The full implications of what amounts effectively to a military coup in the most populous and pivotal Arab state are not yet clear.
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The Economist, always with the sunny side. |
In all sincerity, regardless of the current circumstances, I never intended to be a candidate for another term.
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What a fucking asshole. (Also, !!!(…?)) |
Something about the Egypt situation, briefly
I’ve seen some articles and posts going back and forth about the role of various internets in the Egypt protests. Similar notions got an extended discussion re: events in Iran. There was that Gladwell piece a few months ago (somewhat in response) that drew fire from uncritical web cheerleaders for daring to say that marching for civil rights took more courage and had more affect than Tweeting for it would have.
At the same time, it’s been repeated that the protesters are young, cosmopolitan, “west-friendly”, etc. This is an important issue in terms of the US government stance. Support for Mubarak (among other regional authoritarians, including Saddam, over the decades) has been partly due to concern that the alternative would be worse. Specifically, a fundamentalist regime more difficult to deal with (see the Shah followed by Iran’s Islamic republic).
There are some troubles with all this. “Inside every Muslim is secular westerner waiting to get out”, maybe you can be modern/want democracy and be religious (even dangerously fundamentalist), etc.
That’s sort of beside the point though. I think the discussion is ridiculously narrowly construed when it focuses on fairly recent technology novelties. “Globalization” is kind of a ruined term but it’s the one I’m tempted to use. New interconnections form, yes, through information technology itself but that’s just one pathway and not one that appeared in isolation as if by magic. Economic pressures forced repressive regimes to accept technology they might be have been suspicious of. Increased trade brought exposure to all sorts of things that widened perspectives. Mubarak has been in power for 30 years. There have been cultural changes in the US since 1980 too.
Like I said, briefly. It’s a terrible false dichotomy to argue over whether “social media causes revolutions in the Middle East”, which actually seems to be on some people’s minds at times. The current leading edge of information technology is an example of larger (world-)historical forces that apply pressure against consolidations of authority that attempt to restrict movement, expression, creation, exchange, etc. Obviously there are reactive forces at work as well that facilitate those instances of control and constriction, but they aren’t reducible to technological proclivities either.
“sufficiently accurate for poetry”
Babbage once contacted the poet Alfred Tennyson in response to his poem “The Vision of Sin”. Babbage wrote,
“In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads,
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.… If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next version of your poem should read]:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.”
(Wikipedia gives Charles Babbage a whole “Eccentricities” section.)
Behold the new official logo of HTML5! From the W3C site for it:
It stands strong and true, resilient and universal as the markup you write. It shines as bright and as bold as the forward-thinking, dedicated web developers you are. It’s the standard’s standard, a pennant for progress.
Remarkable times we’re living in.
(This is actually sort of interesting(?). The idea is for the developer/standards community to push an HTML5 brand to associate with sites that use new features of the specification. I guess one of the goals might be to help everyone finally move on from worrying about sites working in really old versions of Internet Explorer. The notion would be that once normal humans get hip to HTML5’s new aesthetic and killer features (…) they’ll stop blaming sites that don’t work on ancient browsers and, after like a decade, start blaming their own shitty browsers. How could the awesome website with even awesomer logo be at fault? Also, t-shirts!)
Wrench
izs:
When you have a wrench, all problems look like fucked up nail that didn’t get hammered in quite right.
But if you pull on it, you can straighten it, so really, I don’t see what the problem is, I mean, it couldn’t be more obvious, and clearly, a wrench is the best tool for any jobs it can do.
It’s a really nice wrench, if people would just learn to use it properly, then their nails would be fine.
