Why the future doesn’t need us.
I finally managed to get around to reading Bill Joy’s article Why the future doesn’t need us the other day while waiting to board a plane. Bill Joy is a renowned computer scientist who co-founded Sun Microsystems and authored the popular UNIX text editor vi. The article is concerned with the ever increasing speed of “progress” in fields of new technology (primarily robotics, nanotechnology and genetic engineering) which Joy views with apprehension, arguing that the products of these fields will eventually render mankind obsolete and lead to our self-destruction.
There’s no point trying to quote it, so instead you can read the article here, read more about Bill Joy here, or read responses and criticism of the article here.
For a soldier he leads a very fine life and he always is blessed with a charming young wife
Paul Brady’s legendary 1977 recording of the old Irish anti-recruitment song Arthur McBride:
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Torture and the media
Abstract from Desai, Pineda, Runquist, Fusunyan et al. (2010), emphasis mine:
The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been
the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers
with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and
sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early
1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered
waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was
torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on
the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By
contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to
waterboarding as torture.The New York Times called waterboarding torture or
implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so
in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as
torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding
torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more
likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is
the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with
a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or
implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States
was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in
91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only
11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.
Writing without reading
A curious case of a professional writer who awoke one morning to find his capacity to read crippled by a stroke. Animation and narration from Lev Yilmaz. You can watch the video here. For some reason the embedding seems to be a bit mucked-up.
Do you think it will always be like this?
Thanks to Paddy for bringing this to my attention. (You should really check his blog out too, it’s excellent.)
Please Say Something is a 10 minute short concerning a troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future. The final film was completed in January 2009 and contains 23 episodes of exactly 25 seconds each.
The film won the Golden Bear for best short at the 2009 Berlinale, the Cartoon D’or and several other awards. In 2010 it was given a distinction of cultural significance by the German ratings agency FBW (Prädikat Besonderes Wertvoll).
Please Say Something – Full Length from David O’Reilly.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country
Photo: Reuters
A select few quotations from a BBC article on Hitler’s bizarre popularity in India:
Latest reports say Bollywood is now planning to cash in. A film – Dear Friend Hitler – is due to be released by the end of the year, focusing on the dictator’s relationship with his mistress Eva Braun.
…
It’s hard to narrow down what makes the dictator popular in India, but some young people say they are attracted by his “discipline and patriotism”.
Most of them are, however, quick to add that they do not approve of his racial prejudices and the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were killed.
…
Nearly all the booksellers and publishers contacted in India say it is mainly young people who read Mein Kampf. It’s not just the autobiography – books on the Nazi leader, T-shirts, bags, bandanas and key-rings are also in demand. A shop in Pune, called Teens, says it sells nearly 100 T-shirts a month with Hitler’s image on them.
Dimple Kumari, a research associate in Pune, has not read Mein Kampf but she would wear the Hitler T-shirt out of admiration for him. She calls him “a legend” and tries to put her admiration for him in perspective: “The killing of Jews was not good, but everybody has a positive and negative side.”
I have to say, I find this peculiar naivety fascinating. I also can’t imagine what it must be like for a Western traveller to be walking down a street in, say, Bangalore, spotting a few people coming towards him clad in Hitler Apparel. Indeed, staying with Bangalore, since it’s such a huge IT hub… Should we expect to see originally well-meaning and innocuous (to Indians, that is) photographs of young IT workers on their IBM or Microsoft campus, posing happily with their corporate swipe-cards dangling from from their neck, the strap perfectly framing a portrait of their “Dear Friend Hitler”? Indeed, do such places, renowned for their lack of dress-code in the West, already have a strict dress-code in places like India, in order to prevent such embarrassments? I wonder.
And, before I go, here’s another great article from Der Spiegel on the same phenomenon, only this time in Pakistan. Yep, they’re at it too. Who knows – perhaps this new-found love for the 20th century’s most hated, genocidal dictator will only serve to foster a new friendship of shared values between India and Pakistan, leading to a stable peace! Surely no harm could come of future generations of two of the world’s most antagonistic and unstable nuclear-countries worshipping a genocidal, maniacal, militaristic dictator!
Brings a whole new sense to that Vonnegut quote…
The biggest problem with Libertarian thinking
A member of reddit, quag7, contributes to a thread entitled “I am a registered Libertarian, but it seems the party has lost its way” in /r/Libertarian. Reposting here in full. Thanks to Hugh for bringing this to my attention:
For me, the biggest problem with libertarian thinking isn’t what its critics say: that is promotes some kind of immorality in its defense of self-interest in the context of capitalist economics.
Where I got off the bus is when I realized how terribly unsustainable libertarianism is, the naivete about how money corrupts, money being to power what matter is to energy. And lastly, the lack of consideration given to how unequal the playing field is, how much class does matter, and how libertarians seek to make a “clean break” from interventionist corporatism to capitalism without addressing the massive chain of abuse which has resulted into the polarization of the wealthy and the poor.
Unsustainability – most libertarians support the free market on the basis of rights and morality, not out of pure utilitarianism, but most tend to believe that a free market in a libertarian context would also provide the greatest opportunities to the greatest amount of people. I think this, too, is a matter of faith. So long as you allow the top few percent to own the vast majority of wealth, you will always have an underclass voting itself, amending the constitution, rioting, or revolting to get some of the upper or ruling class’s money. This is why Marxism refuses to go away in the Third World. Conservatives and classical liberals like to insinuate it has something to do with bankrupt political and economic ideals in an academic context (“Ivory tower Marxists”) but in reality the reason why socialism and communism continue to find purchase in the third world is because of crippling poverty, including things like landlessness, where you can inhabit a piece of land for generations, but someone just deeds it out from under you (a Zapatista complaint).
Labor movements, social welfare programs, guranteed minimum incomes — all of these proceed from human need, and I see no indication that the somewhat benign term “self interest” applies here, as much as “crass greed” does. Libertarians practically celebrate the concepts of wage slavery, sweatshops, and so forth, because – they say – that the people working in them would be “worse off yet” without them. Good luck, 5 years down the line, making that case while the peasants get restless. How anyone feels about the morality of who gets how much pie and who has to share, the reality is that humankind will only put up with so much before organizing, revolting, striking, or otherwise influencing the system such that it is more equitable for the poor – and more offensive to libertarians. No document will constrain that. Read the rest of this entry »
Bloody Sunday
Today, the Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday was published. You can read it in full here. British Prime Minister David Cameron summed up:
- No warning had been given to any civilians before the soldiers opened fire
- None of the soldiers fired in response to attacks by petrol bombers or stone throwers
- Some of those killed or injured were clearly fleeing or going to help those injured or dying
- None of the casualties was posing a threat or doing anything that would justify their shooting
- Many of the soldiers lied about their actions
- The events of Bloody Sunday were not premeditated
- Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein, was present at the time of the violence and “probably armed with a sub-machine gun” but did not engage in “any activity that provided any of the soldiers with any justification for opening fire”
The inquiry ran for 12 years at an ultimate expense of £195M. Its findings have been widely greeted positively.
What I post today is not directly connected but certainly not unrelated: a debate — I use the term loosely — between Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times and members of the Wolfe Tones, an Irish rebel music band who have enjoyed a long, successful career. Fintan contends their music and their style of performing are inherently racist and filled with hate-speech, while the Wolfe Tones assert that… Well, that Fintan is lacking a sense of humour, that his knowledge of the history of The Troubles is lacking and that he shouldn’t be able to consider himself Irish.
While even after having watched it countless times, to me it is completely obvious who wins this farce of a “debate”, the Youtube comments tell a different story:
In any event, here is the “debate”, in full:
Unearthed design of the 1950′s
mikeyashworth on flickr has an interesting photostream of old 1950′s design. The most impressive of which are photos, taken officially by London Underground, of posters in Notting Hill Gate tube station, London, which hadn’t seen the light of day for many decades. He writes:
Work at the station has recently uncovered these amazing advertising posters in non-public areas and that date from c1956 – 1959 when the station’s lifts were removed and replaced by escalators. These are in an old lift passageway and will be safe.
Check out more photos, along with scans of mid 20th Century design.
