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.

Read the entire paper here.

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…

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.

Money corrupts — this is why lobbyists have their way with the American system. The idea that somehow very rich people wouldn’t instantly corrupt a minarchist state in their favor is laughably naive. The US Constitution was supposed to prevent the growth of the state, among other things, and it has failed miserably in this regard because people (politicians, administrators, supreme court) have failed. Libertarians continue to believe that by simply abolishing large swaths of government (which I’m in favor of), that that will destroy the mechanisms by which the very rich basically own the US government. I say, whatever is left, will be corrupted, and grow yet again. Because every man has his price, and every politician, administrator, law enforcement official, and so on, can be bribed — as they are now. The idea of a government purely of laws and not of men is a superstitious religious belief — oh how I wish it were possible. I used to believe it was; I no longer believe this to be the case. Every week we see rich people getting off with a slap on the wrists – if that – having committed massive fraud (google Union Carbide Bhopal), while middle, working class, and the outright poor wind up in jail serving ludicrous sentences for petty crime. All institutions can be gamed with the right amount of cash. Libertarians will quote the old adage that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is interesting the degree to which they will turn a blind eye to centers of wealth, which are just condensed centers of power.

Anarcho-capitalists refuse to see this too – money will create a state which serves the person funding it, because every man has his price.

As it is now, he who can spend the most amount of money on lawyers and legal fights in civil court has the upper hand. I see this as only increasing in the kind of minarchist regime libertarians propose. The farmer caught with stray Monsanto seed having blown on to and grown in the corner of his field will have no choice but to capitulate repeatedly to Monsanto, as he does now. You can outlaw all sorts of lawsuits, but that won’t prevent people bringing them, twisting their arguments to fit them into pre-existing, legal avenues of relief.

Lastly, libertarians offer zero redress for past wrongs. “A free market….starting now!” while rich families who started on third base from the time they were born are on “equal footing” with those who never even got a turn at bat. There is nothing libertarianism has to offer the very poor, except the questionable explanation that the reason their cities are blighted is because of “government intervention” or “high taxes, preventing business investment” which explains a little bit of the problem, but not most of it. (Why would anyone do business in Manhattan or San Francisco if it was really all about regulation and taxes?)

The libertarians get it half right in their suspicion of and rejection of the state, but with me, personally, they fail completely at addressing the corrupting power of money. Their belief in the free market’s sustainability (whereby depressions are just “market corrections” proving capitalism works) doesn’t really address the generations of resentment, hatred, and alienation such events cause. This negative feeling is what sabotages the minarchist state. As much as the non-initiation of force principle is enough for libertarians to live on, it’s not enough for a hard-working father who has to face his children on Christmas with nothing under the tree because the auto plant he worked for dutifully for 20 years just shut down.

In fairness to libertarians, libertarians themselves are not the weak link. In their passion to prove that minarchism or even statelessness (as many libertarians are really anarchists) works, they will open their wallets, and they will donate to charities. Libertarians, by and large, are not the dishonest corruptors of the system they advocate: it’s the people in power who view libertarians as useful idiots who help them continue to perpetuate graft and fraud as a “way of doing business.” that are the problem. Those who would benefit most from what libertarians propose aren’t even libertarians: it’s the very wealthy who will use libertarian concepts to prevent taxation and regulation (resulting in unsafe mines, factories, and so forth, among other things), and who will use the money they make to use government in their favor should that be a better alternative.

I credit libertarians with, especially recently, front-burnering issues of corporate welfare and so on.

But in the end, greed is what drives business – not a celebration of the non-initiation of force principle, nor not even building railroads or making Rearden metal. What drives business is money, and businesses are whores, and they will do anything ranging from cold (firing loyal workers in depressed areas) to fraud (taking bailout money) in pursuit of this goal.

I used to believe, or wanted to believe, that businessmen were moral. I used to accept the lines the way Rand drew them – honest businessmen making these important things whose benefits trickled down to everyone else vs. second handers and leechers.

This was a stacked deck. It wasn’t some intellectual realization based on something I read, but something I’ve come to understand having worked 12 years now in a corporation, and before that for smaller businesses. I’ve never worked for anyone I’ve actually liked or whose character I’ve respected. I’ve never worked for anyone who wouldn’t at least flirt with dishonesty for a quick buck.

Money is what matters. Money is power. It will always be that way, and there will be no justice or freedom until some way is found to blunt its influence on the world.

I have no alternative system to offer. Having brought these ideas up before, the response is always the same: “Well what kind of OBVIOUSLY STATIST alternative to you propose? COMMUNISM?” or some bullshit response like that.

I propose nothing.

I simply say that libertarianism is unworkable in the long term, our progression from a somewhat libertarian society to what we have now in spite of the apparent guidance of the US Constitution proves it.

Power corrupts. Money is power. Money corrupts. And personally speaking, I dread a future based around money and business. I have little interest in either beyond the fact that money is necessary to provide food, clothing, and shelter. But as long as I’m working 50, 60, 70 hours a week to keep my health insurance premiums paid, you can tell me about freedom all you want, but I sure don’t feel free. I’m long since past the point where the conceptual abstraction of “freedom” is enough. If I don’t have the time or energy to dance, it ain’t freedom. And that’s what it is now: work, work, work, spend, spend, spend, until you die. All of life has been reduced to this. It’s dehumanizing, and it has created a corrupt, selfish (and not in that good Ayn Rand way that leads to awesome motors that run on nothing), dreary consumerist world.

One need look no farther than the health care debate, a debate which offers such lousy alternatives that I don’t care who ultimately wins.

Through taxes or being gouged by capitalist enterprises, the fact remains that many peoples lives, financial stability, and so on, will be considered expandable sacrifices to a bankrupt principle of laissez faire economics. Whether through fraud, waste, and the expropriation of my money through taxes, or through private enterprise gouging consumers, ultimately, the outcome is the same: Many of us will not be able to afford health care.

It’s all about money.

2000 years ago it was all about money.

2000 years from now it will probably be all about money.

I have no solution. All I know is neither state socialism nor libertarianism offers a realistic fix for these problems.

The idea of children going without health care, or having to go bankrupt and destitute because you or a family member gets sick and the bills pile up, is just not something I’m comfortable with morally, and it relates to no credible moral system I am aware of.

But these are, apparently our choices. (Libertarians may comfort themselves with things like, “Well if we enact tort reform,” and so forth – but this will have a minimal impact at best.)

That is, unless your daddy was filthy rich.

This is a culture where teachers are paying money out of their own meager paychecks for pencils and paper and crayons, and Britney Spears is worth millions.

I continue on, paying my own way in life, but I am so tired. So god damned tired. I don’t even know why I get out of bed in the morning. Money has ruined music. It has ruined art. It has created a gaudy, offensive sea of glowing, pulsing billboards fucking up my view of the night sky. It has torn up ecosystems and sentenced the lot of us to terrible crackerbox developments, and paralyzing monoculture where I feel my own imagination shrivel up and die. Or is it the work – the relentless, neverending work, to prove I’m worth something as a human…to stay…employable, in this “market correction.”

I still like libertarians and they are welcome in my home, but I fear their overall solution to the problems of the country or world have little or no future. Nearly 40 years of crap performance in elections would seem to be ample evidence for this.

But I guess I like libertarians because they are dreamers – even romantics. For all the “stiff upper lip” posturing that comes with arguments for self-sufficiency as the foundation for our culture, libertarians really see a romantic future where passions – for business or otherwise – would be unleashed and unrestrained, leading to the betterment of our species. I still respect it because I used to feel that way myself.

But any future in which all I do is work, and worry about money, and have to spend all of my free time analyzing banks and investment houses to see how they’re squandering my wealth and encrypting fraud and loss in novel financial instruments, is not something I have the energy to fight for anymore.

tl;dr: Money ruins everything.

• 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:

Won’t it be great when the military can send in the tanks without having to put crews in harm’s way?

Yes and no. The fewer casualties, the better. But what becomes of our reluctance to send the military galavanting around the sordid parts of the world once American casualties are taken out of the equation? We have almost no restraint as it is. I shudder to think of how easily Presidents and legislators will make the decision to go to war when the attitude of “We can just send robots to do it!” becomes entrenched. We saw what the advancements in design of cruise missiles in the 1980s did to the Executive Branch; if someone’s acting up, just lob a dozen Tomahawks at them from a few hundred miles away. It became the easy way to intervene without actually making a commitment or putting Americans at risk. Collateral damage isn’t much of a deterrent to our political class. UAVs are another step in that direction, a step toward a future with more remotely operated and even autonomous means of doing the dirty work.

It’s great that technology allows more American soldiers to come home alive and in one piece, but if we remove the U.S. body count from the decision-making process the only restraints on waging war will be common sense, morality, and logic. Yeah, let’s start taking bets on how well that works.

As you watch the film - it raises complex reactions and thoughts in your mind. But it is ironic that, although the two events are in many ways completely different, the Israelis are now preventing Palestinians and supporters of Hamas from doing what the Israeli defence organisation – the Haganah – tried to do over 60 years ago. From 1945 the Haganah, along with the Irgun, had been carrying out a terror campaign against British soldiers in Palestine. Then in 1947 they organised the Exodus operation as an attempt to break the British blockade.

It is absolutely essential viewing. Read his blog post and watch the documentary now.

Now, I’m happy that the application is stable enough to release to the world in the Code section of my website.

Since I don’t want people to be hammering The Boston Globe’s servers, I’ve made the script wait a fraction of a second between each request, and since I don’t want people to be able to disable this functionality, unfortunately only binaries will be available for the time being. Windows binaries are available already, OS X and Linux binaries to come in a few days.

Indeed, if those at The Boston Globe have a problem with how the program operates, they need simply contact me and we can come to an agreement, but I’ve worked hard to make sure that the program contacts their servers as little as possible.

Bug reports will be automatically submitted through this website too, but if you have any unforeseen problems (e.g. a crash or a hang), email me with as much information as possible (text describing the “Traceback” printed before the crash, what album/photo the program was working on, etc).

What can you do once you’ve got the entire 2GB collection of photos downloaded? Well, you can simply look through them at your own pace and comfort, or indeed choose to create a montage screensaver from them (although be warned – a screensaver that fades from a beautiful Antarctic landscape to a bloody photo of a victim of the war in Afghanistan might not be exactly what you had in mind.)

But in any event, hopefully it’ll be of some use. Enjoy!

Not only is there to be a secret list of blocked websites, such as exists in Australia, but the government is pushing for more data to be collected from citizens and retained for a long period of time.

A video which caught my attention a while back was entitled Du bist Terrorist (You are a terrorist). With soft ambient music playing, and deceptively pleasantly designed imagery, the two-minute video parodies the Du bist Deutschland ad-campaign with a soft, reassuring voice informing you of what the German government has in store for you, in terms of heavier and more invasive surveillance — because You are a terrorist.

Earlier this week I found that the same people had created a new video in the same vein, entitled Rette deine Freiheit (Save your freedom). The video focuses much more on the coming internet censorship in Germany than just data retention and physical surveillance.

Since there was no English translation available, I decided to translate it and re-upload to Youtube. The result is below:

The translation is by no means perfect, but at least it’s something. There were a few tricky problems with it:

• Einfach wegschauen: Literally “simply look away”, the video describes this as the method tried-and-tested by members of families with a history of domestic abuse. I was going to translate it as “simply look the other way” in its first instance, since this is the closest phrase in English that pertains to such a situation. However, this doesn’t exactly capture the double-meaning employed in the video, since it implies wilful ignorance which isn’t quite applicable to what the government is doing, so I decided to settle on “simply block it out”. I’m not sure I’m happy with this, however. Suggestions?
• In the sentence, “In Prävention, Therapie und Personal investiert hätte dies vielen Opfern helfen können: Reinste Verschwendung”, the meaning that is sarcastically implied is that the money that could be invested in preventative measures, therapy and personelle is much better spent on building an internet block. I don’t think I captured this very well.

In any event, there’s likely to be an official translation soon (I just saw an “Englisch (bald verfügbar)” notice at the top of the official page now — perhaps my emailing asking for a transcript of the video got them in a rush) and these issues will cease to be.

One last thing — if you are interested in learning more about the situation in Germany regarding internet freedom and the child pornography scare, I’d not only urge you to visit the links above, but also this shocking, but morbidly fascinating account of one techie’s work in the murkiest of subcultures. Thankfully, he doesn’t go into detail about actual child abuse, but instead details exactly how child pornography rings work, using the internet and computers.

Put simply, it proves what anyone with a clue already knows: current proposals for internet censorship will have absolutely no impact whatsoever on paedophiles and child pornographers and will only serve to infringe the rights of normal, law-abiding internet users.

Thanks to Áine and Patricia for help with one or two minor parts of the translation.

Meanwhile, a Ugandan minister of parliament has proposed legislation to enforce a penalty of death for the “offence of aggravated homosexuality.”

Well then.

Later on, in the evening, I had been walking about the town, looking for a suitable place to have dinner when I came across an Irish pub which I decided to have a few drinks in later that night, after having eaten. A match was on that night between Manchester Utd and Besiktas for which they had the projector screen out and all. Upon entering, I attempted to take a seat at the bar, since I had absolutely no interest in the match, only to be chaperoned to the pub audience and told I must be seated with everyone else, in front of the projector screen.

It quickly became apparant that I was the only Irishman in the building: the staff were all Hungarian, there was a group of Americans closest to the screen, then directly in front of me a group of about four Englishmen, and to my left a group of about eight Turks, men and women, who were occasionally chatting to three Danes seated beside them, having dinner. Those Turks immediately to my left were rather friendly and chatty, and after a while we had exchanged pleasantries and stories explaining why and how we had wound up in an Irish pub in Budapest of all places.

One hour and many beers later, and not a goal had been scored. I grew more and more impatient, and the Turks (for whom this game seemed to mean an awful lot) grew more and more raucous. Then, out of nowhere, a shot on-target rebounded off the goal-posts. As it seems, the drink had affected my prior apathy towards the whole event, and I let an annoyed roar of “JESUS!” out of me. One of the Turks turned to me and said with a smile, “Don’t you mean Mohammad?” I responded, “Ah yeah, he’s pretty good too, just don’t draw any funny pictures of him, ye?”

The Danes exploded in laughter.

The Turks went completely silent, staring straight ahead at the projector screen.