harassment by officials and private-sector goons. The latest example I’ve heard about is of security guards confronting someone taking pictures in Paternoster Square in front of St Paul’s Cathedral in London and threatening to confiscate his camera if he didn’t stop taking pictures of the buildings lining the square. And A-level photography students at my daughter’s school report harassment of the same kind in other parts of London.

Most photographers don’t know what their legal position is, so this guide to UK Photographers Rights by a lawyer, linda Macpherson, is very useful and welcome. It’s designed as a short guide to the main legal restrictions on the right to take photographs and the right to publish photographs that have been taken. Worth printing a copy of the pdf and keeping it in your bag.

Joke of the week

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From the New Yorker. A clergyman, officiating at a funeral service, is saying: “We will now observe a moment of silently checking our BlackBerrys.”

Writing in the Age of Distraction

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Cory Doctorow is one of the wonders of the world — a very good writer, a terrific lecturer and an inspiring activist for open-ness. I’m perpetually amazed by his productivity, so was much cheered to come on this essay by him in Locus magazine. It’s essentially a list of suggestion about how to get things written. Top of the list is this:

Short, regular work schedule

When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.

This echoes the advice of many professional writers down the ages. Graham Greene, for example, used to write no more than 700 words a day — in the morning. But he wrote every single day.

The idea of finding 20 minutes a day is ingenious because it’s something that even the busiest of us can do. I’ve been thinking recently that a mobile phone with a decent little keyboard (step forward BlackBerry) would probably do quite nicely. You could even email the results of your daily stint to yourself.

Other tips from Cory include:

  • Use a simple text-processor. All you’re producing is words, after all. No formatting needed.
  • Don’t be ‘precious’ or ceremonious about where you write. Forget all that crap about having the right music, atmosphere, coffee, etc. Just do it!
  • Switch off all real-time comms when you’re writing — no IM, no Skype, no Twitter.

    • Great stuff.

    Many thanks to Adam Szedlak for the link.

    LATER: Bill Thompson, writing ruefully about how he is easily distracted.

    Rules of engagement

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    The best way of ensuring reasonable behaviour in online commenting spaces is to make people responsible for their words. Anonymity prevents that. Of course sometimes anonymity has benefits — especially in repressive environments; but overall it seems to enable the pollution of unmoderated discussions. Mark Anderon has been pondering the question in relation to his blog, and has come up with some rules.

    After a year or more of running this blog without rules, we seemed to have recently crossed the Rubicon: in moving from our internal member conversations to a more open, perhaps wild frontier on the Net, the dialogue has gone from that of mutual respect and intellectual exchange to anonymous insult and emotional attack.

    So, as of today I am putting the same rules in place on this blog as we use in our newsletter. They are very simple:

    1. All comments must be signed, hopefully with real names. Since we are not naive, there is also:

    2. Comments should be about issues, and not personal and / or emotional attacks. Fine to say you don’t agree or like something, but say why.

    3. We will allow anonymous (to the public) comments in only one situation: when the poster would suffer career damage from the expression of ideas. In these cases, we will require the poster’s real name be shared with us, and we will post the comments anonymously.

    In other words: vigorous debate is encouraged, hate mail is not allowed.

    25 years on

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    It’s 25 years ago since the Apple Macintosh was officially launched by Steve Jobs, two days after the screening of Ridley Scott’s famous commercial. ReadWriteWeb has a nice photo gallery of every model. I’ve owned most of them — and still have a couple of the original Macs, plus the first iMac (in tangerine!) and a 1991 Powerbook 100. Sadly, I gave away the Apple ][ that I had in 1978. Otherwise I’d have the makings of a small museum.

    I vividly remember the first time I used a Macintosh — and wrote about it in my book on the history of the Internet. The relevant passage comes in the chapter on the deep origins of the Web when I was writing about the work of Bill Atkinson (who invented HyperCard).

    In an age of bitmapped screens and Graphical User Interfaces, we have become blasé about drawing and painting packages. But many of us will never forget our first encounter with Atkinson’s baby. In my own case, it happened at a workshop for academics known to be interested in personal computing which was organised by Apple UK at the University Arms hotel in Cambridge.

    The venue was a stuffy conference suite ringed with tables covered in green baize. On each table stood an astonishing little machine with a nine-inch screen and a detached keyboard. Compared with the clunky, three-box design which then represented the industry’s idea of what a personal computer should look like, these elegant little machines seemed, well, just gorgeous. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one.

    After an initial spiel by the Apple crowd, we were let loose on the machines. They had been set up, for some unfathomable reason, displaying a picture of a fish. It was, in fact, a MacPaint file. I remember staring at the image, marvelling at the way the scales and fins seemed as clear as if they had been etched on the screen. After a time I picked up courage, clicked on the ‘lassoo’ tool and selected a fin with it. The lassoo suddenly began to shimmer. I held down the mouse button and moved the rodent gently. The fin began to move across the screen!

    Then I pulled down the Edit menu, and selected Cut. The fin disappeared. Finally I closed the file, confirmed the decision in the dialog box, and reloaded the fish from disk. As the image reappeared I experienced what James Joyce would call an epiphany: I remember thinking, this is the way it has to be. I felt what Douglas Adams later described as “that kind of roaring, tingling, floating sensation” which characterised his first experience of MacPaint. In the blink of an eye — the time it took to retrieve the fish from disk — all the DECwriter teletypes and dumb terminals and character-based displays which had been essential parts of my computing experience were consigned to the scrapyard. I had suddenly seen the point — and the potential — of computer graphics.

    Here’s the video of Jobs’s keynote.

    Isn’t YouTube wonderful.