Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

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Middle-East wars and the Edinburgh Festival

25 July 2006 / / 9 Comments

I am hot and busy, working on the AV elements for Black Watch, an Edinbrugh Fringe production by the NTS. It is based on interviews with former soldiers who served in their 2004 tour of Iraq. We’ve been called in because the show takes in ideas of modern warfare, and how public perception of conflicts are influenced by the media. We see the results of an attack on the TV news, usually before those who actually carried it out. Instant analysis, spin, moralising, judgement. No more heros, just jarheads who create the cross-fire for children to get caught in.
The current conflict between Israel and Lebanon feels very much like a play, running to a predictable, banal script. The headlines from Condoleeza Rice’s latest trip to the Middle-East:

” … we have great concerns about the suffering of innocent peoples throughout the region.”

Is there any possible universe in which she would not have said that? Is there any possible universe in which Israel would not have retaliated against the Lebanese after the Hezbollah rocket attacks? These events are a tragedy in the strict sense of the word, where the traits of the main characters make certain events inevitable. Sure, Israel didn’t start it. Watch any one of the countless Greek Tragedies that will plague this year’s Edinburgh Festival, and you will see that it is never the protagonist’s fault. Hercules didn’t start it. Electra didn’t start it. Clytemnestra didn’t start it. But at the end of the play, when everyone’s dead, one still thinks “if only you had been different.” Nasrallah is the malevolent deity, nowhere to be found yet omnipresent at the same time. He laughs at how easy it is to provoke this tragedy.
And just like the Greek stories, now the children are being dragged into it. Some Israeli kids have been signing the missiles being shot into Lebanon. After drawing their pictures (I rather doubt they are writing messages of death to other kids as Sabbah suggests), the Israel children probably don’t see the effects of their missiles. We do, however, because we are the TV audience. And we watch as the cycle repeats itself. Another blood feud is created, ready to be concluded in some Tel Aviv pizza parlour in 2012.

Digital immigrants, digital natives

19 July 2006 / / 10 Comments

I’ve just had a chance to read the essay Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives by Marc Prensky (hat-tip: Granny Rose). The idea is that those born into the digital ages are ‘natives’ who think in a different way to those who have had to learn the new digital language. The immigrants have an ‘accent’ (printing out e-mails, or showing someone a website rather than e-mailing it), while the natives prefer to speak the new language (“‘www.hungry.com’ said a kindergarten student recently at lunchtime”). The conclusion is that it is the digital immigrants who will have to change they way they think, and crucially, teach… because the natives certainly aren’t going to bother with any kind of ‘backwards compatibility’.
I can hardly brand myself as a Digital Founding Father, but I am certainly a founding citizen, present at the birth of the revolution. I remember the old ways of rotary telephones, hand-written essays, blue airmail envelopes, and car doors that had to be opened with a key. But we also had a Sinclair Spectrum, and I remember playing maths games on a BBC Micro when I was only six. I think there was a window of opportunity, of those born in the mid-to-late seventies, to surf the digital wave. Each new development has been available to use at just the right time, and we’ve never had to learn anything from scratch. Pity the poor immigrants, who have to learn myriad concepts and conventions just to send a text message. And pity the poor natives, ignorant of fountain pens. They do not appreciate how far we have sailed.

Live Shuttle Landing

17 July 2006 / / 2 Comments

The Space Shuttle Discovery is about an hour away from it’s “de-orbit burn”, where they flip the craft upside-down, and fire their engines. It falls out of orbit and becomes a very expensive glider. I highly recommend a trip over to NASA TV where you can watch the transition happen.
What I do not recommend is that you wait until the last moments before landing to load the video stream. Last year, the RealPlayer stream, which I had been running smoothly in the background for a good half hour before landing, failed on me literally seconds before touch down. I blamed all those Fair Weather Shuttle Watchers who hadn’t put in the hours beforehand, overloading the system at the eleventh hour. By the time the stream came back online, the moment had passed and the crew were out on the tarmac.
The same thing happened in April 2005 when the new Pope was chosen. All morning I had been vieiwing the BBC PopeCam, which was pointed at the Sistine Chapel Chimney. So it came to pass that I noticed the white smoke before the crowd in St Peter’s Square. But yet again, when the time came for the actual announcement, the stream became overloaded when thousands of rapturous Catholics followed the same link. “Habemus Papum! The new Pope is…” Crackle. Zip.
UPDATE: Landed at 1315 GMT, and I got to see the whole thing.

Two Zizou round-ups

14 July 2006 / / 7 Comments

Jarndyce links to a number of posts discussing that headbutt, and analyses the the political victimology of Zizou:

The presumption that Zizou was justified in “retaliation” can only be explained by assuming Materazzi fits the northern European stereotype of the Italian as a racist wop. To those that charge Materazzi with racially abusing Zidane, on the basis of so little evidence, I call right back at you.

The speed at which this particular narrative (is it ‘The Rise and Fall..’, ‘The Fall and Rise…’, ‘Hero to Zero’?) has cycled through its steps is astonishing. On Sunday, Zidane was the villain who lost France the World Cup. Monday and Tuesday was the lip-reading intrigue over what was said. On Wednesday he apologised and by now he is the toast of all France for standing up to racism! It is as if a peice of history has been manufactured at high-speed.
Now it is Friday, and we are into post-modern parodies for laughs. Anil Dash has compiled a movie of the Internet’s best Zidane animations, in the inaugural Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival. Full circle.

Sunny at Pickled Politics has curated a similar festival. Apologise to the visitors from there who visited here looking for the above linked YouTube video – I accidentally deleted the embed code from the post. Now reinstated…

Craig Murray

12 July 2006 / / 3 Comments

Craig Murray is the former ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan. He was dismissed from his position after highlighting human rigts abuses by the governing regime, and has now written a book about his time there. Unfortunately for Craig, some of the documents he uses to back up his case are, according to the lawyers, apparently protected by Crown Copyright. So he has been forced to remove them from his site or else face a court battle which would amount to the price of a London house.
That’s unfortunate for Craig. Unfortunately for his detractors, the documents are (according to Chicken Yoghurt):

If you haven’t seen the documents, they’re available here, here, here, here, here, here, and as a bittorrent here.

I’ve always thought it funny that net denizens use the word ‘here’ to describe something that is quite obviously ‘there’, but nevermind. The documents are also here, because I know a minority of people will appreciate a .SIT archive.
I link to the documents because I have read them, and having read them I believe that:

  1. they have no commercial value in themselves (i.e. even if Criag’s book makes money, it will be because of Craig’s ideas and biography, and not because these documents are valuable in themselves); and
  2. they do not contain anything that is a threat to national security – bringing this government into further disrepute in this matter does not harm national security… in fact, I think it enhances it.

There’s also a discussion over whether obscure bloggers can do this kind of publishing with impunity, but I don’t think that is intertesting or relevant here. However, since there’s an open question over whether duplicating other people’s stuff is above board, Chris Lightfoot suggests that people request the same documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

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