Pupil Barrister
Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a leading reformist blogger and former vice president, started to update his blog in prison. He says that the interrogation continues but he has very friendly relation with interrogator and protesters in prison know that there was no significant fraud in Iran’s presidential election.
I smell a rat.
Cartoon by Vahid Nikgoo
There has been plenty of outrage over the release of Lockerbie Bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The scenes of him arriving in Libya to a hero’s welcome have provoked disgust in the UK.
Why cheer a terrorist? It’s worth considering the situation from the Libyan point of view. First, al-Megrahi’s conviction was not water-tight. The manner of his identification by a witness in Malta was, I recall, highly irregular. I remember seeing a documentary about the case last year, which made me worry about the certainty of the conviction. And if Ordinary Britons are uneasy about the case, you can bet that Ordinary Libyans will be too. The conventional narrative there will be akin to that of the Guantanamo detainees – a Western power pursuing a vendetta against and unfortunate scapegoat.
This doesn’t take al-Megrahi’s side, or excuse Libya’s stte terrorism. But it does give an alternative explanation for the crowd’s exhuberance. It is more an expression of Libyan nationalism, than simply barbarians cheering a murderer.
I have been quoted in a couple of articles recently, both relating to free speech issues in the UK.
First, I was interviewed by The Booksller magazine, about the government’s proposed law on Criminal Memoirs:
Robert Sharp, campaign manager for English PEN, said publishers still had time to intervene, as the law would not be voted on until after the summer recess. “We have time to play for,” he said. “We would advise that people concerned about this should lobby the Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw, or Maria Eagle MP, to revist the bill, to run wider consultation, and come up with more clearly defined, narrower proposals.”
…
He also warned of “mission creep” arising. “You [could] have a law supposedly about mad gangsters boasting about how they stabbed someone, suddenly being used against someone writing about their harrowing journey through the criminal justice system.”
PEN will be refining these arguments for a campaign in the autumn.
I was also interviewed on the subject of UK libel laws by De Nieuwe Reporter, a Dutch magazine. Here’s the money quote (literally):
‘Zelfs als ze zeker weten dat ze geen fouten hebben gemaakt, dan nog worden kranten en uitgeverijen gecensureerd door hun verzekeringsmaatschappijen omdat de financiële risico’s te groot zijn’, zegt Robert Sharp. ‘Het stelt rijke mensen in staat om een spelletje ‘High Stakes Poker’ te spelen, waarbij degene met het meeste geld uiteindelijk altijd wint.’
The article is in Dutch, but Google gives an English approximation.
I’ve been aware of the digital artist and musician momus for a while, but didn’t ever think to look for his blog. Thankfully, as so often, Jason Kottke points the way, highlighting an early summary of what the noughties has been about.
By decade’s end, though, blogging was imploding, whittling itself down to wispy microblogging and phatic status updates. The question “What are you doing?” has never been answered more, or imported less. Meanwhile, about 80% of the world’s population aren’t on the internet. What are they doing? Carrying water, and working for the Chinese.
Also, this appraisal of the trend to ‘classic’ design caught my eye, following the Retro-Aesthetic-Packaging-Round-Up we had at the beginning of the year:
…everything from Mac computers to Coke got rebranded as “Classic” — the unique selling point being a fetishized reversion to a “timeless” plain vanilla form of things, an ethical investment in solid, sensible practicality. This Apollonian-Vanilla “return to simplicity and utility” (super-protestant, eco-conservative, but also a kind of ancestor worship) ties in with consumer guilt about excess — it’s the anorexic antithesis to consumerist bulimia.
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