Monday, January 31, 2011
Egypt's revolution and its possible aftermath
The popular uprising in Egypt is going on its seventh day. Egypt is not a monarchy (like Saudi Arabia, where incidentally women have no voting rights). Egypt is a –sort of- democracy: a perverse system that has kept the same government in power since 1981 (in the US we’ve had 5 presidents since!). How to fake an election? 1- Ban opposition parties (such as the Muslim Brothers),* 2- and rig results, which invariably -and overwhelmingly- end up supporting President Mubarak's Party. 3- Use "terror" as a weapon of dissuasion and conformity. Mubarak has used the terror card of Muslim fundamentalism as a political weapon to rule out opposition. The formula reads: "If I'm not in charge, there will be terror" (in fact, many governments balk at the possibility that Egypt’s crisis could descend into a sort of theocracy like Iran's).
Yet, the democratic argument is that sovereign people should build their own political future at the polls (meaning that voting is free and anonymous, something that does not happen in many cases).
Revolutions are great moments in history, but they're also highly unstable. So the question for many is, will this Egyptian revolution bring greater democracy to its people or would it replace Mubarak's dictatorship with a different kind of despotism?
What do you think? Go ahead!
__________
*A part of the ideology of the Muslim Brothers is establishing an Islamic State based on Shari'a law and the rejection of Western influence. In this case, religion and the State are inseparable, as is the case in Iran. Recently, the organization has taken steps to incorporate greater pluralism, but many people are still skeptical of the true intentions of the organization.
I'm closing this post next Sunday, february 6th, at 11pm
Friday, January 28, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
45% of students don't learn much in college
In the Huffington Post.
The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.Kids, this is where philosophy comes in!
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
A former senior Swiss bank executive said on Monday that he had given the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, details of more than 2,000 prominent individuals and companies that he contends engaged in tax evasion and other possible criminal activity
This piece of news in the New York Times:
Rudolf M. Elmer, who ran the Caribbean operations of the Swiss bank Julius Baer for eight years until he was dismissed in 2002, refused to identify any of the individuals or companies, but he told reporters at a news conference that about 40 politicians and “pillars of society” were among them.According to the article, "those named in the documents come from 'the U.S., Britain, Germany, Austria and Asia — from all over,' and include 'business people, politicians, people who have made their living in the arts and multinational conglomerates — from both sides of the Atlantic.'" 1
How should one react to this new development? Obviously, 1) Rudolf Elmer has committed the gravest of sins: to violate Switzerland's strict banking secrecy laws. 2) Wikileaks has gotten more oxygen: compromising data. Should we be interested? Well, Tax evasion is 3) an illegal practice and that those caught evading taxes are generally subject to criminal charges and substantial penalties.
Many people in the right of the political spectrum are bothered by Wikileaks constant noise. Advice: They should stick to their libertarian instincts and praise an organization that actually exposes government and corporate wrongdoing. A mature democracy depends on having an educated and informed electorate. There should be consensus that the actions of government and the state, as well as the competing political interests to exercise political power, should be underpinned by critical scrutiny and informed debate facilitated by the media.
Wikileaks is part of a new phenomenon that has to do with the disappearance of the traditional press as we know it. 2 However, that should not and will not contradict the basic assumption that there is no true democracy without a free press.
Since 2007, Wikileaks has made public an impressive series of classified documents: the so-called Afghan War Diary, a controversial video of an American Helicopter strike on Reuters journalists, the Iraq War Logs and Cablegate last November. The sheer amount of information and the manner in which it has been obtained has exceeded expectations.
Take note: something must be going on when Muammar Gaddafi, a dictator of Lybia for 40 years, calls Wikileaks "an evil organization." 3
What I'm talking about can be put in terms of a balance between liberal economy and morals. If democracy is, in the words of Lincoln in his Gettysburg address, "of the people, by the people, for the people," one can make a reasonable argument that it is in the best interest of the people to know when that covenant is broken, or put into risk.
Transparency and accountability are essential for the functioning of democracy.
_____
1 The surprise here is that this case already has a history: It started as a complaint filed in the Northern District of California by Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. (BJB) and its Cayman Islands unit against Wikileaks, its domain Wikileaks.org, and Dynadot, LLC, a domain registrar, claiming that the defendants unlawfully published confidential and counterfeit documents belonging to the bank. The plaintiffs sought the return of the documents in question, allegedly stolen from BJB by a disgruntled former employee, as well as the removal of those documents from defendants' Web sites. Wikileaks contended that the documents revealed illegal financial transactions and tax evasion by the bank, while BJB asserted that they contained confidential information belonging to the bank and its customers and that some of the documents had been altered. What happens next is that federal district court judge Jeffrey White granted the plaintiff relief in the form of a permanent injunction requiring Dynadot, based in San Mateo, California, to lock and disable the Wikileaks.org domain name on February 15, 2008. But the court's order met criticism on several grounds, including constitutional: The permanent injunction was widely condemned as excessive, particularly because the directive to Dynadot blocked an entire Web site on the basis of a dispute relating to a small portion of its content. Critics likened the order to the Pentagon Papers case in which the Supreme Court famously refused a request from the Justice Department to enjoin publication of articles based on documents illegally leaked from the Defense Department. 2Whatever the causes for such crisis, this is how Steve Coll for New America Foundation puts it:
The rate of destruction of professional journalism -and its output of independent reporting on American public institutions and on international affairs- is far outpacing the ability of new institutions to reproduce what is being lost, particularly in its civic functions. Secular and cyclical economic forces have suddenly combined to dismantle the business models that have for decades supported independent, public-minded reporting for large general audiences about local and state government, Congress, the executive branch, and international affairs. According to one organization that tracks newspaper job losses, the industry shed an estimated 15,970 jobs in 2008 and 8,484 through April of this year. The rapid and large-scale loss of independent reporting by many of these professionals, without any prospect of its replacement by new institutions in the foreseeable future, is an urgent matter of public interest.3 By now we should be used to the "evil rhetoric."
Saturday, January 8, 2011
2 be or not 2 be: thats the ?
Alfredo Triff
People say Twitter is the next big thing.
Methinks not.
While it is true that the Twitter phenomenon can be subversive, as we learned from Ahmadineyad's election coup in Iran (2009-2010), the blue birdie's song is essentially a one-way text-message operation (and a little less friendly than Facebook at that). And though there are clever tweets, the vapid seems to reign. Twitter is designed for "who" or "what" generates more attention. Content is secondary, almost a pretext for textlebrity.1
Twitter is defended in some quarters as "social phenomenon." This writer, for instance, uses Lacanian theory to make his point:
Social networks may be the new form of social life that is arising in the midst of the degradation of the Symbolic Order and the consequent fragmentation of Imaginary reality. The hallmark of this new form is that people are shifting their orientations away from the Symbolic Order to each other. The Symbolic Order no longer serves as a locus from which guidelines for living emanate. The representatives of orthodox knowledge, experts, are being supplanted by me "wisdom of crowds," evoked through social networks.2I'm not convinced. Surely, "texting" is not the problem. What I object to is the platform's self-imposed 140-character limit. Why? The idea cannot be that compressing meaning is necessarily better. What happens is that in our increasing (over)crowded space for attention, less is more.
This blogger cleverly imagines a -possible- Shakespeare tweet:
"2b or not 2b: thats the ? whthr tis noblr 2 suffr slings+arrws of outrgous frtune or take arms vs sea of trbles & by opposng end thm, die: sleep: prchance 2 dream. theres rub"
Tweeter's minimalist credo is conditioned by our present global predicament: As space and time get more crowded, there is less space and time time to say anything. Like in food rationing, the more you're rationed, the hungrier you get.3
Then, there is this Sysomos' survey, which finds that nearly 60% of tweets come from 2.2% of Twitter's users, with 22.5% making up a full 90% of Twitter's activity. How should we read this fact? Imagine each tweet as a unit of exchange with a certain value. If so, the information that is digested by the majority of tweetizens in Tweetverse emanates from a minority.
What is the majority in Tweetverse doing? Absorbing the endless proliferation of tweets coming down the tweetpipe. Even if they tweet once in a while, they still get all this news content and information. They don't have to do very much to get a lot back. It's just a matter of connecting and immediately getting flooded with stuff. In Tweetverse, being happy means being inside the Tweetbubble.
The "social phenomenon" boils down to getting people's attention.
Something has changed: We used to pay attention selectively, at discreet intervals. The very idea of attention (from the Latin attendere) means directing our attention carefully. We cannot pay attention to everything. With Tweeter, our attention becomes "enter-tained" (Lat. intertenere) we literally "stop in between" the ever-changing content.
In Tweetverse we don't pay attention. Instead, we passively absorbing content.
Don't take this post as an invective against Twitter. (Disclosure: I have a Twitter account). With McLuhan, I'm ready to say: "Twitter (the medium) is the massage." Only that this kind of medium leaves me empty.
As society, we've become less and less engaged with discourse, i.e., fighting with ideas, sweating a paragraph, looking for the best words, taking time to make the writing more lucid, richer.
How could this be good?
________1Celebrities seldom text. Instead, they send pics (and count with the most followers).
2 There are manuals that teach you how to write your best Twitter. You learn "how to avoid the too-much syndrome," as if writing and too-big-to-fail were related. The writer candidly recommends "writing techniques for writing poetry and fiction." There are "twitips" such as this: "An example of Twitterville Grammar is leaving out unnecessary words such as that and which. People understand what you're trying to say without them." How about spelling? It doesn't really matter because "English is a living language and Twitter is just the place to have some fun with your word choices." 3 O. C. McSwite, "Administrative Theory & Praxis." Volume: 31, #1 (March, 2009).