I really shouldn’t let the weekend start without jotting a few notes about the ongoing unrest in the Middle East, provoked by the YouTube video “The Innocence of Muslims” and fuelled by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The protests have sparked another round of analysis of the the Muslim faith, with the predictable indictment of Islam as uniquely intolerant. The Onion published a very funny NSFW cartoon, blasphemous to all religions except Islam, with the headline ‘No-one Murdered Because of This Image’. Funny, yes, but not actually accurate as satire. The fundamentalist Hindus of India are not above threats and riots when their sacred images are appropriated. The internationally acclaimed artist MF Hussain spent his twilight years in exile because of threats made by his own countrymen, such was their dislike of his Mother India paintings. And Richard Gere’s effigy was burned by an angry mob after he kissed Shilpa Shetty.
The fact that Hindus riot too is instructive. When they do, it is at the encouragement of nationalists groups like Shiv Sena, who seek political power through demonisation and division. When Muslims riot, it is similarly due to local leaders seeking to win political support. Even the Salman Rushdie fatwā (also in the news this week due to the publication of Rushdie’s autobiography, Joseph Anton) was raised by Ayatollah Khomeini as part of a power-play. The old Ayatollah had been losing political support in the months leading up to Valentine’s Day 1989, when the infamous decree was issued. Continue reading
Category: Diary (Page 109 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Here is a technology trend I have spotted: it may be old hat to experts and tech journalists, but its news to me.
First, I installed iOS 6 for my iPhone this week. As had been extensively trailed, Apple has switched out the Google Maps app for its own, proprietary mapping service. It is a weaker product.
Then, yesterday, I received an e-mail from IFTTT (If This, Then That, an excellent tool that allows you to automate many tasks between online services, such as cross-posting blogs, auto-tweeting, or logging your social media activity). The e-mail said:
In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook.
This is really irritating, as I use IFTTT for many Twitter related tasks.
So, in a single week, I’ve been inconvenienced by the decision of two of the biggest brands in technology to stop co-operating with other services. There is no law that says that they must collaborate, of course, but this is still a dismal state of affairs. I wonder if these announcements might be the beginning of a new era of unco-operation, with more and more products becoming locked, proprietary, and incompatible with one another. I cannot see how this can be good for innovation, small businesses and start-ups in the sector, or the users… Though I do see how it might maximise revenue for the big companies.
The previous high-minded rhetoric that came from these companies makes their current revenue-maximising attitude all the more galling. It has become trite to point out how Apple has changed since it premiered its famous Nineteen Eighty-Four advert at the Superbowl; and Google’s motto was “do no evil”. These latest manœvres, retreating into the corporate silos, are a reminder of the corrupting influence of power and money, and puts one in the mind of the final passages of Animal Farm, when it becomes impossible to tell man from pig, pig from man.
I await deliverance with an iOS 6 Jailbreak.
Well well, this is interesting. The bookmaker Paddy Power have offered odds on a Change.org petition reaching 100,000 signatures. It’s 4/1 in September and 7/4 in October.
It will be interesting to see if this affects the rate at which people sign the petition. If it does, then we will see a new era of campaigning. Just as now, activists spend time trying to get re-tweeted by Stephen Fry, in the future Ladbrokes and Paddy Power may become targets of the same kind of secondary lobbying.
But there is more: there is a kind of open source game theory on offer here. If everyone in the country who agreed to sign the petition, while placing a £10 bet, we would all get paid for our social activism!
At the time of writing, the petition only has 26,000 signatures. So the conservative analyst would not favour September. However, we have seen in the recent past how social media and we interconnectivity it brings can have exponential effects. Remember how Claire Squires posthumously raised almost £1 million for the Samaritans.
I don’t know much about how bookies set their odds on certain outcomes, but participating in this particular ‘market’ seems odd. Unlike a sporting event, an election, or a financial exchange, there is no other person, group or team that can adversely affect the rate at which the figure in question rises. It’s not as if there is a counter petition, and the bookies are taking bets on a race between the two. Opponents of this campaign cannot marshal their own supporters in a comparable way. So the bet is simply about how quickly a political constituency can mobilise itself. I wonder if someone who knows more about this might comment?
I am entirely in favour of the petition, by the way. In my opinion, page 3 demeans and objectifies women. A formal ban on this kind of publication would be anti-free expression, but social pressure on an editor to make a particular decision is entirely right and proper.
xkcd is an online comic strip that has gained a cult following. Penned by Randall Munroe, it presents naif, stick-like figures doing strange, wonderful and weird things. There is a strong geek element to the cartoons, with physics jokes, science fiction references, and spin-off comic What If? which seeks to answer absurd questions with mathematical precision.
I love the sentiment which imbues the comics. Its wistful, and has an appropriate sense of awe at humanity, the world, and the universe. However, I can see how others might find it whimsical, precious or twee.
The latest cartoon in the series, Click and Drag, is really something. A man clutching a balloon drifts over the landscape. “From the stories, I expected the world to be sad, and it was. And I expected it to be wonderful. And it was. I just didn’t expect it to be so big.”
Underneath this is a large panel with a cartoon landscape. The reader can click and drag to reveal more of the image, and see little vignettes featuring other stick figures, pop-culture references, and rendering of architectural structures and geological features. Its a huge image in total, approximately 160,000 pixels wide, and so clicking and dragging takes a long time!
Why is this so good? Commenter Pochacco has a good, simple analysis on the NeoGAF meesage boards:
I have a feeling the author is trying to troll us.
It’s so “big” that you can’t see it all. You will miss some parts and it will haunt you. Just like life.
I suspect this is right.
But there’s more: This is art that is native to the internet, and therefore still relatively rare. While most art we see online (photography, film, creative writing) can actually be viewed in other media (on a wall, in a book, on TV), this piece of art only works online. The clicking-and-dragging is inherent to experiencing of the art. Users on the NeoGAF board are busy trying to download the entire panorama in its entirety, but doing that is a mistake that spoils enjoyment of the cartoon – that you can only see a small part of the image at any one time, and that you may miss something, is precsiely the point.
Listening to the radio over the weekend (Any Questions? I think, or was it Any Answers?) I heard some people described as having “deeply held views” that made them opposed to gay marriage. I have happened across the phrase in relation to the recent bout of Middle East rioting too.
This is an example of language and cliché being used to give weight to certain opinions, over others. When a speaker says that someone has “deeply held views” there is an implication that these opinions are more intractable than the opinion of the average person. The word “deep” suggests that the opinion is somehow buried beneath strata of rock.
But actually, an opinion or a value isn’t like that. It is exists within the malleable, mutable human brain, and therefore susceptible to argument, rhetoric, fact, emotion, and empathy.
Moreover, since we are all equal human beings (in the democratic sense, at least) there is no reason why a person with a “deeply held view” should receive special treatment or consideration. It’s a phrase that, to me, screams special pleading and it’s usually used to describe religious people. The message seems to be, My opinion is better than yours, because it’s older..
This is wrong. An antipathy to women or homosexuals (say) may have been encoded into the religious text or culture mores for centuries, but a person nevertheless chooses to adopt that opinion themselves within their own lifetime. That “deeply held” view is no older or deeper than the most new and liberal of opinions held by their next-door neighbour.
Or perhaps, “deeply held view” is actually code for those opinions that the holder has accepted (for reasons of religion, tradition or patriotism) without making a proper, considered choice? In which case, “deeply held view” is also a euphemism for an unthinking deference to the pronouncements of others (which is, in the end, a form of prejudice). I actually suspect that this is what the politicians and BBC journalists mean when they use the phrase.
Well, enough of that, I say! Let us stop giving undue credence to bad ideas, just because they have a long history. If the best argument you can give for holding an opinion is that it is “deeply held” then it’s not a very good opinion at all, and you should divest yourself of the burden of defending it as soon as possible.