2012-09-23
Doing the Wrong thing for the Right reason
You know those scenes where someone has an angel on one shoulder, and a devil on the other? It must help if you can see the red skin, horns and barbed tail of the devil. Don't listen to that guy, huh?
It's interesting that we depict the devil in such an obvious way. In Abrahamic (Judaic, Christian, Muslim) mythology, Lucifer, Son of the Morning was the most powerful angel, and so beautiful that any human who saw him would weep for joy. Did he get the spiky suit because he rebelled against God? Or can the devil still look like a force for good?
And why am I asking these questions?
I was thinking about leaders, what they say and what they expect us to do. They tell us that sacrifices (inevitably of people not-them) are necessary. They divide us against each other. They find ways to normalize things (murder, torture, egregious invasion of privacy) which previously they have promised not to do in our name. These are the good guys.
After all, wouldn't it be easier for the devil if he could look appealing and impressive, if he could tell you you're doing the right thing, while directing you ineluctably towards self-destruction?
My gut feeling on this is: if someone in authority asks you to harm another human being, that's wrong. I don't care what suit they're wearing, or what arguments they use. Harming people is wrong.
Most of us probably won't be asked to torture a prisoner. But we are asked to approve it, by voting for people who do it. We don't get out there and club peaceful protestors, but we vote for administrations which do.
Worse still, our leaders tell us that we are doing the right thing, that these "difficult steps" are necessary to defend our freedom and have a peaceful place to live.
In Australia, they tell us we're putting refugees in concentration camps to prevent them from drowning, and taking away the choices of Indigenous people in order to build them Stronger Futures.
We're starving the unemployed in order to encourage them to get jobs, which either don't exist or for which they don't have the training.
We're paying huge amounts of taxpayers' money every year to subsidize the production and use of fossil fuels, the emissions from which are changing our climate and threatening the survival of our own people.
But hey, our leaders make it sound like we're doing the right thing. We can trust them!
Sometimes, those we trust and admire can make wrong things sound right. A long time ago, there was a guy called Agamemnon, whose sister-in-law went off with another man. So he decided to invade and loot that man's city and enslave everyone in it. His army loaded up the sailing ships, but he needed a good wind to push them to Troy (the other city).
His god told him he would get a good wind if he killed his daughter in front of everyone. So Agamemnon murdered his daughter in front of cheering crowds, got the good sailing wind and was universally praised by his people.
Because it was the right thing to do.
Her name was Iphigenia, by the way. Next time you turn on the news or walk down the street, you could be looking right at her.
2012-08-25
How the U.S. government created Julian Assange as an international issue
Let's say someone bumps you a bit on the stairs. Most of us would think, "It's crowded, I bump people sometimes" and just take it in our stride. The exceptions are the people who genuinely believe they are so important and special that nobody should be allowed to inconvenience them.
These people often surround themselves with a buffer of money and/or power, to protect themselves from any bumps. As a consequence of this paid-for illusion of control, they become hyper-sensitive to the slightest bump.
You can't accidentally bump this person, because they are the centre of the universe. Everything either supports or threatens them.
This is how a single teenage blogger in Vietnam or Bahrain, simply writing their opinion online, becomes a "threat to the security of the state" and results in those kids being tortured and imprisoned.
"You can't disagree with me, because I'm always right! I have to be right!”
Truly strong people are quite willing to admit to mistakes and learn from them. This is how you build strength: by facing reality. You don't lie about what you did. You don't blame it on someone else. It's your mess: you fix it.
So, when Wikileaks released the "Collateral Murder" Apache helicopter video, did the U.S. government say, "It's true. No, it's not OK to kill civilians. We're going to do our best to make up for this, we're going to change our procedures to try and prevent it happening again, and we'll report back to you."?
No. The U.S. government complained, loud and long, that someone had dared to release this information. They blamed the messenger. They repeatedly said that they saw the release of facts about their activities as "a threat", and anyone who let us know those facts was a criminal, a terrorist, should be executed etc.
This was
Mistake #1: refuse to take responsibility for illegal acts and atrocities revealed by your own documents
combined with
Mistake #2: blame the person who reveals the truth
It thus becomes obvious to us ordinary people that you don't want us to know the truth. Since relationships are based on trust, you're throwing credibility away in heaping handfuls right now.
So, do you acknowledge your mistakes and come clean? No, as Hercule Poirot once said, you "cover the bad fish with a thick sauce". You go into CYA mode. "See? There's nothing wrong with the fish. *choke, gasp* It's the sauce which is making it look bad."
At this point in history, few people knew about Wikileaks. The U.S. government could have taken responsibility for their actions, and Wikileaks would have faded off the radar, like many small publication groups and even key whistleblowers whose names we don't know. Later Wikileaks releases would have simply brought more issues to the U.S. government's attention (something their constitution, and any healthy organization, explicitly encourages). Wikileaks would have just been a publication pipeline, nobody important.
But no, the U.S. government made
Mistake #3: build up the messenger's profile
As an attempted distraction from the revealed facts, they put a great deal of time and energy into accusing Wikileaks of being a serious and imminent threat to the whole country. They insisted on the existence of a "leader", a single person behind this organization who could be targeted, personally reviled and taken down, thus disabling the threat. Wikileaks isn't an hierarchical organization, and removing an elected/consensus leader doesn't disable any healthy group, but somehow the U.S. government thought this was a good idea.
To a certain extent, they achieved their aim of distracting the wider community from the facts Wikileaks had revealed. There was constant speculation about this shadowy leader, much FUD generated, and the more difficult issues of government law-breaking were largely abandoned for the more personal, everyday focus on whether someone is "hot or not": whether you like/approve of them or not. This is easy, and requires virtually no thought.
However, in generating this distraction, the U.S. government made
Mistake #4: create the messenger as a popular icon
A lot of mainstream media time was spent speculating who this supposed leader was, until Julian Assange came forward to try and water down the distraction. Then a staggering amount of MSM time was spent speculating on Assange's background, opinions, appearance, personality and God knows what else. Whether people agreed with him or not, they certainly knew about him. And inevitably, as the U.S. government polarized the discussion, some people started supporting him.
Even then, Wikileaks and Assange could have dropped out of public discourse, if the U.S. government had simply played a soft bat: "Yes, we've seen the documents, and we're working on those issues. Follow this site for updates." Instead, each document release resulted in the same frothing outrage, convincing the public that there must be something really important being revealed, and that Assange and Wikileaks were people to watch. Even so, not many people supported Wikileaks at this stage, not really being sure what they embodied.
Instead of leaving well enough alone, the U.S. government then made
Mistake #5: financially blockade the messenger
This may have worked in the days when you could blockade a country, stopping all communications, but we're long past that. Again, the U.S. government might as well have put up billboards saying, "We can't cope with what Wikileaks reveals". Financial blockades are directed by governments at whole countries, and are only ever partial, strengthening negotiations about specific behaviours. However, the U.S. government pressured Visa, MasterCard, several banks and more than one other government into cutting off Wikileaks completely.
Since we ordinary people can easily identify with not having access to our bank accounts, this brought Wikileaks into the everyday frame. We can also identify with being bullied. Suddenly, the most powerful country on earth was obviously trying to suffocate a small publishing organization. These actions also didn't pass the smell test: you can donate to the Klu Klux Klan, or a range of other law-breaking and destructive groups, but you can't donate to Wikileaks?
Along with the financial blockade, the U.S. government pressured Amazon into throwing Wikileaks off their servers, and continued to make grandiose threats in the mainstream media. Any PR professional would be pulling his or her hair out by now. When you want an issue to go away, you deal with it, addressing the underlying concerns. You don't keep lighting rockets under it, continually re-detonating it in the public eye.
Like anyone playing Whack-a-Mole, the U.S. government appeared to think that just one or two more strikes, and they would win. Nevermind everyone standing around and losing respect for you by the minute. Nevermind the fact that the bad fish still stinks. You're going to yell a lot and everyone will go away. Because you have told them that there are no issues, and besides, we can squash these guys like a gnat.
Mistake #6: put enormous pressure on the messenger: assume that legal threats, imprisonment and financial starvation will make the messenger fold
On the information the U.S. government already had about Wikileaks and Assange, that was a notably inaccurate assumption. Even we ordinary people knew by now that Wikileaks was a minimalist distributed group, and that Assange had no expectations of an easy life. Incidentally, even after one year of torture, two years of imprisonment without trial, Bradley Manning (who might have been considered a softer target) hasn't folded.
Punishing people for telling the truth tends to strip life down for them. Do I believe the truth is worth this struggle, or not? If you go up against an oppressor, there will always be a cost. You decide if it's worth that cost.
Some of the Wikileaks members may have had an illusion of safety, and a few did run when confronted with the reality. The rest were disillusioned but probably not all that surprised. I doubt if Assange was surprised at all.
I could say, "Assange has been chased by a crazy cult before" (which is true), but that would probably be unfair to the U.S. government. They're not crazy, they're just choosing to be staggeringly inept. It's hard to understand why.
Faced with growing popular engagement with Wikileaks, and interest in Assange, the U.S. government brings the whole thing into a long, drawn-out spotlight by making
Mistake #7: be seen to be persecuting the messenger
The whole "yes it's rape, no it isn't, you can leave the country, INTERPOL MOST WANTED!" soap opera has dragged even more eyes onto the situation. Women sincerely wish even a tiny proportion of these resources were directed at the rapes which happen in our communities every day. Assange's alleged victims don't get the speedy and professional investigation they deserve. Assange is hunted with far more tenacity (and bombast) than existing mass-murderers. The U.S. government repeatedly denies that it wants to prosecute him under the 1917 Espionage Act (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), the Australian government refuses to represent him in any useful way (on the facts, he'd be much better off if he'd been caught smuggling kilos of cocaine into Indonesia), the Swedish government says it doesn't extradite political prisoners to the U.S. (despite having been involved in illegal CIA "renditions" of its own citizens) and the British government has specifically threatened to invade an international embassy in London.
Seriously, we pay you guys the big bucks to make decisions like these?
Maybe it's worked for you in the past. Maybe dramatizing, pointing fingers, making threats and misusing the legal system has made some people go away.
It doesn't make the underlying problems go away.
As long as people are losing trust in government, worrying about systematic invasion of their privacy and being confused, fragmented and even misinformed by polarization of issues, the fabric of our society is indeed threatened.
It's not Wikileaks down there, driving a pick-axe into our foundations. It's you.
These people often surround themselves with a buffer of money and/or power, to protect themselves from any bumps. As a consequence of this paid-for illusion of control, they become hyper-sensitive to the slightest bump.
You can't accidentally bump this person, because they are the centre of the universe. Everything either supports or threatens them.
This is how a single teenage blogger in Vietnam or Bahrain, simply writing their opinion online, becomes a "threat to the security of the state" and results in those kids being tortured and imprisoned.
"You can't disagree with me, because I'm always right! I have to be right!”
Truly strong people are quite willing to admit to mistakes and learn from them. This is how you build strength: by facing reality. You don't lie about what you did. You don't blame it on someone else. It's your mess: you fix it.
So, when Wikileaks released the "Collateral Murder" Apache helicopter video, did the U.S. government say, "It's true. No, it's not OK to kill civilians. We're going to do our best to make up for this, we're going to change our procedures to try and prevent it happening again, and we'll report back to you."?
No. The U.S. government complained, loud and long, that someone had dared to release this information. They blamed the messenger. They repeatedly said that they saw the release of facts about their activities as "a threat", and anyone who let us know those facts was a criminal, a terrorist, should be executed etc.
This was
Mistake #1: refuse to take responsibility for illegal acts and atrocities revealed by your own documents
combined with
Mistake #2: blame the person who reveals the truth
It thus becomes obvious to us ordinary people that you don't want us to know the truth. Since relationships are based on trust, you're throwing credibility away in heaping handfuls right now.
So, do you acknowledge your mistakes and come clean? No, as Hercule Poirot once said, you "cover the bad fish with a thick sauce". You go into CYA mode. "See? There's nothing wrong with the fish. *choke, gasp* It's the sauce which is making it look bad."
At this point in history, few people knew about Wikileaks. The U.S. government could have taken responsibility for their actions, and Wikileaks would have faded off the radar, like many small publication groups and even key whistleblowers whose names we don't know. Later Wikileaks releases would have simply brought more issues to the U.S. government's attention (something their constitution, and any healthy organization, explicitly encourages). Wikileaks would have just been a publication pipeline, nobody important.
But no, the U.S. government made
Mistake #3: build up the messenger's profile
As an attempted distraction from the revealed facts, they put a great deal of time and energy into accusing Wikileaks of being a serious and imminent threat to the whole country. They insisted on the existence of a "leader", a single person behind this organization who could be targeted, personally reviled and taken down, thus disabling the threat. Wikileaks isn't an hierarchical organization, and removing an elected/consensus leader doesn't disable any healthy group, but somehow the U.S. government thought this was a good idea.
To a certain extent, they achieved their aim of distracting the wider community from the facts Wikileaks had revealed. There was constant speculation about this shadowy leader, much FUD generated, and the more difficult issues of government law-breaking were largely abandoned for the more personal, everyday focus on whether someone is "hot or not": whether you like/approve of them or not. This is easy, and requires virtually no thought.
However, in generating this distraction, the U.S. government made
Mistake #4: create the messenger as a popular icon
A lot of mainstream media time was spent speculating who this supposed leader was, until Julian Assange came forward to try and water down the distraction. Then a staggering amount of MSM time was spent speculating on Assange's background, opinions, appearance, personality and God knows what else. Whether people agreed with him or not, they certainly knew about him. And inevitably, as the U.S. government polarized the discussion, some people started supporting him.
Even then, Wikileaks and Assange could have dropped out of public discourse, if the U.S. government had simply played a soft bat: "Yes, we've seen the documents, and we're working on those issues. Follow this site for updates." Instead, each document release resulted in the same frothing outrage, convincing the public that there must be something really important being revealed, and that Assange and Wikileaks were people to watch. Even so, not many people supported Wikileaks at this stage, not really being sure what they embodied.
Instead of leaving well enough alone, the U.S. government then made
Mistake #5: financially blockade the messenger
This may have worked in the days when you could blockade a country, stopping all communications, but we're long past that. Again, the U.S. government might as well have put up billboards saying, "We can't cope with what Wikileaks reveals". Financial blockades are directed by governments at whole countries, and are only ever partial, strengthening negotiations about specific behaviours. However, the U.S. government pressured Visa, MasterCard, several banks and more than one other government into cutting off Wikileaks completely.
Since we ordinary people can easily identify with not having access to our bank accounts, this brought Wikileaks into the everyday frame. We can also identify with being bullied. Suddenly, the most powerful country on earth was obviously trying to suffocate a small publishing organization. These actions also didn't pass the smell test: you can donate to the Klu Klux Klan, or a range of other law-breaking and destructive groups, but you can't donate to Wikileaks?
Along with the financial blockade, the U.S. government pressured Amazon into throwing Wikileaks off their servers, and continued to make grandiose threats in the mainstream media. Any PR professional would be pulling his or her hair out by now. When you want an issue to go away, you deal with it, addressing the underlying concerns. You don't keep lighting rockets under it, continually re-detonating it in the public eye.
Like anyone playing Whack-a-Mole, the U.S. government appeared to think that just one or two more strikes, and they would win. Nevermind everyone standing around and losing respect for you by the minute. Nevermind the fact that the bad fish still stinks. You're going to yell a lot and everyone will go away. Because you have told them that there are no issues, and besides, we can squash these guys like a gnat.
Mistake #6: put enormous pressure on the messenger: assume that legal threats, imprisonment and financial starvation will make the messenger fold
On the information the U.S. government already had about Wikileaks and Assange, that was a notably inaccurate assumption. Even we ordinary people knew by now that Wikileaks was a minimalist distributed group, and that Assange had no expectations of an easy life. Incidentally, even after one year of torture, two years of imprisonment without trial, Bradley Manning (who might have been considered a softer target) hasn't folded.
Punishing people for telling the truth tends to strip life down for them. Do I believe the truth is worth this struggle, or not? If you go up against an oppressor, there will always be a cost. You decide if it's worth that cost.
Some of the Wikileaks members may have had an illusion of safety, and a few did run when confronted with the reality. The rest were disillusioned but probably not all that surprised. I doubt if Assange was surprised at all.
I could say, "Assange has been chased by a crazy cult before" (which is true), but that would probably be unfair to the U.S. government. They're not crazy, they're just choosing to be staggeringly inept. It's hard to understand why.
Faced with growing popular engagement with Wikileaks, and interest in Assange, the U.S. government brings the whole thing into a long, drawn-out spotlight by making
Mistake #7: be seen to be persecuting the messenger
The whole "yes it's rape, no it isn't, you can leave the country, INTERPOL MOST WANTED!" soap opera has dragged even more eyes onto the situation. Women sincerely wish even a tiny proportion of these resources were directed at the rapes which happen in our communities every day. Assange's alleged victims don't get the speedy and professional investigation they deserve. Assange is hunted with far more tenacity (and bombast) than existing mass-murderers. The U.S. government repeatedly denies that it wants to prosecute him under the 1917 Espionage Act (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), the Australian government refuses to represent him in any useful way (on the facts, he'd be much better off if he'd been caught smuggling kilos of cocaine into Indonesia), the Swedish government says it doesn't extradite political prisoners to the U.S. (despite having been involved in illegal CIA "renditions" of its own citizens) and the British government has specifically threatened to invade an international embassy in London.
Seriously, we pay you guys the big bucks to make decisions like these?
Maybe it's worked for you in the past. Maybe dramatizing, pointing fingers, making threats and misusing the legal system has made some people go away.
It doesn't make the underlying problems go away.
As long as people are losing trust in government, worrying about systematic invasion of their privacy and being confused, fragmented and even misinformed by polarization of issues, the fabric of our society is indeed threatened.
It's not Wikileaks down there, driving a pick-axe into our foundations. It's you.
2012-06-03
OzLog undermines trust in Australian government
Australian technology site Delimiter has done an excellent job of following up on the Australian government's planned #OzLog legislation. Under OzLog, everything Australians do online, every phone call, every email, every chat session, every browser address and action, will be stored for two years at our ISP, available on request to any Australian government agency (plus those in a slew of dodgy European countries)... and we will pay for it.
Does that seem right to you?
We've been lucky so far that guys like Delimiter, the EFA and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam have been willing to put a lot of time and energy into digging up OzLog info our government is patently unwilling to share with us. However, as with imposed "treaties" like ACTA, the facts don't look good. We get screwed, while big corporations and government gain enormous power over us.
I really don't get how supposedly democratic governments can get away with pushing copyright-enforcement and police-data-collecting work and costs onto local ISPs. If there are any small ISPs left (our regional ISP just went under), this will sink them.
If the justification is that anyone can become a criminal, then we need to factor into the severity and scope of surveillance the actual probability of that happening. 0.00001?
Unless our government plans to legislate against normal life in the future, OzLog bills us, and comprehensively invades our privacy, based on law-breaking we're overwhelmingly not doing. Why not address the actual causes of criminality, especially in communities where some decent social investment would have immediate and significant results?
Why assume a whole population intends to break the law, when we have a very low criminality index compared with other developed countries? Trust in government is a fundamental part of a successful democracy. How can we trust a government which invests huge amounts of our money into demonstrating how little it trusts us?
Basically, laws succeed when people agree with them. In general, nobody thinks it's OK to bash a grannie or hurt a child. We know it's stupid to drive on the wrong side of the road. We're not so sure about being blocked from buying ebooks, movies, TV shows or music. We're quite willing to buy them, so we don't understand why so much effort goes into stopping us. We don't accept that our privacy should be systematically invaded, just in case we decide to change a lifetime of behaviour and become criminals.
If YOU – the government – want community support for OzLog, you're going to have to convince us that we have adequate privacy protection, that our information is not going to be misused (or simply handed over on request to thinly-disguised European dictatorships like Azerbaijan), and that our lifetimes of responsible civilian behaviour add up to more than "Yeah, but you might do something".
Trust goes both ways. Let's see you earn some from us. Stop hiding things which affect us. Respect our skills and experience: really listen to what we say. Work with us to create responsible communities, rather than treating us as the enemy.
The U.S. may have 49 million people living in poverty, but we still have a functioning democracy. Use it.
Does that seem right to you?
We've been lucky so far that guys like Delimiter, the EFA and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam have been willing to put a lot of time and energy into digging up OzLog info our government is patently unwilling to share with us. However, as with imposed "treaties" like ACTA, the facts don't look good. We get screwed, while big corporations and government gain enormous power over us.
I really don't get how supposedly democratic governments can get away with pushing copyright-enforcement and police-data-collecting work and costs onto local ISPs. If there are any small ISPs left (our regional ISP just went under), this will sink them.
If the justification is that anyone can become a criminal, then we need to factor into the severity and scope of surveillance the actual probability of that happening. 0.00001?
Unless our government plans to legislate against normal life in the future, OzLog bills us, and comprehensively invades our privacy, based on law-breaking we're overwhelmingly not doing. Why not address the actual causes of criminality, especially in communities where some decent social investment would have immediate and significant results?
Why assume a whole population intends to break the law, when we have a very low criminality index compared with other developed countries? Trust in government is a fundamental part of a successful democracy. How can we trust a government which invests huge amounts of our money into demonstrating how little it trusts us?
Basically, laws succeed when people agree with them. In general, nobody thinks it's OK to bash a grannie or hurt a child. We know it's stupid to drive on the wrong side of the road. We're not so sure about being blocked from buying ebooks, movies, TV shows or music. We're quite willing to buy them, so we don't understand why so much effort goes into stopping us. We don't accept that our privacy should be systematically invaded, just in case we decide to change a lifetime of behaviour and become criminals.
If YOU – the government – want community support for OzLog, you're going to have to convince us that we have adequate privacy protection, that our information is not going to be misused (or simply handed over on request to thinly-disguised European dictatorships like Azerbaijan), and that our lifetimes of responsible civilian behaviour add up to more than "Yeah, but you might do something".
Trust goes both ways. Let's see you earn some from us. Stop hiding things which affect us. Respect our skills and experience: really listen to what we say. Work with us to create responsible communities, rather than treating us as the enemy.
The U.S. may have 49 million people living in poverty, but we still have a functioning democracy. Use it.
2012-05-28
Dear Mr Baillieu – Don't Slash TAFE
Dear Mr Baillieu
It doesn't make sense to slash TAFE funding when we are so critically in need of workers with vocational skills. TAFE is an essential bridge between secondary-level skills and actual employment. It is also an opportunity for the unemployed and/or dispossessed, which makes it an essential safety-valve in a era of growing social discontent.
I have seen kids turn their lives around by attending TAFE. I've seen single mums returning to work through TAFE. I've seen migrants improve their language skills and become independently functional in our community, through TAFE. I've seen people upskill to gain entrance to emergency services and armed services, through TAFE. I've seen people reskill for university entrance, through TAFE. I've seen employers benefit from TAFE workplace education, gaining evenly-skilled workers and avoiding low productivity and injury liability, through TAFE.
Oversee TAFE and its profit-motivated competitors, by all means. Just don't pull the rug out from under people who can improve their lives, our community and our economy through TAFE.
Clytie Siddall
It doesn't make sense to slash TAFE funding when we are so critically in need of workers with vocational skills. TAFE is an essential bridge between secondary-level skills and actual employment. It is also an opportunity for the unemployed and/or dispossessed, which makes it an essential safety-valve in a era of growing social discontent.
I have seen kids turn their lives around by attending TAFE. I've seen single mums returning to work through TAFE. I've seen migrants improve their language skills and become independently functional in our community, through TAFE. I've seen people upskill to gain entrance to emergency services and armed services, through TAFE. I've seen people reskill for university entrance, through TAFE. I've seen employers benefit from TAFE workplace education, gaining evenly-skilled workers and avoiding low productivity and injury liability, through TAFE.
Oversee TAFE and its profit-motivated competitors, by all means. Just don't pull the rug out from under people who can improve their lives, our community and our economy through TAFE.
Clytie Siddall
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