Viceland.com has produced an amazing series titled “The Vice Guide to Liberia” that is an excellent and engaging piece of media on the founding and history of Liberia, together with a gruesome review of the civil war that plagued the country through the late 1990s and early 00s.

“This is like a civil war on steroids, a post-apocalyptic armageddon with child soldiers smoking heroin, cross-dressing cannibals, systematic rape, it’s total hell on earth.”

But for those of you read this and think the world is beyond hope, don’t forget that General Butt Naked, who makes an appearance in the opening of the documentary, has been saved by Jesus, and there’s now a documentary out on his redemption, The Redemption of General Butt Naked.

When Eris, the Greek goddess of strife, dropped the apple of discord in front of Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, the bickering that ensued over who was “the fairest” was both pointless and unworthy. Furthermore, in tragic Greek fashion, it is said to have led to the ten year Trojan War.

“Eristic” might be what the West’s greatest philosopher Socrates would call America’s political rhetoric — exemplified by the town hall meetings — submits The Economist in its Christmas edition. In a lengthy, almost Kaplanesque article, The Economist gives a short history of the classical philosopher and applies his lessons to modern day America. The demagoguery of American political media is nothing new, pointed out as often as it is prevalent. Socrates would have seen that “Eris is present in presidential debates, in court rooms and wherever people are talking not to discover truth but to win.” Arguing to win. Victory is more important than truth lamented Mark Bowden. This is a sad fact of modern political commentary, a distortion of classical rhetoric or “the effective use of language”. Constructive debate has no place among those that think it is their right to be always right.

The fast pace and short form of our media (television, radio, blogs, etc.) only contribute to the confusion. From The Economist:

In 1968 Stringfellow Barr, an historian and president of St John’s College in Maryland, wrote a Socratic critique of American discourse: “There is a pathos in television dialogue: the rapid exchange of monologues that fail to find the issue, like ships passing in the night; the reiterated preface, ‘I think that…,’ as if it mattered who held which opinion rather than which opinion is worth holding; the impressive personal vanity that prevents each ‘discussant’ from really listening to another speaker”.

“Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes” noted Voltaire. I think most informed individuals would agree that proper contribution to the discussion is lacking. But that leads to a new problem: how do we know who is informed and who is not? We know by judging their arguments. More than opinion we need the basic skills of philosophical inquiry that Socrates promoted (in life as well as in death). To make the country a better place the citizenry need the semaphore skills to communicate effectively between “ships passing in the night”. Without those skills we will continue talking past one another, or worse, will not be able to avoid a collision, another Trojan tragedy. The earlier that critical thinking and argumentation skills are taught the better. Then maybe we can make nullify the point made by Bertrand Russell: “Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.”

Read: Arguing to death: Socrates in America

Seeing December 1st as a key day in the unfolding Dubai crisis, I decided to pick up a copy of Emirates Business 24/7, the local version of the Wall Street Journal, and present to you a cross-section of business and finance headlines from the first few pages.

• UAE a strong resource-based economy: IMF
• UAE banks have sufficient capital, says Al Suwaidi. Caption to main photo reads, “The Central Bank says the banking system was more sound than a year ago.”
• Dubai World revamp not to affect sovereign rating
• Dubai will be able to manage debt, says EIU. Large caption block quote reads, “I believe Dubai will pull through as it has the resources and the experience to do so.” Humam Al Shamma, Al Fajer Securities
• IMF welcomes UAE decision to shore up banks
• US bank exposure is “very manageable”. A color photo of Dubai’s busy Sheik Zayed Rd. is captioned by the words, “Dubai’s core competence as a logistics and trade centre will help carry it through the crisis, says EIU.”
• “Media confusion needs correction”. Inexplicably, the second line of the article is: “Lieutenant-General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, Commander-in-Chief of Dubai Police… said the debt owed by the government is nominal.” There is also a picture of the offier with a gruff scowl and wearing a uniform that looks like a pseudo-military police officer found in many parts of the world.

Basically, I agree with the sentiment encapsulated in the paper. Dubai will muddle through this crisis and the lifestyle available here will keep it the place to headquarter businesses doing regional work in the Middle East. But it’s done a horrendous public relations job in asking the world for a break on its debt. The global credibility of “Brand Dubai” has been badly damaged.

But the articles listed above, particularly the last article, display the scary element of media censorship here. Why on earth does anyone care what the chief of police thinks of global finance? Is he going to arrest me if I disagree? Well, not likely—but there are criminal sanctions for criticizing the rulers of Dubai, and that abstractly extends to their management of the economy. The ruling elite have chosen to adopt the sponsorship of Pyongyang-esque media coverage—see the recent censorship of the London Times for the relatively harmless comment of calling the Sheikh a “benign dictator.” (The online article can be accessed, however.) This type of information control may have provided short term gain, but it ultimately invites ridicule and doubt about local press coverage. Consider this comment:

While public criticism of the authorities here has been relatively muted – which is understandable, given that you can face criminal charges for disparaging the ruling Maktoum family – private criticism is rife. This is especially true of the thousands of expatriates living here. Mostly, the discontent expresses itself in gallows humor: Idle bankers at the now desolate Dubai International Finance Center, for instance, have taken to calling it the Dubai International Food Court. Occasionally, though, the talk takes an ugly, conspiratorial turn: We’re living in a police state. They’re going to throw us all in jail. They want us out.

Far from calming during a crisis, the optimism of local press in dire times has a frightening effect on educated readers. The time to cancel media censorship, which does more harm than good to Dubai’s rulers, may be now.

Over at CA’s “sister blog” mutantfrog.com (where I am also a regular contributor), there is a very lengthy discussion going on regarding a recent case in Japan where an American father tried to snatch his kids away from his estranged ex-wife. The details of the case are murky and messy, and still not clear two weeks after the incident, but a big problem with the breaking of the case to the international media was the liberal reporting of “facts” by CNN’s correspondents. And in a subsequent story covered by the same CNN correspondents, a US father caring for his disabled child in Japan came across as bizarre because the facts were so muddled—asking the most rudimentary questions about the story result in a pretty clear conclusion that the facts are just wrong (which I also looked at on the same blog here).

Well, it turns out that the mistakes on that story are not a result of institutional Orientalism. CNN apparently has a problem at its very core—a failure to check facts, and there is a habit of the organization to report anything heard as fact without double checking anything. This was the subject of a brutal evisceration of the network by the Daily Show that I thought was worth sharing with readers.

Fox News is also regularly skewered by the Daily Show team, but mocking the blatantly biased attitude of that media source is just too easy. The CNN analysis is clever yet troubling—if “The Most Trusted Name in News” can’t even bother to check facts, democracy loses its ability to function.

Evgeny Morozov (who also blogs at FP) has been a long-time critic of the notion that the internet is ultimately a liberalizing force in international politics. His contrarian views on tech in authoritarian regimes are always thought-provoking. In the TEDtalk below, Morozov lays out his case against “cyber-utopianism” and “iPod liberalism”. I would also recommend reading the comments which offer more information and some contrary views.

Autobiographical note: As many may know, my graduate thesis was on Chinese-Japanese competition over energy resources. Before switching to that topic at the last minute, I was working on the use of the internet and blogs by Iranian mullahs and political activists. Imagine my sense of regret at the missed opportunity during the Twitter revolution in Iran earlier this year.

Robert Kaplan’s latest essay at The Atlantic reveals his love for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based independent news network of the Middle East. This might be surprising to those critics that think Kaplan is a neocon, but his love is not one without criticisms. Kaplan has been long suspicious of the international news media. Even though this article is about Al Jazeera, he goes out of his way to get a few hard digs in on Fox News, “with its jingoistic, meatloaf provincialism”:

Could Fox cover the world as Al Jazeera does, but from a different, American-nationalist perspective? No, because what makes Fox so provincial is its utter lack of interest in the outside world in the first place, except where that world directly and obviously affects American power.

Five years ago Kaplan wrote of media’s “tyranny” in his critical essay The Media and Medievalism. In that article he makes only two references to Al Jazeera. The first, a criticism of biased reporting during fighting in Fallujah which depicted “a low civilian casualty rate” as “indiscriminate killing”; the second where he controversially describes AJ as “a product of the creeping liberalization of Middle Eastern society for which the American military deserves partial credit.”

Kaplan’s view on AJ’s political bias has not changed. In The Atlantic he describes it as “inherently pro-Palestinian, as well as deeply hostile to American military power.” But it goes deeper than that:

According to Al Jazeera, the politically weak, merely by being so, are automatically in the right.

It is this — what Kaplan calls “A certain kind of moral equivalency” — that is AJ’s weakness, and the philosophical shortcoming of the so-called Left as seen by moral relativists like Kaplan and other pessimistic realists. Despite this shortcoming, Kaplan enjoys the coverage of Al Jazeera, and claims in the face of myopic networks like Fox, “we have really no other serious news channel to turn to.”

I have had Al Jazeera’s streaming app (iTunes Store link) on my iPhone for a few weeks now and have been amazed by the production quality and breadth of coverage. I don’t watch it often though, as my news consumption is much more specialized and streamlined. I do not have much time to waste on one-way broadcast.

Read Why I Love Al Jazeera at The Atlantic Online.

In the comments on my post about preparing your child for the coming anarchy an interesting side conversation broke out, one that I thought deserved its own post. The consensus of the commentary on that post was that reading was an important skill to encourage critical thinking and an interest in the world. Then controversy arose when one commenter called Orson Scott Card “a Motherf*cking Bigot” and I agreed. I said:

I couldn’t believe it. After reading Ender I was like “This book is great! Who is the authour?” and turns out he is a hardcore Mormon religious nutbar. I almost regret looking it up because now I find it hard to enjoy his other writing.

M-BONE related his own experience of being put off by HP Lovecraft’s anti-semitism. Lexington Green on the other hand, chided us:

An artist’s work, his art, is what matters. All the other stuff that he does is irrelevant. Judging Card or Lovecraft for their political views is like saying that a brilliant brain surgeon’s work is diminished because he cannot make a good ham sandwich. Further, artists are often weird, out of step people.

Thus the question: should the ideological and political background of an author influence the reading of his work?

I think this is an interesting line of debate, and would like to continue it here in a new thread. Below the fold I have reproduced the relevant comments from the parenting post. Read through and post your thoughts below.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Newsweekly’s Last Stand
The Atlantic Monthly (July/August pp.48-53)

Michael Hirschorn ponders the success of The Economist newsweekly in the increasingly paperless news economy. His analysis is largely business strategy and the article misses the point as evidenced in it’s comparisons with TIME and Newsweek. Unlike those magazines The Economist is a global publication from a global perspective.

My subscription to The Economist has continued for years. It was the first magazine I ever subscribed to (I have always been more of a book reader). My experience with The Economist led me to try subscribing to The Atlantic Monthly and most recently Foreign Policy. My experience with those two publications has been lacklustre. They are far too America-centric. This is understandable for The Atlantic, which positions itself as a journal for American intellectualism. I basically pick out the articles by Kaplan, Hitchens and Bowden and skim the rest. I could do just as well online. FP on the otherhand should be more international, but is squarely in that camp sometimes referred to derogatorily as “American political science”.

I am not American so it is understandable that I tire of endless US-centric analyses. I would have thought, however, that America would have the resources to produce a weekly or monthly publication with a truly global perspective. The large percentage of US-bound subscriptions to The Economist proves that their is domestic demand for such a perspective.

It’s high time that I profiled one of the best miniseries on television of all time: the House of Cards trilogy. The three titles—The House of Cards, To Play the King, and Final Cut—total twelve hours, and together constitute one of the most beautiful and up-close views of how power and politics can be deliciously used and abused for personal gain. Get it on Amazon or Bit Torrent.

The series is focused on Francis Urquhart, who starts the series as the Chief Whip of the Conservative Party in the days after Margaret Thatcher. The character is played by the late Ian Richardson, a veteran Shakespearean stage actor. The character known by his initials of “FU” is both evil and lovable, the true anti-hero who lies, cheats, seduces, terrorizes, defrauds, and murders his way to gain and maintain power. (Ian Richardson’s portrayal of the archetypal Machiavellian politician was so popular with the British public that one of his last performances was reading Machiavelli’s The Prince, which you can buy on Amazon here.) What’s more, he speaks to the audience throughout the series, almost making the audience complicit to his acts, part of a delightful grand conspiracy. What do I mean by that? Check out the opening few minutes of the series below.

It would be criminal to reveal to readers the conclusion of any of the episodes of the trilogy, but needless to say the “bad guy” protagonist survives both in his political career and physical body long enough to provide for a three-part series. In these episodes he faces off against his own party members in a power struggle; the new King and the institution of the monarchy itself; and the men and women of the cabinet who are supposed to be his loyal ministers and honorable friends.

And the series is so delightful that it’s probably the series I’ve seen repeatedly so many times over any other series or movie ever. For those who enjoy raw politics, I can’t recommend the House of Cards trilogy enough.

So I happened across this article and was prepared to post it with a comment on how barbarous this Saudi proposal appeared:

A Saudi inventor’s proposal to insert semiconductors subcutaneously in visitors and remotely kill them if they misbehave will not be patented in Germany.

On Wednesday, a German Patent Office spokeswoman said the application was received on October 30, 2007 and published 18 months later, as required by law, in a patents database. But inventions that are unethical or a danger to the public are not recognized.

Reporters said the document proposed that tiny semiconductors be implanted or placed by injection under the skin of people so their whereabouts could be tracked by global-positioning satellites. This could be used to prevent immigrants overstaying.

A model B of the system would contain a poison such as cyanide, which could be released by remote control to “eliminate” people if they became a security risk. The document said this could be used against terrorists or criminals.

a) Saudi Arabia hardly patents anything;
b) to make such a chip that cannot be readily removed would be a real challenge (see: James Bond in Casino Royale);
c) to have enough power to deliver a lethal dose of anything in such a device would be a real challenge; and
d) to have an antenna that could pick up a signal remotely seem highly unlikely.

Of course, such tracking chips exist in pets, but you have to get REAL close to detect them.

But that’s just the common sense test. I did a patent search, and there it is no sign of such a device. Note that EU and WO Patents get a published review, and if a Patent has a review it will have an A1 or A3 at the end.

As this is an Iranian news site making the Saudis out to look like barbarians, maybe that’s what’s behind the story…?