Inner City Trendy

So Hamas agrees to an Egyptian brokered truce. What’s the bet that one of the following two things will occur:

1) Israel does not accept the truce.

2) They accept the truce and then assassinate a Hamas leader thus provoking the Palestinians to break the truce.

[Read: SMH report via AFP]
[Read: Al Jazeera report]

So I’ve had a little break from blogging. But I’m back now and I thought I might just reflect on the lessons that were and were not learnt in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks.

If there is one thing that should be clear and uncontroversial about terrorism, it is that it is caused by anger. People are angry about what has been done to the people that they identify with. This is not a radical position, it is the message being communicated by intelligence agencies all over the world. A closely related concept is one that has got some media attentionis that of “blowback” - the idea that going and attacking people around the world is likely to increase the number of terrorist attacks.

If the point isn’t obvious enough in the abstract, it’s made very concrete every time terrorists are able to get a message out through the media. They speak of persecution, genocide and discrimination. The Mumbai gunmen asked the audience “Do you know how many Muslims were killed in Kashmir yesterday?” - a good questions since these tragedies which are supported by India’s government are rarely reported. (Although the BBC has a good page about Kashmir.)

Here in Sydney, the op-ed pieces about Mumbai were predictably lacking in insight. Tanveer Ahmed chose to ignore the obvious causes of terrorist activity and argued in the SMH that the reason for the attacks was the terrorists’ “pre-modern” sense of identity. Apparently they are simply unable to identify as both Indian and Muslim and that is why they go on murderous rampages.

We don’t need to think that the anger justifies terrible things like the Mumbai attacks to uderstand that it is the cause. We need to understand the context in which these attacks happen and ridiculous psuedo-intellectual talk of modern versus pre-modern sense of identities will get us nowhere. It will merely lead us to the innane and frankly insulting solution posed by Tanveer Ahmed:

Achieving harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities…

This argument is about as convincing as Bush’s “they hate our freedom” line. Indeed, in a clear and insightful piece that puts Mumbai in an illuminating context, Arundhati Roy points out that this very argument is, of course, being run in India now too.

We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, give us his version of George Bush’s famous “Why they hate us” speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim hate Mumbai: “Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.” His prescription: “The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever.” Didn’t George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can’t seem to get away from.

We must face up to the causes of terrorism - an our role in that causal chain - before we can do anything about it.

Just now, Obama declared victory with his typically fantastic oratory style. Many people will justifiably be celebrating in the US and around the world. If nothing else, this victory represents an important and deep yearning for change. People see in Obama something different from the status quo and his defeat of McCain shows us that people do care about changing the world for the better.

But how much better will Obama be? ‘Hope’, ‘change’, etc are all very nice abstract nouns but all the evidence suggest that Obama will hardly fulfill the public’s desire for change. Ralph Nader puts it very well in an open letter he has written to Obama.

In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words “hope and change,” “change and hope” have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not “hope and change” but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.

Nader goes onto to discuss the fact that Obama has received more corporate donations than McCain which indicates that corporate interests feel safe under an Obama presidency. He discusses Obama’s expediency and opportunism in flipping his support of Palestinian rights to complete support of AIPAC and its policies as well as his lack of character displayed by him turning his back on America’s Muslim population - not visiting a single Mosque.

Nader depressingly concludes:

Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. “Hope” some say springs eternal.” But not when “reality” consumes it daily.

I think that Obama will be a lot better than the alternative but that perhaps simply reflects on what a poor choice we have. Perhaps Obama will surprise us but I don’t think that is an abstract noun in his vocabulary.

So, soon our wonderful and trustworthy government will choose what you can and cannot see on the web.

Of course, all they will be blocking is ‘illegal content’ so unless you’re criminally minded you have nothing to worry about. It’s just like unless you’re a terrorist, you shouldn’t be worried about anti-terrorism laws. It’s all to protect the children, you see.

Seriously, this is really scary. When anti-terrorism laws were introduced, it was obvious that they were going to be used to stifle dissent. And sure enough, they have been used more against activists than they have against anything resembling terrorism. Are we seriously supposed to believe the government when they tell us that they are only trying to protect children? You watch, very soon we will see politically dissident websites being blocked. There is simply no doubt that this is what this initiative is going to end up being.

Here’s some good reading material:

- A piece by Antony Leowenstein

- A post by An Onymous Lefty

- A post by Somebody Think of the Children

- An article at OpenNet Initiative

Back in the 80s my family had an Apple IIe. On the machine we had a program called Eliza that attempted to behave like a human having a conversation with you. In fact, that particular program pretended to be a therapist and it was surprisingly convincing for such an early program.

Of course, it never convinced anyone that it was actually human but if it had, it could have won the programmer $100,000. Any program that satisfies the Turing Test - basically by convincing a human judge that it is a human - wins the Loebner Prize and walks away with a wad of cash.

This week there was a bit of excitement as a computer program called Elbot convinced 3 out of 12 judges that it was human. You can see the conversation and some discussion of it here. If you read the conversation, you’ll see that those three judges must have been completely crazy. This program is no better than the Eliza program written in 1966. On the Elbot website, you can have a go talking to the robot yourself. (Once there, push the red button.)

Of course, the whole test is a ridiculous exercise. As any linguist will tell you, the amount of general knowledge that is required to carry out a conversation is enormous. In fact, Chomsky has pointed out that even to get the syntax of sentences right (the grammar) you need to know an enormous number of facts that are seemingly unrelated to language. The idea that a computer could hold a normal conversation any time soon is ludicrous. We can’t even get a robot to walk around an obstacle course properly let alone stumble through natural language.

Here’s a great podcast from This American Life about the financial crisis. Click on this link or listen below.

This American Life is a radio show on NPR in the US. I’ve known about it for a long time but only recently started to listen to it. It’s well worth it!

Towards the end of the hour there is really interesting discussion about the bank-lobby in DC. Apparently there are thousands of lobbyists there right now ensuring that the 700 billion is basically given to the banks rather than used to buy a share in the banks - an alternative plan called the “stock injection plan”. They report on an interesting survey of economists which revealed that almost every economist in the country think that of the two plans, the stock injection plan is better.

I thought it was just me but apparently it’s not. Huge numbers of ex-Telstra customers have received unimaginable numbers of calls from Telstra trying to persuade them to return to Telstra. Many of the callers were aggressive and, so it turns out, were regularly misinforming customers of the plans Telstra offers.

Telstra must be one of the worst Telcos around. If this has happened to you, complain to Tesltra and to the Tellecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

This is my experience. When I left Telstra, I started getting calls trying to convince me to return to them. After a few weeks of receiving up to 4 calls a week, I began to ask them to stop calling me. Since this didn’t work, I began to ask to speak to a supervisor each time they called. Roughly half the time the caller would hang up on me and the other half they would hand me on to a supervisor who assured me that my number would be removed from the list. Nevertheless, this went on for over a year and my number was never removed from the list. The whole time, I was on the do-not-call register. Eventually I changed my number and that stopped them from calling me. Luckily, I hardly every use my landline and don’t regularly give out its number so it was relatively painless for me to change numbers. But this might not even be an option for many people.

If this has happened to you, why not relate your experience below or at the smh mashup blog.

There’s been a lot of talk of the bad things about the current economic crisis and impending recession/depression. There’s also been a bit of discussion of the good things that might happen. But almost all of the latter discussion has focused on either relatively minor issues or has just tried to make light of the situation. (Colbert has a particularly amusing interview doing this and Annabelle Crab wrote a funny piece today too.)

But what about the big picture? What about the really good things that might happen? Sure, repo men will win out and some of the “dead wood” will be forced out of the market by the hard times but there’s sure to be some really good things for society to come out of the impending recession.

1 Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, the utter hypocrisy of so-called “free market” ideology and “laissez faire” economics will be stripped bare. There never has been a “free-market” in the west. Instead, the term is thrown around every time governements don’t want to spend money helping those most in need. Meanwhile, governments have intervened in the economy to the benifit of big business regularly. This language maintains and is maintained by the illusion that private enterprise, left to its own devices, has been at the forefront of innovation in the west. Nothing could be further from the truth: almost ALL innovation has been a result of government intervention. So with the massive bail-out going ahead, maybe governments will have a tougher time avoiding helping the needy in society since the hypocrisy is so transparent.

2 Although there is debate about the effectiveness of this as a strategy, one of the most common ways of boosting the economy out of recession is through an increase in public spending. And one effective way of spending public money is on major public infrastructure. Known as deficit spending, it can generate demand which in turn can stimulate production. While it would be great if governments invested in things like public transport all the time, in a time of recession there is extra incentive for them to do so.

3 Related to the above two points, economic downturns can precipitate enormous increases in welfare. The great depression saw the creation of the modern welfare sate which has been slowly eroded ever since.

4 Workers rights can be greatly improved as a direct result of major economic crises. As part of the response to the great depression, FDR increased the power of unions and encouraged collective bargaining. In the USA, union membership more than doubled between 1930 and 1940 and workers won many rights that they previously did not have and which they kept until the severe waves of deregulation in the 70s and 80s (the beginning of the deregulation which many now blame for the current crisis).

5 Wall street suicides! Ok, so this isn’t really a good thing. But there’s something you can’t help finding funny about the image of an economic fat-cat jumping out of their office window after their stocks crash. It was fodder for a lot of great cartoons and it did teach modern fat-cats to diversify. For a bunch of reasons, we’re unlikely to see this happen this time around.

There’s five (really only four, I guess) really good things that severe economic downturns can bring about. This post was motivated by some interesting conversations I was having with academics who thought there was a case to be made for the idea that the recessions such as this might have benifits which outweigh the costs and in that vein, I’m now turning it over to you.

So now it’s your turn. What are some other seriously benificial possible outcomes of the recession?

If you don’t like Colbert, then I probably don’t like you.

I was looking over some old Colbert clips recently and came across this one. It’s an oldy, but boy is it good.