A Bit More Detail

What Andrew Barton said at Acts of Minor Treason. Building fiction universes which make sense, and which–when they diverge from the world we know–do so in ways that are readily comprehensible, is something that’s not only important for science fiction, either. Plausible characters and settings and plots count everywhere.

Sometimes it’s difficult to really wrap one’s head about why this is important. Recently I came across an article on Gizmodo regarding the Pentagon’s withdrawal of support from the movie The Avengers. As author Spencer Ackerman put it, their reason was that “the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.” Presumably, the implied conclusion we’re supposed to draw is that this is ridiculous, hair-splitting stuff, and that the Pentagon is just being a bunch of jerks who want to cramp the movie’s style.

You know what, though? The military is right. According to the Defense Department, their main problem is that they couldn’t figure out where the US military stood in relation to S.H.I.E.L.D., which Wikipedia describes as an “espionage and secret military law-enforcement agency,” which really narrows it down – and, hell, I imagine it’s easy as hell to maintain secrecy over something like a giant flying aircraft carrier. S.H.I.E.L.D. has, from what I understand, been the subject of fan debates over just what it is for a good chunk of the last fifty years.

Answering questions like this is important. They define what you can and cannot do in a story, and as such reduce the unmanageability of everything being possible into more restricted channels that can guide the flow of a narrative. Something that is shadowy, nebulous, and ill-defined even to the people writing it does not lend itself well to the best writing. Creators need to know how their creations work, even if that information never filters down to the audience.

The extended interview of Alternet’s Joshua Holland with Charles Johnson, the blogger behind Little Green Footballs, makes for remarkable reading. The mechanics of the transition of Little Green Footballs from crazy right-wing blog to something altogether different is important, I think.

JH: You were always kind of an anachronistic right-wing blogger. You’re a highly accomplished jazz guitarist; you always seemed to care about the environment. What were your politics like on September 10 or during the Clinton years?

CJ: My politics in one sense didn’t change because even when I started to be more associated with right-wing blogs and that whole milieu I was still what you call a social liberal. I never went in for the religious right stuff. In fact the rising importance and power of those kind of people in the Republican Party is one of the reasons why I finally had to just go elsewhere.

[. . .]

JH: [. . .A]long the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this day. Geller was behind this ridiculous Ground Zero mosque controversy and was an apparent inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered 70-plus Norwegians last year. Tell me about that incident. And what is Vlaams Belang?

CJ: So you’ve been googling around a bit. Actually the split between me and the far-right blogging scene had begun before that, but that was one of the big schism points. It wasn’t just Pamela Geller, but Robert Spencer and those who called themselves the “anti-Jihad bloggers.” They had gone to Belgium to have a meeting with a bunch of European like-minded bloggers and other personalities. When I discovered that one of the people there was Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, which actually is a successor to a party called Vlaams Blok, which was banned by the Belgian government for their neo-Nazi roots and extreme-right hate speech. What they did is basically reform the image of the party, but didn’t change much else.

When I discovered that this was one of the people they were making alliances with, I said I can’t. This is not for me. I started to criticize people like Pamela Geller. Geller in response started to lash out at me with incredible viciousness, which is kind of her standard mode of operation, and it went from there. Basically the more I looked into and really started to investigate the connections that were forming between these people and the American anti-Jihad blogging scene, the more I realized there’s something really wrong here. We’re talking about people who are fascists, who not only have neo-Nazi connections but also have connections to real, oldtime Nazis, the real Nazis from the Third Reich.

At that point I had a real gut check. It was a moment where things kind of changed — I began to look at things differently.

James Warner’s Open Democracy essay “Government Violence, Human Nature, and The Hunger Games” is an essay that takes a look at American writer Suzanne Collins’ trilogy The Hunger Games and Koushun Takami’s 1999 Battle Royale. These two stories feature children set against each other by their governments, forced to fight to the death for their societies’ edification. Warner contens that the brutal conflicts in these two novels reflect a more optimistic view of the human condition than one might find in the earlier Lord of the Flies, say; the earlier novel presumes that bloody conflict is inevitable, while the contemporary novels see conflict as a consequence of decisions made by more powerful outsiders.

In William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, a group of boys on an island revert to a “state of nature” in the absence of adult supervision. The book is set during, and is on some level about, World War Two, in which Golding served as a Naval officer – but despite the murderous nature of some key governments in that conflict, the point of Lord of the Flies is that the violence ultimately lies within us. Golding wrote of the ending of the novel, “The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?”

Neither The Hunger Games nor Battle Royale bother with the ominous landscape descriptions Golding gives us in Lord of the Flies, partly because for Takami and Collins the evil is not in our nature, but in our government. For the same reason, few of the contestants in these books succumb to delirium as the boys in Lord of the Flies do – with only a few exceptions, they handle their predicament as rationally as if they were competing in a video game. One sense in which Lord of the Flies may be the darkest of these books, despite its comparatively modest death toll – only two murders – is that so many of its characters go mad. Even Ralph, the most clear-headed survivor in Lord of the Flies, keeps forgetting the boys’ long-term goal is to be rescued rather than to thrive as savages, and by the end all the other boys are united in trying to kill Ralph — whereas Katniss in The Hunger Games and Shuya in Battle Royale succeed against the odds in maintaining healthy alliances and remaining focused on a strategy, and only a few minor characters in those worlds go insane.

Moreover when a character in Battle Royale behaves evilly, Takami always supplies an explanation – this boy was born a sociopath, this girl was abused, most of the kids are just scared to trust each other in case they’re taken advantage of – evil is not seen as humanity’s default setting as it is in Lord of the Flies. The Hunger Games is less explicit on this ethical question, but the guiding principle of the series seems to be that people are good until power corrupts them. Both Takami and Collins portray the adult world as one of brutal conflict whose rules frustrate our normal instinct to cooperate. For Ralph, after he’s been hunted, wildness loses its attraction, but Katniss draws power from nature – hunting in the woods is how she becomes resourceful enough to stand up to authority, and it’s significant that even the harmful creatures she encounters there are not naturally occurring species, but mutations artificially engineered by her government.

• 80 Beats notes that the failure of North Korea’s satellite launch has had huge negative consequences for that country: diplomatic, economic, and, of course, internal.
• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton is thankful that, on the eve of the conservative Wildrose Party’s victory over the apparently not-conservative-enough Progressive Conservatives in Alberta, he doesn’t live in that province of Canada.
• Language Log has a guest post by one S. Robert Ramsey defending the esthetics of Korean script vis-a-vis Chinese as part of what seems to be a backhanded attack on Chinese script for its excessive (?) complexities.
• Marginal Revolution links to an interesting new report identifying urban growth in developing countries as the main driver of economic growth in the coming decades.
• Noel Maurer points out, in a defense of Rachel Maddow’s new book on American militarism against one criticism, that in the pre-Second World War era just as now the United States was constantly fighting little wars.
• At Savage Minds, Christopher Kelty is unimpressed by the Archaeological Institute of America’s opposition to open access for papers.
• Slap Upside the Head notes that anti-gay groups are upset with Canada’s BioWare game developer for including the potential for same-sex relationships in its online games–Star Wars is mentioned, but Mass Effect 3 also includes some.
• Towleroad takes apart the argument that the apparently orderly evacuation of the Titanic a century ago was achieved because of Christian values which have now vanished from our godless culture. Where to begin?
• Zero Geography reproduces a map of the top Twitter-using countries and finds that the United States and the United Kingdom rank alongside Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Malaysia. Twitter is global, it seems.

I’ve come across two very considerate essays examining the ways in which social networking bypasses existing journalistic networks and the ethics of their so doing. Jeff Jedras in “Vikileaks and the death of the journalist as news gatekeeper” at A BCer in Toronto talks about the potential for good in removing the shackles of the journalistic establishment from public discourse, while Zeynap Tufekci in “The Syrian Uprising will be Live-Streamed: Youtube & The Surveillance Revolution” at Technosociology talks about the potential bad that comes from allowing every atrocity to be preserved and recorded in minute detail.

First, Jedras. “Vikileaks” refers to @Vikileaks30, a Twitter account created by an unknown person after Canadian Public Security Minister Vic Toews introduced Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. An amendment to the Criminal Code that would give police sweeping powers to intercept individuals’ Internet communications without warrants, the bill was harshly criticized by opposition; Toews responded by saying that opposition MPs could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers.” @Vikileaks30–traced by the Ottawa Citizen to someone operating on the grounds of the House of Commons–then appeared and began tweeting extracts from Toews’ 2008 divorce. Unfettered by the traditional reticence of Canadian journalism, Vikileaks30 revealed that Toews’ marriage apparently came to an end after he fathered a child with his children’s babysitter. After being this revelation, and much scathing criticism besides, it looks like the Conservative government is going to amend this.

Jedras’ view? This, ultimately, is good, since things can’t get hushed up.

What really interests me though is the reaction of the proverbial “main-stream media” to the Vikileaks story, with an Ottawa Citizen piece attempting to trace the IP address of the “@Vikileaks30 leaker” spurring endless speculation and demands to identify the person or persons responsible. It should be noted that had @Vikileaks30 given their documents to a journalist who chose to publish a story based onthem, then the media would be reminding us how important it is to protect the confidentiality of their sources. Even competing outlets wouldn’t try to unmask another journalist’s confidential source. That’s just not cricket, old boy.

[. . .]

Journalists made judgment calls every day on what is news and what isn’t, what people have a right to know, and what isn’t relevant. It’s part of the job in one sense; there’s always more news than column inches or air time. And they see it as a public service. But no one elected them as the arbiters of good taste. They’re accountable to no one but their publisher and the shareholders. It’s a lot of trust, and a lot of responsibility.

The internet, blogging and social media are changing all that however. Now you no longer need a printing press or a television or radio station to publish information to the masses. Anyone with an Internet connection can publish anything they want, and potentially find an audience. And the market will, in away, make its own judgment on its news worthiness. I people find it relevant,they’ll share or re-tweet it and the news finds a wider audience; if they deem it inappropriate it will wither and fade away, perhaps after first being soundly condemned.

What it means, though, is that the role of the traditional media as gatekeeper is drying, if it’s not already dead. With their breadth of reach and size of audience, the regular media is still the fastest way for news to be disseminated to the wider public. But thanks to social media, even if the press deems something“un-newsworthy,” if it gets enough traction online they eventually have no choice but to cover it anyway.

Tufekci’s concern, in contrast, is that the preservation of everything–including every atrocity–and its potential for global transmission will make it impossible for people to forget. Her paradigm is the 2007 filming of an honour killing of an Iraqi Kurdish girl by her Yezidi co-religionists seems to have led directly to al-Qaeda bombings that killed hundreds of Yezidis.

One may wish that stoning death of Yazidi Kurdish young girl Du’a Khalil Aswad in 2007 was never discovered on Youtube, but that seems so trivial compared to wishing that she was never killed in such a cruel, brutal fashion. She was, though, for the alleged crime of seeing a boy of a different faith. She was murdered somewhere early in April 2007 and the video started circulating widely later that month. A few weeks after her killing, and a few months after the video was discovered and made headlines around the world, a series of bombings shook Yazidi villages near Mosul, resulting in about 800 deaths and more than 1,500 injured—making it the single biggest episode of mass killing in an act of political violence since September 11, 2001. While the culprits were never discovered, most observers traced the events to the tensions that began with the video of her death and ended in Al-Qaeda style car-bombs.

The fact that the event was filmed and uploaded to the Internet is quite striking, too, considering the community. The Yazidis are a mostly Kurdish speaking religious group in the Middle East who keep to themselves as much as they can. The reasons for their protectiveness is lengthy and complicated but is related to the fact that a central figure in their faith, Melek Taus is accused of being identical to the Muslim figure of Satan. Having faced much prosecution, and also having a contentious faith in a contentious region, Yazidi society is predicated upon keeping outsiders out and practices strict endogamy—no marriage with outsiders.

Du’a Khalil, just 17 years old, crossed just that line with her alleged relationship with, and rumored conversion to Islam. For that, she was dragged by a few dozen men who proceeded to beat her to death as she curled up on the ground, bleeding. The shaky and grainy video, which I saw in bits over the space of a few days as I could not bear to watch in in a single sitting, shows at least *three* people recording her stoning with cell phones. It is quite stunning to think—not only are they killing her –this secretive, closed society which managed to survive for thousands of years by being so guarded and cautious— her killers felt like they should film this. And, more, upload it to the Internet.

Tufekci, thinking particularly of the huge volumes of material–video, audio, text–coming out of Syria as the incipient civil war takes hold, wonders what will happen in other conflict regions.

I have more questions than answers. What does it mean that everything –ranging from the most trivial but especially the non-trivial– has such a great chance of being available worldwide? Does this level of documentation make it more likely that the international community will be compelled to react to atrocities–which will likely come with higher and higher levels of documentation? Or will this, too, become just background noise, similar to famines or disease in Africa have become for most of the world (except the victims, of course)? Does the level of documentation and surveillance make it harder to establish processes like the Truth and Reconciliation efforts in places ranging from South Africa to Guatemala? Will this amount of documentation of atrocities make divisions even more likely and pernicious–as the ability to forgive often needs some level of forgetting? And the Internet, it seems, does not forget. Will this all make regime bureaucrats more likely to defect—as “I was just pushing paper and had no idea all this was going on” has become an even weaker defense? Or will they cling to power to the very end as much as they can, knowing their victims and survivors have much evidence as well as awful reminders of their crimes?

I don’t have the answers but I’m quite convinced that we’ve entered an irreversible point in terms of documentation of our lives, including death and destruction—not just baby pictures and trips, parties and graduations. There is no going back. And tools matter just as wars with nuclear weapons are different than wars with bows and arrows, a world with cell-phone cameras in every other hand is different than a world which depended on traditional journalists and mass media gate-keepers for its news.

As a commenter at Technosociology points out, the critical issue is whether human compassion will keep pace with human technology.

British/American historian Niall Ferguson is a very smart and deservedly well-recognized man who has written many things worth paying attention to because they are wise about globalization, and many things that will be paid attention to on account of their potentially terrible consequences in the direction of imperialisms past and present. Ferguson’s explicit invocation of “Eurabia”, for instance, lent that poisonous concept mainstream credibility. Writing at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Lemieux made the case that Ferguson’s latest Newsweek column, “Israel and Iran on the Eve of Destruction in a New Six-Day War”, is another example of this type.

It probably felt a bit like this in the months before the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel launched its hugely successful preemptive strike against Egypt and its allies. Forty-five years later, the little country that is the most easterly outpost of Western civilization has Iran in its sights.

Beginning his essay defending an Israeli attack on Iran by explicitly defining Israel as “the most easterly outpost of Western civilization” is a dog whistle to a certain subset of his readers, right?

Anyhow. The central point of Lemieux’s analysis, that Ferguson’s arguments are unserious in that his conclusions (an attack on Iran would be a good thing) could be made to suit any number of interpretations. (Writes Lemieux, “One can start with his inability to decide whether a war would create a massive spike in oil prices or not (whether a “Saudi spike” will mostly cover things depends on what argument he’s making at the time.)”) I find Ferguson’s argument that the Iranian government isn’t an adherent to realpolitik and is uninterested in the survival of the Iranian nation-state more problematic, resting on a partial and inaccurate view of Iranian actions; Ferguson would have done much better to question the viability of an Iranian-Israeli nuclear standoff, given that other nuclear-armed dyads of states (India and Pakistan, for one) have come quite close to nuclear war.

And then, there’s Ferguson’s final sentence: “It feels like the eve of some creative destruction.” Surely the time to joke about potential military catastrophe in the Middle East is not our time?

Yes, yes, Ferguson wrote all this in an article for The Daily Beast. One can legitimately question whether anything written there on foreign policy, or anything else, should be taken seriously. But then one should also wonder why someone wanting to be taken seriously would publish there.

Despite all this, I still like Ferguson. He writes well on many subjects of interest to me. It’s just, well, why is he doing this?

This weekend’s [FORUM] question I put to you: what do you do when the public intellectuals you like, for their style and/or their content, go and make arguments or political statements or demonstrate a terrible lack of judgment? Do you, like me, try to find ways to engage selectively? Is it enough to trigger a break?

Discuss.

Discuss in the comments.

Earlier this month, an article published in the New York Times written by one Eamonn Fingleton, “The Myth of Japan’s Failure”, achieved wide circulation online. Briefly, Fingleton argued that the prevailing picture of Japan as a country stuck in a slump for the past two decades is wrong, that by many measures Japan is thriving–he cites the Japanese trade surplus, growth in life expectancy, and the increasing number of skyscrapers for instance–and that in fact Japan is a stronger country, relatively even, than before.

Spike Japan has none of that. In a very thorough fisking, that Japan blog argues that Fingleton has either cherry-picked evidence to support his case or is an incompetent commentator. For instance, on Fingleton’s report that “of the 50 cities in the world with the fastest Internet service, 38 were in Japan”.

Our first lesson is on the use and abuse of statistics. That the Japanese city with the fastest average Mbps, Shimotsuma, ranked 3rd in the world, is a small Tokyo dormitory community to which very few Japanese could point on a map, and that one of the Japanese “cities” in the top 50, Marunouchi, is not a city, nor even a ward of Tokyo, but a few blocks of office buildings clustered around Tokyo station, make it readily apparent that if you are a largish country for which Akamai has a lot of data collection points and you have a highish average connection speed, then of course you are going to dominate the city rankings. For a more truthful picture of Internet infrastructure, we need to turn to a country-level analysis.

In 2011 Q2, Japan ranked third for average connection speeds, at 8.9Mbps, behind South Korea at 13.8Mbps and Hong Kong at 10.3Mbps. Impressive, to be sure, but not quite the picture of global leadership that Fingleton insinuates it has. Indeed, the broader the metric becomes, the worse the picture looks for Japan: for high broadband connectivity (above 5Mbps), the Netherlands ranks first at 68% of all connections, Japan ranks 6th, at 55%, and the US 13th at 42%, while for good old-fashioned broadband connectivity (above 2Mbps), 10 mostly European countries have penetration rates over 90%, the US ranks 35th at 80%, and Japan is actually behind the US, coming in 39th place at 76%. What’s more, Japan’s high broadband connectivity actually fell 8.9% YoY and its broadband connectivity fell 12% YoY, while the rates of almost all other countries surged. Not all that stellar a performance at the broadest end of the spectrum, especially given how suited relatively small, very densely populated Japan is to the build-out of broadband.

Fingleton goes on at length. Is the number of skyscrapers more relevant a figure than the square footage of real estate that is being used? Can the low Japanese birth rate really be put down to a canny plan to maximize Japanese food security? Why would anyone think that the number of restaurants in Tokyo highly rated in the Michelin guide has any particular relevance to general standards of living, likewise growth in electricity use per capita?

Read the whole post. It’s a devastating, brilliant, fisking of a man whose views on Japan are almost humourously off-kilter. It’s also very good journalism.

I’ve a post up at History and Futility noting the challenges faced by a particular language community–the users of N’Ko script, used by the Manding languages of Africa–and wonder briefly about the effects of the marginalization of relatively disadvantaged language communities. What’s getting missed?

It’s time for me to ask my readers what they want to see more of at A Bit more Detail this year. Photos? Links, annotated and otherwise? Extended format content?

Discuss.