Month: July 2005

Home Grown

Steve in Manchester has put it very well again:

Why, why, why? You were born here FFS! What medievil twat filled you with that much hatred? Was it moral outrage? Bare female arms at the height of summer? Rowdy young men quaffing ale outside the pubs of England? Was it the very notion of democracy that offended you? A deep yearning for the proud civilsations of the Tigris, Euphrates, Ganges and the rest to return to some kind of perverted ascendancy? What was it? What made you think that setting that timer, triggering the carnage with a mobile phone or whatever; what made you think it was THE RIGHT THING TO DO?

‘Cos, for the life of me I don’t get it. I really don’t.

I suppose for me the futility of it is what is dumbfounding. This morning’s 6 am CBC radio news says one suicide bomber’s parents rain a nice fish and chip shop in a mixed neighbourhood where everyone got along and that the bomber was a friendly guy, excellent cricketer. What is so ill about that picture that you blow yourself up for a cause that will never come within a thousand years of ever coming to pass? Because, frankly, there is nothing the slightest bit attractive in the form or the substance of the message.

I also suppose one odder thing is that it is fanatical regressivism. At least the IRA and, say, the 1890s Chicago anarchists blowing themselves up were revolutionary in the sense they were trying to make a better day in their twisted attacks, nasty utopians. But what is the plan with these back-facers? Most fans of tyranny do the right thing – take over the army, enslave and destroy the people and reap the rewards. But these guys appear to confuse the tyrant and the victim: “if you don’t watch out I will blow me up…and when we’ve all blown ourselves up then…err…watch out!”

I am coming to think that there is little to the fighting the causes of terrorism but also there may be little to the fight – unless we get a clue what this is about. I think islamo-fascism is too simplistic. The faith has been around for 1500 years and no one has talked about a puritan nilhilistic militantism like this in the past. There is something awfully odd wrapped by the guise of islamo-fascism. Georgetown odd. Columbine odd. So someone is passing a compelling message – which is hate speech. Hate of normal folk.

BBC Broadcasts First To Web

Sometimes new things actually do happen on the internet:

BBC Three is to premiere comedy series The Mighty Boosh on the internet before it is broadcast on television. The second series of the show will premiere via broadband from 19 July – a week before it is shown on television.

Seven years or so ago all the talk was convergence. All we got were podcasts. Maybe the BBC, which is doing its best to define the internet as much as pr0n has, is on to something.

Go About

Attentive readers might not expect I might find illumination in the words of the Monarch but look today at what Elizabeth R wrote this morning:

The dreadful events in London this morning have deeply shocked us all. I know I speak for the whole nation in expressing my sympathy to all those affected and the relatives of the killed and injured. I have nothing but admiration for the emergency services as they go about their work.

Go about. She uses that phrase in Christmas messages – being pleased to see people going about their business and, if I took note of it at all, I would have thought it aloof.

But I just came in from the bank and the bakery at noon in crowds going about. I like going about. Much of what I write here is about my going about, either travels of my mind or on my feet. When, however, the Nazis flattened great-grannie’s home by shovelling parachute bombs from Henkels for 72 hours straight over her Scottish city, they were really saying “don’t go about”. When those teens I taught in Poland after the fall of the Wall were under martial law in the 80s when they were in elementary school, they were being taught “don’t think you can just go about.” These few jerks today in London said the same thing.

I am far madder now than I thought I would be. I still plan to have a holiday in the States, be in public every day, not hide or even pray to be saved from such events. I am going to go about. So today, you go about, too.

Post Post II

Post “post-9/11” that is. I am trying to note if I see any markers for the ending of an era. Whether you think that that terrible day was caused by the alignment of a great number of extraordinary unlikelihoods giving the terrorists a clean run they would never have gotten on any other day or whether you think the years since 9/11 without a repetition of the horror are as a result of the winning of the war on terror, there will be a time some day that will be after the post-9/11 era.

I noticed the events in Edinburgh this week, the protests against the G8 and the echoes of the violence to the Battle in Seattle and wonder if that is one of the markers.

Update: weeks later I realize I have another post called Post Post so I dub this Post Post II.

When Is Theft OK?

If I never read the Boingsters, I probably would never encounter the “right to take” as a great new idea. But two recent posts point out something of the hypocrisy and the case-by-case arbitrary judgement that really is at the core of the arguments against respect for authorship – let’s call them the “anti-authorship” group – who call themselves “copyfighters” and part of the “remix” culture:

  • On June 29, 2005 Boing confirms that big Nike stole little rock band’s imagery without payment. The taking of the stuff of others wrong.
  • On July 6, 2005 Boing praises an essay in Wired which states that the new era of takery is here:

The remix is the very nature of the digital. Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.

So because it now can be done, it must be ok…except when we like the band and the company that takes is big. The sad thing is that people by what Boingsters like Cory Doctorow and Wired and they say about the appropriation of copyrighted material because he has successfully leveraged status rather than successfully argued the point. It is a tyranny of the self-described cool, which is a very weird tyranny. Sadder still is that there may be good arguments for specific accommodations of digital media which are lost through this broad and craptastic “remix culture” pap that sounds so neato…until it is your website layout, your icon, your text, your music and your art that is taken.