Posts by giovanni tiso
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You don't think this includes women's welfare?
Why, do you think it's Helen Clark or UNDP that makes decisions about military strategy in Afghanistan?
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Afghan is the adjective and Afghani is the noun for people, though, no? It's like Spanish/Spaniard. You have one Spaniard, but a group of Spanish people, or Spaniards, not a group of Spaniard people.
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because allowing the persecution of any group of people on religious, gender or cultural grounds is no better than driving past a road accident without stopping.
Yeah, but see, if I were inclined to be polite, I would say that this is bollocks. Firstly, because we drive past such road accidents all the time, all over the world, when they occur in less strategically valuable tracts of the highway. Secondly, because we caused the accident ourselves. Thirdly, because we didn't go in to save the women. Fourthly, because we're not staying there so that the women stay safe either. The discussion in the US Senate committee on foreign affairs on whether to committ further resources to the war (ie a surge), stay or go hinges on one objective, and one objective only: to limit the scale of the insurgency in Afghanistan so that it doesn't spread to Pakistan. That's the endgame. Nobody is talking about the women, whose welfare is not now nor has ever been part of the strategic equation. They only get mentioned to justify the war to liberals.
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But I personally can't just shrug off the moral implications of, in particular, the fate of Afghanistan's women. You say "women's rights" like it's some Western affectation, but before the Taliban -- before 1996, that is -- they could work and walk the streets and learn to read. They were allowed to look out windows. It's their birthright too, and it really troubles me that it might be taken away again. It's a horrible, horrible moral choice.
Remind me: who armed the Taliban in the first place? And who keeps buying their heroin? I think women's rights (as well as human rights more generally, including the right to remain alive) will remain a Western affectation so long as we refuse to see our historical and continuing role in ensuring that they be denied in the countries with the oil or the pipelines or the dope that we so badly crave. The "but we're doing good now" argument, self-serving as it is, must surely also be tempered by the question: why should they trust us? Why this time? And it turns out that some of them do but many of them don't, and with the money we give them they buy guns.
Which is not to say that I see a way out, or even a lesser of many evils. But we didn't go in asking women's rights organisations on the ground what they thought of our plan (in fact, you might recall RAWA's outrage at photos from their publications being used as propaganda by NATO during the invasion). Let's not pretend it's what we're fighting for.
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And then we got to "gullible liberals" and "patronising Western liberals" ...
Not that it's necessarily a meaningless category, though, eh?
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I do feel bound to observe that the latest version is touting a "new realistic page-flip transition" ...
Hah! Serves me right.
Is it a zero sum game?
I'm not suggesting it is. There are things that I consider to be progress and that I'm excited to see develop and feed back into the non-Apple-based world, and others that I am less enthused about. That's really all I mean.
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But aren't they doing rather different things?
Yes, entirely different things. I just find the former exciting, the latter not so much. And why I think it matters is that this struggle for the aesthetic of the Web is also a struggle for its knowledge model.
now that Gio has the iPad to be critical of, he might stop giving the iPhone so much shit.
Because people care?
I'll be standing on a street corner some day, my clothes torn, unshaven, drinking virtual beer from an iPhone like Gene Wilder with his Woolite bottle at the end of Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex.
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I'm still very interested in the other question: how does Flipbook secure its content? If it does, that is, and doesn't overlay itself on the target URL without changing anything other than the presentation.
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You don't like the page metaphor in this case because you haven't used it and you've determined that the whole business is A Thoroughly Bad Thing anyway.
The page metaphor has been around on the Web forever. And I am not determined that the iPad is a Thoroughly Bad Thing, actually, it may be the closest we have come to making the interface go away, as Negroponte suggested it would in Being Digital. So whilst my desire to own or use one remains steady at zero, I am interested in what it does and how its uses might develop. But as symbolic languages go, yes, I find the page swipe thing to be a step backwards. Whilst cheering on the sidelines - which I believe to be a legitimate spectator sport - I'd like to see more stuff like the Alice in Wonderland app and less stuff like Flipbook. (That being, of course, just me.)
I feel even more justified and ancient, having recently decided that these newfangled pens are just unreliable, and reverted to pencils.
Oh, don't get me started on pens.
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Ah, yes, I see that now :-)