Memorials to our Missing Women

Memorials to our Missing Women: "

Megaphone has a look at the festive and solemn names of Missing Women created in flowers.

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Rousseau, Nasser and the Egyptian revolution

Rousseau, Nasser and the Egyptian revolution: "

In watching the live streaming coverage of the Egyptian revolution on Aljazeera I am awe-struck by the incredible humanity of what is unfolding in that country. I imagine Jean Jacques Rousseau wandering amongst the throngs of people and being equally amazed and delighted. For the character of this uprising, this outpouring of frustration and joy, of kindness and determination, of compassion and hope and community is more Rousseau than it is Mohammed or Marx.

The image of an old man with a long white beard racing his horse across Liberation Square yelling at the top of his lungs “I am free! I am Free! I am free!” – hardly able to comprehend that he was able to do so without fear of bring beaten or worse, is for me the most enduring image of the incredible events taking place in Egypt.

The revolution has greeters. On Tuesday as people streamed into the square in the tens of thousands, organizers actually greeted each one: “Welcome, welcome…” All the people who pundits would have three weeks ago assured as would never revolt are there in the square: incredible numbers of women, secular and otherwise; old people; middle class people – and upper class people like a former member of the board of one of Egypt’s biggest banks.

Rousseau proclaimed that morality was not a societal construct, but rather innate, an outgrowth of our instinctive resistance to passively witnessing suffering and injustice, out of which comes the emotions of compassion and empathy. If Tahrir Square is the evidence, then Rousseau was right. And he would have been totally at home.

The revolution is one of those phenomena that cannot be predicted. It smashes stereotypes embedded in the consciousness of the West over decades. That stereotype of poor, desperate, ignorant, grasping third world people is a convenient construct for the US and Canada for they form the foundation of our justification of keeping vicious dictatorships in power.

The Egyptian ruling elite not only adopts these same stereotypes but also fervently believe them for the similar reasons: their theft of the resources of their countries also depends on this notion, for it is the ideology of oppression, if we see ideology as that which gives meaning to power.

But that stereotype is, thanks to the revolution being continuously televised, is utterly dead. The incredible poetry of the people in the streets describing their feelings, the almost universal articulateness of the men and women expressing their views is awe-inspiring. And humbling. I cannot imagine a Canadian (American?) crowd offering so many poets, philosophers and historians in spontaneous response to reporters’ questions. (Leave aside for the moment the fact that I can’t imagine a million Canadians in any square.)

The humanity of the people giving this explosion of democratic sentiment its character is hard to credit, from a people who have been brutalized, robbed, humiliated, jailed and tortured. Yet there it was in the first words spoken by Wael Ghonim, head of Google’s Middle East operations after being released from jail. He was held, constantly blindfolded, for 12 days before finally being released.

But Ghonim was incredibly measured in his response to this crime – and he called it a crime – and his humanity, I think, was at the root of the huge resurgence of the numbers of protesters. Over 100,000 people have now signed onto a Facebook page declaring that he speaks for them.

But he would make no such claim: “I am not a hero. I only used the keyboard; the real heroes are the ones on the ground.”

He continued:

“This is not the time to settle scores. Although I have people I want to settle scores with myself. This is not the time to split the pie and enforce ideologies.

…Inside I met [State Security] people who loved Egypt but their methods and mine are not the same. I pay these guys’ salaries from my taxes, I have the right to ask the ministers where my money is going, this is our country.

“I believe that if things get better those (good state security people) will serve Egypt well.”

This compassion for, of all people, the dreaded security police, seems not to have come from a place of naïveté or weakness but just the opposite: from a place of strength that derived from the hope and joy of witnessing the unity in the square. Listening to Ghonim you really get the feeling that the revolution will succeed.

The humanity demonstrated by the protesters also helps explain why the global reaction to the violence against them was so universal and so powerful: this revolution has been absolutely peaceful since day one – respectful of people and property and the army. The violence was that much more grotesque because of it.

In order to curry favour with this new hero of the day, the newly appointed General Secretary of the ruling NDP party, reformist Hossam Badrawi, actually drove Ghonim home. But Ghonim was not fooled or persuaded: “I told him I will go in the car …but without an NDP logo. I told them we don’t want any NDP logo on the streets. … I told him I don’t want to see the logo of the NDP ever again.”

As Mid East exert Eric Margolis points out, there are hints here, too, of what was called Nasserism in the 1950s and 1960s, after Gamal Abdel Nasser, the most loved and progressive leader Egypt ever had. Nasser’s philosophy combined Arab nationalism and a pan-Arab ideology, and embraced a form of socialism. He was also a key figure in the non-aligned movement of developing countries. While it is too early to tell what direction the movement will take, the central role played by skyrocketing food prices, the grotesque divisions between rich and poor and Mubarak’s alleged $70 billion bilked from his own people, suggests that both nationalism and class will define the movement – and how it spreads to other countries. But what captures the imagination for the moment is the humanity and compassion of the people changing the face of the Middle East before our eyes.

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Government transparency doesn't matter without accountability

Government transparency doesn't matter without accountability: "My latest Guardian column is 'Government data like crime maps is not enough - there needs to be action,' and it looks at two recent data-crunching apps for UK policing: first, the crime-maps that tell you what the crime's like in your neighbourhood, and second, Sukey, an app that helps protesters evade police 'kettling' -- an inhumane form of arbitrary detention practiced by police.

When the citizenry need to build apps to protect themselves from unlawful detention by the police, it's not surprising that a new application that allows you to go down to your local police station and ask them to do something about some newly transparent crime statistic is greeted with indifference or jeers. If you can't trust the police not to detain your children on a freezing road for hours, why would you believe that you could have a productive dialogue about how they should be deploying their resources?

After all: tuition fee rises are a complete reversal of a critical Lib Dem pledge; mass NHS redundancies for nurses and other frontline workers are a complete reversal of a critical Tory pledge. When you've voted for a party that promises one thing and does the opposite, no amount of data about how rotten things are will inspire you to join a 'big society' that works with the state to accomplish its aims.

Meanwhile, Sukey's authors cleverly included a facility in their app that allows the police to communicate with demonstrators who are using it - an architecture for dialogue, built right in at the code level. If this was a 'big society', then the police would be using that channel to come to some accommodation with protestors that acknowledged the fundamental right to peaceful protest. But the radio silence to date tells us exactly why the crime map will serve no purpose: what good is it to know how your taxes are spent if you don't believe that anyone will listen when you complain?

Government data like crime maps is not enough - there needs to be action

(Image: A lot of yellow : TSG Police Line : Student Protests - Parliament Square, Westminster 2010, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from bobaliciouslondon's photostream)

• London police brutally kettle children marching for education ...


• Sukey: an anti-kettling app for student demonstrators in London ...


• Inside Sukey the anti-kettling mobile app - Boing Boing

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Archaeologists love Google Earth

Archaeologists love Google Earth: "Google Earth continues to play a big part in the future of archaeology. Archaeologists have used the program to cheaply scan the Amazon for ancient cities. More recently, a researcher in Australia used Google Earth to spot almost 2000 potential archaeological sites in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Cool stuff! And much less expensive than doing the same thing with lasers or buying satellite time.


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Geez Pete's list of "Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos"

Geez Pete's list of "Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos": "








Inspired by the Modern Library's 'Top 100' list, botchick over at the Geez Pete blog took a crack at listing his picks for the 'Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos.' Now, of course this is a 'fool's errand,' as she says, and the word 'weirdo' is made of an infinite number of pocket subcultures, but it's still a list of mostly really great, inspiring, or at minimum, provocative, books (not that I've read them all). Next, Geez is planning to tackle fiction for weirdos. Here are a few of my faves from her non-fiction list:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson: Looking over my list, my husband asked, “Isn’t that almost fiction?” Good point! But reporting on events through the filter of copious drugging and a sizable helping of paranoia is still technically reporting in my book. Hunter’s world view is one of the backbones of modern counter-cultural thought. Start here, and maybe try his vicious lone wolf takedown obit of Nixon, too.

Just Kids by Patti Smith: Yet another book about a world long lost to our modern times. Smith tells the story of coming to New York, meeting her lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe, and living the happy-but-skint life of artists in the big city. While reading, be sure to consider that today you can get a $50 cheeseburger in Manhattan without looking very hard.

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil : I don’t care how historic or high-minded any artistic movement is, it’s going to be full of sniping and backstabbing and petty jealousies. We’re all human, and that’s just part of the fun. Kudos to McNeil for getting all these stories about hairy nights hanging out in front of CBGBs on paper, before many of the principals were lost.

Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson: If that book cover isn’t enough to convince you to check this out, what is? Robert Anton Wilson (RAW to his fans and followers) was an icon of brain-altering philosophies, and his writing has lost zero of its power over time. The headline here is that Prometheus Rising is about meta-programming your own mind. The subheads are many. You’ll feel altered.

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus : Marcus tackles what should be an impossible task — taking anarchic artistic and social movements throughout roughly a century of history, and tying them together into a narrative thread that leads straight through punk rock and pop culture — and pulls it off. And it’s entertaining to boot.

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante: Scorsese’s mostly horrendous Gangs of New York dabbled in the nefarious history of lower Manhattan, but Sante goes for the full narrative, from the Civil War straight through the first couple decades of the 1900s. Learn what the crooks, prostitutes, swindlers, junkies, grifters and their various known associates were doing for “fun.”

'The Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos' (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)


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Bomber names ex-CIA operative in 1990s Cuba hotel bombings

Bomber names ex-CIA operative in 1990s Cuba hotel bombings: "A Salvadoran man jailed in Cuba in connection with a string of 1990s hotel bombings says he told a US prosecutor that he got explosives and money directly from a former CIA operative now on trial in Texas.

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Saudis have inflated oil reserves by 40%: Cables

Saudis have inflated oil reserves by 40%: Cables: "The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent an oil price spike, American diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks said.

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