Public Address - Hard News (Home)

In the area | Nov 28, 2003 11:59

Steve in the area: the rumour that Apple Computer and Pixar chief Steve Jobs will be at next week's Return of the King premiere would seem to be bolstered by the fact that he's already on the right side of the Pacific Ocean.

Jobs has been in Japan this week to promote the company's first non-US-based Apple store, in the ritzy Ginza shopping district of Tokyo. The shop officially opens on Sunday, giving Steve time to fly to Wellington to see the movie and, presumably, have a look around Weta. If he is indeed coming, will he be wearing his Apple hat, his Pixar hat, or both?

Anyway, as Damian says, he'll be our man on the red carpet, and will be providing us not only with words, but - yes! - pictures. Looking forward, then. Meanwhile, Liv Tyler was dirty but beautiful (I confess, there's something about the idea of that that turns me on), there are hobbits all over our airliners, and there are reports that both Andy Serkis and Ian McKellen might be back for Jackson's King Kong.

Interesting Sludge Report: the US money supply is shrinking, and no one seems to know what it means.

Diebold, the company at the centre of the Scoop-driven story on dodgy electronic voting machines, has ATM problems too. In August machines at two American banks were infected by the Nachi worm. Huh? Yes - they were running Windows XP.

Why was Diebold running a multipurpose OS on a single-purpose machine? And having done that, why did it fail to install a security patch that had been available for more than a month? Presumably because while the Diebold architecture let the worm rewrite the ATM software, patches had to be locally applied by a service technician. Another black mark: the ATMs were listening to a whole bunch of ports they had no good use for. Well, duh. Ironically, Diebold is now bragging about providing "superior protection against software security threats targeted at automated teller machines."

Salon has a story on the gathering storm around Richard Perle, as the Hollinger scandal starts to bite.

An astonishing story in The Guardian this week revealed that the US military is paying off families whose relatives have suffered random killings at the hands of US troops. In many cases, the families have been paid a few hundred dollars on the condition that they relinquish rights to any further action.

Meanwhile, Cringely revives rumours of an Apple tablet computer based around enclosures that have been produced for the last few months by the Taiwanese company Quanta. Wireless and home entertainment-oriented, he reckons.

And the DeCSS guy is back in business - having apparently posted code allowing the relatively liberal DRM on the iTunes Music Store to be breached. He's claiming to be the people's champion, but might he not have had a better case for having a go at Windows Media?

And, finally, a vote of thanks to the departing editor of the Listener, Finlay Macdonald, who in his five years in the job has given the magazine a strength of identity that had been wanting for a long time. Like it or loathe, you know what the Listener stands for, and that's his legacy. I might add that he's been a good guy to work for. Cheers, mate.

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Bovine TV | Nov 27, 2003 11:10

So we have another media blog. Excellent. Welcome aboard, MediaCow, although I note that the author has taken the rather burdensome path of adopting a third-party persona, and worse, a non-gendered one.

I can never quite understand why people do that. When you write about what you think, isn't it easier to use the first-person pronoun, rather than labouring through "MediaCow thinks"? And what am I supposed to call the author. He? She? It? The last, I guess, even though it feels like I'm arguing with a quadraped.

Anyway, it's quite good, and ought to get better once the chip-on-shoulder stuff eases up. And I agree about the Anita McNaught stuff: I really like Eating Media Lunch, but her devotional behaviour in the presence of Michael Moore was embarrassing.

It even has a crack at me, for an interview on Mediawatch with my "chum" Lauren Quaintance, which was "fawning", "missed a good opportunity to find out more about the direction of the Sunday Star Times" and, in particular, didn't cover a Quaintance story that has since become controversial: Going Straight, which looks at claims that homosexual orientation can be changed by therapy.

I should point out that Lauren Quaintance is not my "chum". I'd never met her until the interview, and I'm not exactly a keen past reader of North and South. MediaCow should stick to things it knows. But Quaintance has written some significant journalism, and she's a magnet for awards and scholarships. It was a profile interview arranged before the story went to press, and her experience on the [British] Sunday Times was interesting. Having been at the Star Times all of two weeks, she was understandably not willing to pronounce about it, or on its behalf. I wouldn't either in her position.

The Going Straight story isn't all bad. After all, if this sort of thing is going on in New Zealand, I want to read about it. It does note the strong opposition to reassignment therapy expressed by the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapy, and quotes a psychotherapist who works with gay men.

But it falls disastrously short of explaining the context of the research. Spitzer questioned only men and women who had already been through religiously-oriented "sexual conversion" therapy, most of them referred to him by either conservative Christian organisations, or a fringe psychotherapeutic group called NARTH, which is "dedicated to the research, therapy and prevention of homosexuality." He admitted to having struggled to find 200 subjects (from the thousands supposedly cured every year) who claimed to have been reoriented.

The study was conducted exclusively through phone interviews. He had no means of establishing whether his subjects had been exclusively homosexual (or just bisexual) before they entered the therapy, and he relied on their own verbal reports for his diagnosis of change. It seems reasonable to speculate that subjects in a censorious hardline Christian environment might say one thing and do, or feel, another. Even so, he reported that 86% of men and 63% of all subjects emerged from the therapy still having feelings of attraction to the opposite sex. The claim that they had been converted by the therapy into bisexuals seems quite dubious. A more detailed analysis of Spitzer's study is available here.

None of this was in the Quaintance story and it damn well should have been. I don't think the story was written with homophobic intent, but look where it ended up - used with permission - on the front page of the wildly homophobic (it freely equates homosexuality with paedophilia) web site, Catholic Educator's Resource Centre.

In theory, people who are genuinely unhappy in their sexuality, who truly feel that they have taken the wrong path, ought to be offered the same help we extend to people who want to change their bodies to fit their perceived gender. In practice, the work is almost exclusively done by religious zealots who use self-loathing as a tool. Read this report from an Exodus International conference, which would be really funny if it wasn't so sad.

I know happy, mature people of either gender who don't have the active sexual identification they did when they were younger - it happens - but I've never met anyone who has graduated from reorientation. I have known married men who present as heterosexual but carry on clandestine same-sex relations. And I have good friends whose lives have blossomed when they have finally felt able to come out (I have been assured that watching rugby is even more fun when you're gay). The oppressive creed applied by the reorientation crowd would seem to militate against that.

So anyway, MediaCow also explains how it came to invent itself:

Media criticism and analysis is underdeveloped in New Zealand.

Neo-socialist commentators like Russell Brown, Alistair Thompson, Judy Comrie and Tom Frewen easily drown out the few pro-market media analysts like David Cohen.

This is not a 'poor us' whine from the political right. We may not have the weight of a university department behind us, or the luxury of a weekly, national radio or television programme, but there's no point moaning.

Right. Well stop then. I must say I do feel for poor David Cohen, who seems to carry the burden of expectation of every put-upon political conservative in the country. Why doesn't he have a broadcasting gig? I dunno - has he ever applied for one?

But neo-socialist? Moi? Christ. First, Christiaan Briggs tells I "may be one of a long line of people throughout authoritarian-human history who belong to a kind of 'coordinator' class whose job it is to placate the masses in the face of [corporate] profiteering," and now I'm a freakin' neo-socialist! How confusing. (I might point out that I write for the country's leading business magazine, where I use big words like "profit" and "brand strategy".) Mind you, 'coordinator class' sounds like it might have a few more perks. Do you reckon they do free drinks? How many points do you need for an upgrade?

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Hearts and minds | Nov 25, 2003 11:37

I seem to be writing even longer blogs than usual at the moment; but you get that on the big jobs. So anyway, my old correspondent Neil Morrison has taken issue with last week's post suggesting that invading and occupying Iraq was having a somewhat counterproductive impact on the War on Terror.

In his own blog, The Sock Thief, Neil muses thus on my argument:

He is arguing that somehow Bush and Blair have got it wrong, that in fact their actions have made countries like Turkey more susceptible to the appeal of terrorism. Is this really true?

It genuinely puzzles me that, even if they hold to their belief that the war was well-advised, timely and justified, people like Neil - and the incorrigible Gordy - find it so difficult to acknowledge that, even in a few ways, "somehow Blair and Bush have got it wrong", and quite seriously so.

You only need to look back through some of the earlier rationales for war - and lordy there have been a few. Wasn't the idea to win hearts and minds through liberation? Weren't the people of the countries surrounding Iraq supposed to rise up, face West and demand pluralistic democracy for themselves? Wasn't that the promise? Instead, every piece of research in those countries indicates a collapse in confidence in us and the ideals we're trying to promote.

Turkey was a country that largely appeared to have made its peace with Israel. Yet, two weeks ago, there were grisly attacks on synagogues, the first in decades. Bush even declared Turkey to be the "new front" in the war against terror. I'm sure the Turks are bloody delighted about that. (But wasn't Iraq the new front only a few weeks ago? Does that mean Turkey is the new Iraq? I'm confused.)

Neil's contention is essentially that the well-documented collapse in goodwill for the US and for the West in Islamic countries has had no significant impact in the battle against terrorism - or, to put it another way, that it was purely and simply a matter of time before al-Qaeda got around to killing people in Turkey:

Let's go back to the Clinton years for a moment. What was happening when Clinton (bi-passing the UN of course) was protecting Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo from Christian fascists? Bin Laden was planning 9/11 and carrying out bombings against US embassies in Africa, killing many locals. Islamic extremists were killing other Muslims from Algeria to Afghanistan. All this well before Bush came to office.

Okay, let's. There are some huge differences between Kosovo and Iraq. There was a clear goal and a present emergency in Kosovo. The strategy was realistic and it worked. The action was taken through NATO, and not a make-believe coalition. The US government didn't have to tear its own intelligence services apart to put up a case for war. (I think the US had to go into Afghanistan as well; although they could have done with a Wesley Clark, and it would have been nice if they'd finished the job instead of scooting off to invade the next place.) But the fact that Neil has to throw a secular nation like Turkey, on the verge of joining the EU, into a basket with ruined states like Algeria, Afghanistan and the Sudan is something of an indictment of his argument.

The point is, that it appears these attacks weren't carried about by al-Qaeda itself, but by local proxies. Anyone dismissing the idea that the massive antipathy generated by the conduct of US policy has helped create the conditions for that development is denial. But don't take my word for it. Try last week's speech by Germany's foreign espionage chief - yes, he's European and thus an unreliable coward, etc, etc, but read it anyway:

Anti-American and anti-Western sentiment is growing out of anger at the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Germany's foreign spy chief said Thursday.

August Hanning, head of the Federal Intelligence Service, said the U.S. occupation of Iraq has become a new rallying point for a resurgent al-Qaida.

"Successes on the military front alone will not lead to a solution," Hanning said in a speech to a conference on the Middle East in Pullach, near Munich, where his agency is based.

"We are in the process of losing the battle for people's minds."

The reliably pungent Billmon is saying much the same about the Iraq adventure this week:

How many foreign intelligence sources have dried up since March? How many foreign leaders - like Pakistan's Musharraf - have pulled their punches in dealing with homegrown jihadist groups? How many cops and intelligence officers in the Islamic world have quietly begun to sabotage their own governments' anti-terrorism efforts, leading to more episodes like this one back in April:

Yemen was questioning two senior secret-police officers yesterday after 10 al-Qaida suspects, including two linked to the suicide bombing of the American warship USS Cole, escaped from a Yemeni jail, an official said.

As I said, it's probably impossible to quantify the damage. But whatever it is, it's more than we can afford. Al Qaeda's revival -- despite the death or capture of much of its pre-9/11 leadership -- shows how little margin for error America has in this war. The terrorists are every bit as cunning and ruthless and fanatical as the propaganda masters say they are, which is why America simply can't afford to give them too many breaks: Not if it wants to prevent an eventual repetition of 9/11, perhaps on an even grander scale.

And yet that's exactly what Bush and Blair have done. By putting Iraq in play, they've opened up an entirely new front, one that sucks up people and resources at an alarming rate, but yields absolutely no offsetting advantages in the struggle against jihadism. It's become the 21st century version of Gallipoli -- at best, a bloody stalemate; at worst, a disastrous strategic defeat.

I should make it clear that I think demands for the US to immediately vacate Iraq are naïve. I think the country's future now depends on them staying and trying to find a strategy - possibly one involving some grovelling to the UN - that will offer genuine security and self-determination. Unfortunately, I'm expecting them to dress things up and bail out before next year's presidential elections.

Blair likes to argue that history will vindicate him and Bush for Iraq's liberation. I don't think so. Even if Iraq does turn out well - and I hope it does - history will take a longer view. It will see a cynical policy that embraced a brutal thug, encouraged him to wage a ghastly war against his neighbour, sold him weapons (yes, everybody sold him weapons), failed to warn him off invading another country, waged a war about that, promised to help people liberate themselves but actually left the thug to slaughter them, destroyed Iraq's society with sanctions, went to war on a false premise and with ludicrous expectations driven by ideological extremists, political chancers and profiteers, alienated most of the world, and made a string of disastrous decisions after the war was "won". Breaking off the "success" part and touting that around might be just a little too self-serving, methinks.

Yes, Bush made a speech full of fine ideas about fostering democracy, but as usual it was at odds with what America actually does. A cluster of dictators in Central Asia - oil-rich and morally bankrupt, and with that appears to be the most hideous record of torture anywhere in the world - are treated with kid gloves, and even specially invited to the White House, while Iran is threatened with the forcible imposition of democracy? Really? Democracy is hailed while the brutal military regime in Algeria - which overthrew a democratically-elected government and provoked a war in which something like 200,000 people, mostly civilians, have died - is patted gently on the head. Kareem Kamael in the Palestine Chronicle has an interesting look at hypocrisy about democracy.

Time has a fascinating story on Bush - The Love him, Hate Him President.

Telecom is trying to keep Film Net, its service for the international transfer of big, chunky video files, going as Lord of the Rings post-production winds down. But never mind bunging files across the Pacific - perhaps Telecom could start by making simply sending large files across town on JetStream less ruinously expensive.

I've been mucking about listening to a bit of 8-bit "chip music" online. The Amiga stuff sounds mostly like bad 80s synth-pop, but many of the tunes made on a Game Boy have a certain gritty charm - especially if you play them up load. MSNBC had a story on Game Boy DJs, and this page rounds up the top names in the underground, including Role Model from Sweden.

And, finally, big thanks to Richard Shearer and the crew at WebFarm, who not only sponsored our NetGuide Award, but have just sent up a case of rather good wine, which will be shared by the Public Address folks in the near future (we have an overseas aid programme too). Presents like that are very much appreciated. Go the 'Naki!

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