The War On Democracy
http://seesmic.com/Standalone.swf?video=5TvZKvFuQf
Watch “The War On Democracy” on Google Video.
US “Defence” Budget to exceed $1 TRILLION in 08
The world’s largest arms dealer, the USA, which is also the country with the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons (it maintains a current arsenal of around 9,960 intact warheads… how many DO you need to destroy the world?), will spend more that $1 trillion on “defence” for the first time in history in 2008, according to this article in Le Monde. I put inverted commas around “defence” because their current strategy of non-UNSC sanctioned pre-emptive attacks can hardly be called “defence”. It’s a typical PR sleight-of-hand. Let’s call it what it is. It’s an “ATTACK” budget.
As part of this $1 trillion, the US will spend $23.4bn towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads.
As part of this $1 trillion, the US will spend $23.4bn towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads.
The older I get, the more I read, and the more unconvinced I am becoming that democracy and capitalism contain the model for the future for the human race. If the USA is the beacon of modern democracy, then I believe we need a new system, a better system.
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Twittories – Day Three
So I launched the idea of Twittories late last week while suffering from a creative outburst fuelled by rage and caffeine. We actually started the first story, “The Darkness Inside” on Tuesday this week, and since then I’ve been fascinated by how people are moving the story along and the sense of anticipation that I feel and, judging by some of the things I’m seeing written on Twitter, others are feeling as well.
I wrote the first line of the story but I have no idea (or control) what it is even going to be about? Since my first line we’ve already seen the introduction and murder (perhaps? he isn’t dead yet, just poisoned) of a second character. And we’re only up to submission #16!
Duncan wrote about Twittories on TechCrunch yesterday and it got the usual bullshit TechCrunch criticisms in the comments. It makes me laugh how many people are the living embodiment of Comic Book Guy. Anyway, it was hopefully great exposure for us. Most of the TC criticism tends to come from two angles: it isn’t original and it isn’t “literature”.
I think both of these are worth exploring further because they are what I expected the doubters to say. Duncan, as he usually does, also wrote some profoundness about the idea which made me think about it in more detail.
“It isn’t original.” Mitts Kane sez “People have been doing this kind of round robin story forever, both on and off the internet, so I guess this is interesting just because it’s Twitter? And just as I am one of those who never got the point of Twitter… I don’t get this either.” The point, Mitts, is that we have 140 people contributing to a story as a form of entertainment. I had a terrible time trying to write the first line, it was very daunting. I don’t know if the other authors have felt the same kind of pressure to write something that not only needs to take the story somewhere, but is going to do so in a very public environment. I’m also enjoying the tension waiting to see where the story will go next. What genre will it be? Already we seem to be veering from Hammet to Asimov to Stross and back again to Hammet. Will the story deteriorate into complete crap? Perhaps. Many might say it already has. But I’m enjoying it a lot. Getting back to originality… writing books isn’t original either Mitts. If I wrote a book today, would you diss it because someone did it before? Being a cheap critic isn’t original either but you seem happy in the role.
“It isn’t literature.” On TechCrunch, Marc wrote: “Besides the fact that this was invented years ago by the surrealist group in Paris under the nice knickname of “cadavres exquisâ€, it also is a very nice way to ban litterature from the end result. Just figure out that with Proust for example, you wouldn’t even have reach the main verb with 140 digits. It is SMS style logorrhea, and definitively not writing. Sorry.”
According to Wikipedia (tranlated from French into English),:
It was invented in the house of 54 rue du Château inhabited Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. It has changed from a fun activity, according to André Breton: “Although, as a defense, sometimes, this activity has been called, by us,” experimental “, we are looking for first and foremost entertainment. What we have been able to discover valuable in relation to the knowledge no one came then. “(Medium No. 2, 1954)
Entertainment! Aha! Literature my ass. Bite me, Marc. “Definitely not writing”. Jesus, what a dickhead.
Anyway, as David Lee Roth once said “If you stick your head above the crowd, someone’s going to throw a rotten tomato at it.” I love getting my philosophy of life from DLR. He da man.
SO what are the normal people from around the world saying about Twittories? Here’s a few snaps from across Twitter:
descentintomael in love with twittories.wikispaces.com
chrisvdberge zijn er mensen hier die meedoen met Twittories?
nickellis Meu post sobre o Twittories…
plivings Interesting to view the Twittories history because it reflects time zones – hoping I’m awake when it comes around!
genarobardy check twittory très drôle
JBO Historias Twitter – http://twittories.com – Realidad o ficcion 140 caracteres a la vez
Pixites bekijkt http://twittories.wikispaces.com/ ideetje om roman (netje?) te schrijven
Kodo glad i didnt sign up for twittories, no way i couldkeep up the high standard being set
dpn is it just me or has twittories increased everyones tpm rate? (twits per minute) Everyone seems to just be hanging around on twitter.
jjprojects @Warlach Added quite a few of the Twittory participants who I weren’t following – many have reciprocated.
thadeum e os filhotes de twitter continuam a surgir: http://twittories.wikispaces.com/
I like this post by Josh Spear as well:
It was only a matter of time before someone started leveraging the phenomenon that is Twitter for something more creative than a branded RSS feed of daily specials. That someone is Twittories, and despite their decidedly lo-fi look, the idea behind the project is awesome. Think of it as the SMS version of those stories you had to write in English class, where you’d write for two minutes and then pass the paper on to someone else. Twittories is the same thing, only it happens 140 characters at a time. And each person is only allowed to make one entry per story. A story is finished when it reaches 140 entries (just to keep the numbers nice and round). The first Twittory is called The Darkness Inside, and it’s started off pretttttttty interesting. There’s already talk of killing a man…
The whole Twittories thing exposure, combined with the general explosion of Twitter over the last couple of days with Jeremiah’s post hitting Techmeme, has pushed me up the in the Tweeterboard rankings. It won’t last, trust me. I’m not that popular.
And if I needed reminding of that fact, some gutless wonder is using TwitSecret to say I’m up myself. All I have to say to gutless is… fuck, you are so gutless. If you want to bag me out, put your name on it, chickenshit. Do it to my face. Fucking punk-ass bitch. I’ll rip your half-empty achondroplasian head off and stick it up your ass. And then we can BOTH be up ourselves.
Free Will debate in Second Life
We had a massive debate at TPN HQ last night (until my internet access dropped out at midnight and didn’t return) about the subject of free will which was kicked off in a massive twitter debate during the day.
My central postulate was this: if every decision you have is a thought: and if a thought is an autonomous electro-chemical process in the brain: then to claim to have free will, you have to be able to explain how you create a thought outside the process of causality.
The discussion got fairly heated at one point when I (probably wrongly) threatened to eject Dave from The Global Geek Podcast if he kept interrupting me. Sorry Dave, probably harsh. Belinda says I get like that during debates.
Anyway, nobody in the room was able to explain to me how they create a thought except to say “I think them”, which, in my opinion, is a circular argument, because the next question is “how did you decide to think that thought?”.
My other suggestion was that if you are in control of your thoughts, you should be able to stop having them. I suggested everyone in the room stop thinking for ten minutes, and when everyone agreed they couldn’t do that, I asked how they could claim to be in control of the creation of thoughts if they couldn’t stop them at will also? This lead to lots of angst and “but but but” retorts, none of which held any water.
Second Life is a pretty good environment for having discussions like this with people from around the world in real time, although you still suffer from the issue of having 20 people trying to talk at once at times. We need a virtual talking stick to pass around or something. Perhaps someone should create one.
G’Day World Book Club Recommends: Fidel Castro “My Life”
Yesterday I was presented with an early Xmas gift from Nick Hodge – Fidel Castro’s “My Life”, a recently published volume of interviews conducted by Ignacio Ramonet, the long-time editor of the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique, professor of communication at the University Denis Diderot in Paris and founder of Media Watch Global.
This has jumped to the very top of my reading list.
Ramonet spent one hundred hours interviewing Castro between 2003 and 2005. Castro then reviewed the entire manuscript in 2006. This, then, is the closest we will ever get to having Fidel Castro’s autobiography.
Ramonet says he wrote it because young people around the world know little of the truth about Castro. After 48 years of American negative propaganda against him and the Cuban Revolution, the perception of Castro is mostly negative. He is perceived as a brutal dictator, a relic from the Cold War. Ramonet, however, paints a very different picture of the man. He describes him as “shy, a polite, affable man who pays attention to each person he talks to and speaks without affectation, yet with the manners and gestures of a somewhat old-fashioned courtesy that has earned him the title of ‘the last Spanish gentleman’.” He is also “indefatigable” – in his eighties, he still sleeps on average 4 hours a night, working through until five or six am every day, with his entourage of young assistants asleep on their feet. He lives frugally, with no luxury spent on himself – no palaces for Fidel. He is a man with a never-ending series of Big Ideas.
Ramonet writes of Castro:
“Moved by humanitarian compassion and internationalist solidarity, he has a dream, which he has spoken about a thousand times, of bringing health and knowledge, medicines and education, to every corner of the planet.
As for Cuba itself, Ramonet writes:
“Although the face of Fidel is often in the press, on television and in the street, there is no official portrait, nor is there a statue or coin or avenue or building or monument dedicated to Fidel Castro or any other living leader of the Revolution.
Despite the unceasing harassment from abroad, this little country, clinging to its sovereignty, has achieved undeniably admirable results in the area of human development: the abolition of racism, the emancipation of women, the eradication of illiteracy, a drastic reduction in infant mortality rates, a higher level of general knowledge…. In questions of education, health, medical research and sports, Cuba has achieved results that nany developed nations would envy.
Despite the persistent attacks by the United States and the 600 assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Cuba has never responded with violence. For forty-eight years, not a single act of violence encouraged or sponsored by Cuba has occurred in the United States.”
Cuba gets (and deserves) criticism from Amnesty International for some of its policies which deny it’s citizens civil freedoms, such as the freedom of association, freedom of opinion, freedom of movement, and the use of the death penalty. However there are no reported cases of torture in Cuba or ‘disappearances’, the murder of journalists or political assassinations or protest marchers beaten by police. There has NEVER been a popular uprising against the regime – in nearly fifty years. To understand why Cuba has some of those civil freedom restrictions, you have to understand the forces trying to destroy Cuba.
The Unites States government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in this decade alone trying to oust Castro, through NGO’s such as the “National Endowment for Democracy” (NED) and the “United States Agency for International Development” (USAID), which alone has delivered over $65 million to anti-Castro groups since 1996. According to Ramonet, hundreds of journalists around the world are paid to spread negative propaganda about Castro. Funding is provided by the USA to terrorist organisations hostile to the Cuban government such as Alpha 66 and to the now-perhaps-disbanded Omega 7.
Cuba has been under a devastating and evil economic embargo from the USA since 1960, severely crippling its economy, and yet Castro continues to defy their attempts to destroy the Revolution. He has survived relentless attacks on his person and his country by the most powerful economic and military superpower on the planet for 48 years while continuing to improve the living conditions of the 11 million citizens of Cuba.
The key to understanding Cuba and Castro is that you have to understand what life was like back before the Revolution when Cuba was governed by a series of corrupt and brutal regimes directly supported by the US government and US corporations. The quality of life for the citizens of Cuba was terrible. Castro changed all of that. He ousted Bastista’s corrupt regime and the US interests that backed it. He has significantly improved the living conditions of the Cuban people, all while fighting off the US government’s continued attempts on his life.
Please – read this book.
How To Get Scammed In Second Life
Well today I learned a few lessons in Second Life.
About three weeks ago, I rented my first land in Second Life with the idea of experimenting to see how TPN could use it to spend more time with our community. I rented the land from an avatar called Rich Bulloch (who also apparently goes by the avatar Dog Fargis). We paid six months in advance and it wasn’t a lot of money – about L$20,000 for six months (about US$80). After about a week on our first block of land, Rich sez he has a bigger block, a whole island, we could rent for a bit more L$. I asked Rich if there were any “gotchas” on the new island and he said it was “low prim” (1874). Being a complete n00b, I asked him what the practical implications were of that and he told me it limited what we could build. It was twice the prims we had on the previous block however, so we upgraded.
The first thing I learned pretty fast is the real implication of “low prim”. We ran out of building room pretty fast. Everything you want to build on your real estate in SL requires “prims” or “primitives”, like building blocks. And when you use up all of your prims, you can’t build anything else – buildings, chairs, etc. So we figured out pretty quickly that we were going to have to move again.
Little did I realize how soon….
This morning I found out that Rich Bulloch, who was renting the land himself from a Gigs Taggart, is behind in HIS rent and as a result, I’m getting evicted from my island. Gigs claims he hasn’t heard from Rich is over a week and Rich is way behind on his rent. So Gigs is evicting us! We can rent the land ourselves from Rich but he wants US$114 a MONTH. Remember I’ve already paid Rich about US$150 for SIX MONTHS. That’s a pretty big rental rise and way more than I had budgeted for.
I tried contacting Rich myself but his profile said he hadn’t been online for a week. So I IM’d the R & A Realty Group, Rich’s group of tenants, and asked them if Rich is a scammer. That started a slanging match between a few members of the group until I finally got a private message from one of Rich’s friends, telling me it was all a very big mess, that Rich wasn’t a scammer, that it was all her fault, involved “mafia stuff”, and that Rich would refund my money by Wednesday. I told her that even if it wasn’t Rich’s fault, he should get in contact with his tenants and explain why they were getting evicted. I paid him money in good faith, not I’m getting kicked off my land. I gave her my email address and asked her to pass it onto Rich.
A few minutes later I got an email from Rich saying:
well i tell ya what i will get you in the next few days all the proof that it was paid that is how i paid threw paypal but i did cancle that account afterwords but i have spoke with paypal and they are gathering the info where i did pay him i will make sure you get copies of that also they will be faxing it to me within 48 hours and i will make sure you get copies of it to post with your blog if you would like gigs is saying something deffernt and i will not fight with him in world i am letting sl take care of that issue for me and paypal for charge back
Okay, so… I may see my money back (not that it was a lot of money) and there are some lessons learned.
1. Second Life needs a good way of reference checking who you are dealing with. Ebay has a pretty good (though not infallible) rating system. These things may already exist. If they do, I’m not aware of them and it would be good to have them built into an avatar’s profile for handy reference. Rich’s profile in SL was only a month old when we rented from him. Probably should look for someone with a longer track record?
2. I deliberately jumped into my first land rental without ANY research, knowing I might get hurt, but wanting to learn. And I’m a big believer in LEARNING BY DOING, as long as while you are DOING you minimize your downside. This time I’m going to do some more research before we get new TPN land. I’m talking to people like Duncan Riley and Jeremy Chase (from the Second Life mafia, as heard on G’Day World #105). Duncan sez we should buy our own land, not rent. Sounds like a good plan, if I can afford it.
I want TPN HQ to be a place where our audience can experience and experiment with Second Life, learn the rules, find their Slegs, in a safe and encouraging environment. So I’d rather I learn these lessons and be able to pass them on. I’m fairly resilient. 🙂
Bye Bye for now TPN HQ. 🙁