December 2010 Archives
A thought for 2011 from the smartest guy on the planet. OK, one of the smartest ...
Click for the TV interview. It's in German.
In this TV interview about the German literary scene, old amigo Carl Weissner, author of Death in Paris and Manhattan Muffdiver -- and translator of too many books to list -- sounds as if he's sitting in a bar gossiping about gangsters. "Right," he messages in an e-mail. "I AM gossiping about gangsters. And of course I call Herr Grass et al. 'SCUM!' "
Julian Assange speaks to David Frost.
A friend writes: "I see an escalating need for him to break himself down to subatomic particles and travel by solar wind..."
(For continuing updates go to Nemesis a k a Mr. Wikileaks and scroll down.)
Here's Joe "Good Guy" Biden contradicting himself about Wikileaks. Sickening isn't it.
Thank you, Glenn Greenwald. (Update: Dec. 19 -- Really sickening, to say nothing of U.S. officials calling European standards for human rights an "irritant.") Which brings me to Paul Krugman's blogpost "Decade of the Living Dead." Krugman's blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, even more than his NYT column, is necessary reading. It's necessary for those who understand his number-crunching charts and for the rest of us.
The "living dead" blogpost is typical of Krugman but has the added beauty of a link
to an Orwell essay that elaborates on the persistence of what Krugman has dubbed
UPDATE: Krugman's Dec. 20 column continues the theme.
"zombie lies" and the whitewashing of truth, which have been recurring themes of his blog.
The Orwell essay, published in 1943, is entitled "Looking back on the Spanish War," although Orwell goes much further than that, as usual uncannily seeing into the future. Orwell is so quotable it's almost ridiculous to single out any one of his remarks. But what the hell, let's be really ridiculous, beginning with this: "believe nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda -- that is to say, lies." Have Wikileaks and Julian Assange been channeling him?
Violence in the streets scares the shit out of the authorities. More than guerrilla geeks, student rioters in the streets send the authorities into a panic, making them so repressive that the violence boomerangs. The authorities lose control of the situation and whatever moral highground they may claim. Guerrilla geeks also frighten the authorities, but Internet attacks are an abstraction even when damaging. Watch this 15-year-old British schoolboy lay out the stakes with courage and eloquence. Is he a younger version of Mario Savio for 2010? Those Brits seem tougher, way tougher, than our candy-ass American students.
Update: Jan. 3, 2011 -- "They can't stop us demonstrating," he said,
"they can't stop us fighting back, and however much they try to imprison us in the streets of London, those are our streets." But, as it turns out, it's not their Internet. The video of the speech has been taken down from YouTube. Other videos showing the riots in the streets, including one also linked in this blogpost, have been taken down as well. Apparently the Internet itself scares the shit out of the authorities.
Is Operation Payback "the first great cyber war" or just a "major shitstorm?" Are the mounting cyberattacks in support of Wikileaks something like the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s? Remember Mario Savio? Remember his prescient speech on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964?
There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the levers, upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Here's the speech in context and the complete text of the speech.
Savio framed the moral issue and portended the outcome of protests that came later against the Vietnam War, when New Left radicals led campus revolts, war protestors organized peace marches, Yippies "stormed" the Pentagon, urban guerrillas went underground, and armed "liberation movements" sprang up. That was the temper of the times, if not for everybody certainly for a large portion of America's youth.
But as happy as I am to welcome today's guerrilla geeks, I believe there's a huge difference between then and now. I don't see a mass movement taking shape. Maybe I'm just frozen in time. Maybe I don't know what's really happening. Maybe, given the importance of cyberspace, the cyberattacks will be more than sporadic. Maybe the guerrilla geeks are fulfilling Savio's words. Maybe they are putting their bodies upon the gears and screwing up the apparatus, even if it's just their virtual bodies. For the moment it looks like Julian Assange's actual body will stand in for them and us, and -- more permanently -- so will Bradley Manning's.
Postscript: Greenwald on the crux of the WikiLeaks debate.
Dec. 11 -- More essential reading from Greenwald: The media's authoritarianism and WikiLeaks, substantiating links included.
As to whether a mass protest movement for free speech is taking shape or not ... Based on information supplied by Minerva, an Internet security company, and other experts, the NYT reports that within days of Julian Assange's arrest "tens of thousands" of Internet users -- going well beyond guerilla geeks -- downloaded software to attack Web sites of companies that caved to government threats against Wikileaks.
Meanwhile, according the AP, via Forbes, the guerrilla geeks known as Anonymous circulated a press release saying
the group -- which it refers to as an "Internet gathering" -- was acting out of a desire "to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by the above companies to impair WikiLeaks' ability to function."
Which sounds to me exactly like the cyber equivalent of a Free Speech Movement sit-in.
Dec. 16 -- The Economist uses the sit-in analogy in an editorial today, but calls guerilla geeks "cowardly hooligans, not heroes," because their distributed denial-of-service attacks are anonymous.
The closest equivalent to a DDOS attack in the offline world would be a mass sit-in or a mob milling around a building, making entry and exit impossible. ...Some argue that DDOS attacks are, similarly, a legitimate expression of dissent. But in a free society the moral footing for peaceful lawbreaking must be an individual's readiness to take the consequences, argue in court and fight for a change in the law. Demonstrators therefore deserve protection only if they are identifiable. ...The furtive, nameless nature of DDOS attacks disqualifies them from protection; their anonymous perpetrators look like cowardly hooligans, not heroes.
I disagree of course with that characterization, but have to hand it to The Economist for logical consistency:
This applies to those attacking WikiLeaks too -- a point American politicians calling for reprisals against Julian Assange's outfit should note.
Trouble is, who will hold American politicians accountable if they do not deign to take note? The U.S. Justice Department, which is seeking to decapitate Wikileaks? Please.
Here's one way the print version of a daily newspaper beats the online version.
Paul Krugman's NYT column this morning, Freezing Out Hope, begins:
After the Democratic "shellacking" in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?
Halfway down the column a pullquote, in large type, underscores its theme. The online version of the column doesn't have the pullquote. It could have. There's no technical reason for not having it.
Maybe it's a style choice. None of the articles in the online Times have pullquotes. But it's a stupid choice -- style over substance. For that matter, using pullquotes online to break up those long columns of type would be a stylistic improvement.
Postscript: Speaking of substance, there are those on the left of course, including me, who believe "Obama is something like a Manchurian candidate," as a friend put it, "a so-called extreme liberal who gets into office and just coincidentally behaves not so differently from Bush/Reagan."
