Month: April 2009

I’ve spent Far Too Long (TM)

following

today’s protests in Georgia. Don’t laugh, it’s a longstanding obsession, caused largely by the fact that Georgia is small enough that it is possible to follow most of the english-language news there, but with a tendency towards the utterly batshit insane which could make even a hardened diplomat giggle, Plus, it’s somewhere I’d love to live, if I thought I had any chance of learning the language (I don’t. It makes Hungarian look simple).

Anyway, this has helped me finally get a handle on Twitter (where I am perspectivelute. Blame Rudolf II). Once I started thinking of it as an inferior version of irc, it started to make sense. I still don’t like it, but I can’t really criticise twitter and still bemoan the lack of twitter irc channes, can I?

If anybody knows a decent political IRC channel, let me know. Please. Or maybe I should create one…

For those of you not paying attention: in the past few days, Moldova has had massive protests. Some of the protesters (who are mostly young and pro-western, with all that implies) have been communicating via twitter. This is immensely exciting to a certain kind of pundit, who turned this into the main feature of the protests. The Georgian government noticed this, and very slickly started up their own twitter account yesterday. [The Georgian government are unbelievably slick when it comes to playing up to the Western media. I guess it’s because they’re all very young, and educated in the US. Still, compared to any other government on the planet, they’re stunning]. A couple of Georgians and a slightly larger handful of interested outsiders pile on, and we more-or-less manage to pick over the news. i.e. exacly what would happen in irc, but with a hideous interface.

Anyway, upshot of the protests: ~50,000 people, no violence, no passers-by beaten before dying, no likelihood of the government toppling, come back tomorrow for the smaller, angrier version.

Tagged


georgia

I’ve never got into the habit of blogging about things I’m working on – largely because they tend not to have a public face, and/or to be confidential in some way.

[Here](http://scavngr.com/) is an exception. It’s a scavenger hunt, built by the folks at [edgecentric](http://www.edgecentric.com/), with a chunk of my code somewhere in its bowels:

This is our version of a web-managed Scavenger Hunt. Sure you’ve seen lists to go after, but never before have you competed live against other players from around the world! If you are having difficulty with what a Scavenger Hunt is we suggest you read the entry at Wikipedia.

In our version, we send you a text message to your phone with the current item to ‘hunt’. Once you get your message – you go off an get the best picture of the item. When you have your shot, you then email it to us!

Once we receive your image we’ll put it in the ranking system and everyone will start scoring its quality against other contributions.

Unfortunately it’s US-based, and I’m not, so I haven’t been able to try it out (alienated labour, huh?). Still, nice to know it’s out there.

The London G20 protests, if they achieved nothing else, have certainly radicalised a lot of people. Or at least, have made them distrust and dislike the police.

Now there’s a (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/07/video-g20-police-assault), showing Ian Tomlinson being attacked by police just before he died.

No, the police probably didn’t plan to murder him. They did beat him (more severely than is shown in the video, according to eyewitnesses), and fail to help him. And after his death they tried to conceal what happened.

The fact that he died is the only bit of chance here. Everything else was a deliberate strategy, chosen by the police. And many people will be looking differently at the police – if not because of this, then because of kettling. Keep people trapped on a street for hours on end, and they won’t like you for it.

The [Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/07/civil-liberties-g20-police-assault-ian-tomlinson?commentpage=4&commentposted=1) also pick up on the media response, so far:

Although the Guardian reported the death on its front page, almost all the coverage elsewhere ignored it completely or concentrated on a version of events that suggested that the police’s only connection with Tomlinson had been to try to rescue him from a baying mob of anarchists.

Now, the video has got the story more [mainstream](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5121597/G20-protests-death-Ian-Tomlinson-shoved-to-ground-by-police-officer-video-shows.html) [attention](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6054713.ece), and even the [Mail](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1168315/Caught-camera-The-moment-G20-bystander-flung-ground-police.html) is criticising the police. Strangest of all, I find myself agreeing with many of the comments on the Mail article.

Travel now fixed: I’ll be back in the UK again May 13-18. Other than sashagoblin‘s birthday on the Friday, my plans are pretty empty (Bifest is on the Saturday, which I am considering). As always, suggestions gratefully received.

I’ll then be spending 2 days in Dublin, largely because the flights ended up cheaper that way.

In other news, it’s perhaps a little unfair that the police are being called murderers for shoving Ian Tomlinson around just before he died – but in the context of police being apparently pretty rough with protesters, who can be surprised that somebody ends up seriously hurt.

Meanwhile there’s a big protest in Moldova, which is some confusing overlay of youth/age, pro/anti-Romania, and internationalist/nationalist, plus poverty, anger at a fair(ish) election won by an obnoxious government, and a decent dollop of geopolitics. In Georgia, the opposition are about to try and bring down the government, with a decent chance of success. And in France, universities are two months into a strike (longest since ’68), but nobody seems to have noticed. Interesting times.

Many French universities have been on strike since the start of February – their longest strike since ’68. This has received very little media coverage outside France. My sister, being a student in France, is somewhat irritated by this, and keeps emailing me to grumble that nobody has noticed the protests. Unfortunately, my eyes glaze over when I try to figure out all the arguments and counter-arguments. Still, rather than totally ignore it, I thought I’d at least post a few links:

• The little coverage in English: Guardian, Independent
• French Wikipedia articles on the law and protests
• Rue89, a French online newsmagazine, Libération seems to have decent coverage. Today, they are suggesting the strikes might end soon
• Statements from the universities are popping up on Youtube

If you want to find out more about all this, you could do much worse than following the notes about it in Art Goldhammer’s [French politics blog](http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/)

My Chinese-language textbook tells me earnestly that:

The ultimate aim of the reform being carried out in the Chinese writing system is to gradually replace the ideograms with a phonetic writing system. Before this can be done, the characters should first of all be simplified and the number of strokes of the characters reduced so as to relieve much of the burden of both users and learners of Chinese

That’s undoubtedly somewhat over-optimistic; no wholesale conversion to pinyin is likely in the near future. But apparently in the 25 years since it was published, character reforms have not just slowed down, but are [under threat of being reversed](http://www.danwei.org/scholarship_and_education/simplified_traditional_charact.php).

At this year’s CPPCC session, representative Pan Qinglin submitted a proposal to abandon simplified characters in favor of traditional forms.

His reasoning:

1. The first round of simplifications in the 1950s was accomplished too hastily, producing a result that betrayed the fundamental aesthetic and scientific principles underlying Chinese characters.
2. They’ve outlived their usefulness, since flexible computer input methods have been developed that handle simplified and traditional characters equally well.
3. Reviving the use of traditional characters would foster cross-straits unity by bringing the mainland in line with Taiwan, which still uses what are called “standard characters” (正体字).

Assorted arguments for and against are summarised [here](http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/return-to-complex-characters-proposal-netizen-reactions/). My – entirely selfish – reaction is to fervently hope that the simplified characters stay put.

[Rowenna Davis](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/03/left-wing-politics) points out the obvious need for market-based left wing politics:

Seven months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the left is still failing to put forward a coherent agenda for change

….

To move forward, the left must get over its insecurities about the market and make the economic case for the society it wants to see.

She then totally fails to suggest where that position might come from. [Cosma Shalizi](http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/socialism.html) has pointed out one framework:

“Market socialism” is a current of ideas, starting, it seems, with the Polish economist Oskar Lange, for how to make extensive use of markets without thereby creating gross economic and political inequality.

Or, as he puts it in a [book review](http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/future-for-socialism/):

[The author thinks] that both competitive markets and socialism contracted mésalliances when young and easily entrapped (to unlimited private property and central planning, respectively), but that now, in their maturity, they can and should divorce these undesirables (both rather brutish creatures, really, and one, at least, more than a bit of a whore) and wed each other, and he sketches a portrait of their connubial bliss.

These ‘market socialist’ proposals are all a bit pie-in-the-sky, suggesting ideas such as a stock market denominated in coupons. And I haven’t read the book, so have little idea how the ideas play out. But market socialism fits my prejudices far better than straight Marxism, or [Parecon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics).

*ETA*: more on this at [Liberal Conspiracy](http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/04/07/what-is-the-lefts-approach-to-the-financial-crisis/)

Some more from Nick Davies’

Flat Earth News

, this time him being particularly damning about the Mail:

Perhaps I have been unlucky, but hI have never come across a reporter from the Daily Mail who did not have some similar story, of black people being excluded from the paper because of their colour. A district reporter told me he would call up from Manchester to tell the news desk a story, ‘and they would always ask: “Are they our kind of people?” i.e. “Are they white, middle class?” Or more often it would be: “Are they of the dusky hue?” And if they were of the dusky hue, then they didn’t want the story.’

I mentioned this to another reporter, who has spent several decades on the

Mail

, and he immediately named the senior news executive who was most keen on the ‘dusky hue’ euphemism. And this is not a thing of the past. While I was writing this book, I spoke to a local news agency who had just had the

Daily Mail

news desk on the phone, checking out a murder on their patch and asking if the victim was white or black so that they could decide whether they wanted the story.

This is one of the more interesting – and forthright – general interpretations of the financial crisis. Partly because of cottoning on to the political structure:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

But mainly for doing the legwork to investigtae things I haven’t heard mentioned

anywhere

else:

[from May 2008] the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you’ve never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there’s also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments).

I’m intrigued that this article is printed by Rolling Stone. I’d somehow always thought of Rolling Stone as being fairly superficial, despite the ancient history of Hunter S. Thompson, but it now carries not only this, but also much of Naomi Klein’s best work.

And the author of the piece above? Matt Taibbi, who – I’ve belatedly realised – was one of the founders of Moscow magazine [The Exile](http://exiledonline.com/). The Exile was what all expat magazines aspired to become. Racist, sexist, and reliably offensive in all ways possible, it also carried political analysis that put mainstream correspondents to shame. It was closed down last summer, through some murky combination of government raids and lack of money, leaving only a [ghost presence](http://exiledonline.com/) online. Its remaining staff are now exiled themselves, [supposedly](http://exiledonline.com/the-exiled-were-back-and-were-very-pissed-off/) in Panama, although founder Mark Ames also popped up in Georgia to cover the war there last year. It’s nice to see the overlap between mainstream journalism and the porn-and-bile of the exile.

What I love most about Georgia is the constant stream of head-slappingly ridiculous news. There was the [anti-Putin Eurovision entry](http://www.rferl.org/Content/Russian_Activists_Protest_Georgian_Eurovision_Entry_/1502642.html), of course((http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ3OScJ2kfM&feature=related)). But Russia can counter that with its hastily-produced [action film](http://www.rferl.org/content/Russia_Unleashes_The_Butterflies_Of_War/1565184.html) about the Ossetia war (also on [Youtube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOoz-ZaJSbE)).

Far more entertaining is the [political talk show from self-imposed jail](http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE5143PJ20090205):

It’s been dubbed “Protest TV”. A man in an improvised prison cell under the 24-hour gaze of television cameras, promising to stay put until Georgia’s president quits.

And to top it off, [here](http://www.rferl.org/Content/Flinging_Russia_Mud_In_Georgia/1511819.html) is a former

Minister for Conflict Resolution

threatening to hunt down the president and “make him sorry for ever having been born”.