Especially Facebook! Are you out of your mind? You’ve got some very smart people working for you. Go ask some of them why I might not think it’s a swell idea for Facebook, that impenitent mendacious serial offender against privacy and prior consent, to automatically receive ANY information about my activities elsewhere in the online universe.
What next? Are you going to automatically crosslink Google accounts and Google Image results with Facebook’s mega-creepy facial recognition project? You know, the one that’s building an enormous database of real photos linked with real names and online usernames? Facebook has long since made it clear that they’re never going to respect user privacy; and you, dear Google, already know way too much about us all.
Even without their privacy shenanigans I don’t trust Facebook. It’s the anti-internet, a walled garden that wants you to never leave and keep playing that stupid free farm game. It goes against the grain of what the internet is supposed to be, open, free and nobody’s property. The only reason I ever got an account was as a landclaim, but even on the rare times I do login it manages to annoy me in less than a minute.
The Dutch parliamentary elections were held a month after the British elections, yet where the latter had a new government in less than a week, almost two months later we’re still governmentless. Which has everything to do with the fragmented results of the election, as you can see from the graph above. No big winners emerged, instead you had four parties with twenty seats or more and three others with ten to fifteen seats. Which means that to get a majority of 76, at least three parties have to agree to govern, which hasn’t proved easy. None of the traditional coalitions were viable, so instead several other possibilities were explored.
The first was a rightwing government of the PVV (Wilders), CDA and VVD, which went nowhere as the CDA refused to negotiate until VVD and PVV had set aside their differences. Then it was the turn of two other possibilities, a centre left cabinet of no less than four parties: VVD, PvdA, D66 and GroenLinks which seemed promised but fell apart, as did a proper centre coalition of VVD-CDA-PvdA, which would’ve been the first time all three parties worked together in one government…. So now the process has moved full circle as VVD, PVV and CDA are once again negotiating.
Which is worrying. With the current worldwide mania for cutting government spending and slashing social services, having three rightwing parties each firmly convinced of the validity of neoliberal market uber alles thinking, chances are we will see quite a few government services under threat. Already there’s talk of cutting unemployement benefits to one year (even though we’ve always paid employee contributions based on getting multiple year benefits, depending on time of service), as well as e.g. dismantling the central benefits agency UWV in order to “tackle waste”, devolving its tasks to the municipalities instead. To be honest, that would probably do wonders for my own employment, with my extensive experience working for it and its predecessors — imagine all the IT systems a city council needs to buy, install and maintain for this. Imagine also the chaos as every other council decides to buy different software…
Of course, having Wilders and the PVV in government will also be disastrous for anybody not of pure aryan stock, so to speak. The idea at the moment seems to be that CDA and VVD will form a minority government, with strategic support of the PVV, leaving Wilders free to agitate against Muslims. Despite his populistic noises, in economic matters there’s little daylight between PVV and VVD, both happy to slash government budget and mollycoddle the rich, while the PVV in social matter will probably demand some symbolic measures against the “Islamisation of the Netherlands”. Not a happy view to look forward to…
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award is intended to showcase once important but largely forgotten science fiction/fantasy writers, who’ve often slipped out of print. Since its inception in 2001 it has shown an excellent taste, building up a list of great writers, but there’s something different about this year’s winner. Let’s see, shall we? Since 2001 the following writers have won the award:
Olaf Stapledon, 2001: writing outside genre science fiction as a worthy heir to H. G. Wells, novels like Last and First MEn and especially Starmaker were truly cosmic in scale showing how science fiction could escape the petty concerns of everyday life and show how insignificant we really are in the universe, creating an almost religious sense of wonder.
R.A. Lafferty, 2002: cynical, sarcastic, the sharpest wit in science fiction, fond of wordplay but never turning it into punishment, his stories always had a strong moral centre even if it was not always easy to find out exactly which moral centre. Nobody wrote like him before him, nobody writes like him now.
Edgar Pangborn, 2003: one of the most humane science fiction writers, showing how science fiction could hold up a mirror to observers, that it could focus on people as well as on gadgets.
Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, 2004: both were great writers on their own, but together they were also one of the great writing partnerships, in which even they themselves could often not tell who had written which story. C. L. Moore was almost as good a writer of planetary adventures as Leigh Brackett, as well as the creator of one of the great fantasy heroes, Jirel of Joiry, a redheaded warrior popular decades before Roy Thomas would resurrect an obscure Robert E. Howard character as Red Sonja. Kuttner specialised in humourous fantasy and science fiction stories, helping create a truly American fantasy tradition in the spirit of the old European fairy tales.
Leigh Brackett, 2005: the best of the heirs of Edgar Rice Burroughs, better even than the man himself, unsurpassed when it comes ot proper planetary romance and science fantasy, as well as the writer for the best Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back
William Hope Hodgson, 2006: Edwardian writer of horror, ghost stories and fantasy, still very readable today, his best works The House on the Borderland and The Night Land still impressing modern writers like China Miéville.
Daniel F. Galouye, 2007: who wrote a handful of novels, one of which formed the basis of both a seventies German television series directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the 1999 movie The Thirteenth Floor
Stanley G. Weinbaum, 2008: died much too young of a particularly nasty cancer but still managed to be the first writer to create truly alien aliens, back in the 1930ties.
A. Merritt, 2009: a pulp writer of horror and fantasy, massively popular before World War II with multiple movie adaptations of his stories, a friend and influence on H. P. Lovecraft.
Mark Clifton, 2010: co-writer of the worst novel ever to win the Hugo Award.
One of those winners is not like the others… Clifton might not be the worst science fiction writer ever, but does he really need to be rediscovered? Where is the Lionel Fanthorpe Reobscurity Award when you need it?
Jamie writes about strange way in which The Times not just disappeared behind a paywall, but from public consciousness:
But back in the pre-internet days I was certainly aware of the Times as an institution. I had the sense that it would always be there and that it fulfilled a need of some sort. It had an ambient presence, and quite a large one, extending far outside its actual readership.
And now, nothing. Nothing at all. It’s not just a case of not missing it but of forgetting that it was ever there, which is quite odd when you think of the wider social role and meaning it used to have in British life: from Voice of the Establishment to Hermit Kingdom. Or perhaps it’s a consequence of the whole debate about the paywall. If you’re constantly reminded that something is no longer there, then you’re forced to conclude how little it matters. I suppose that’s what happens to hollow institutions when they stop constantly reminding people that they are institutions. I wonder what would happen if you put the Royals behind a paywall.
I’m not sure it’s the dpaywall itself that’s to blame for this. The Times has never had the place in the internet’s public consciousness that a rival paper like The Guardian had. In my own experience, few bloggers actually linked to Times stories and when they did, nine out of ten times the links just disappeared ins blauen hinein anyway. Their competitors like the Indy, Daily Mail and Guardian/Observer were much quicker and smarter in exploiting online attention and controversy, aiming beyond their traditional readers at the casual browser, including large foreign audiences.
The Times has always been something of a prestige object for Murdock, not necessarily needing to make a profit as long as it got the ears of the Westminister elites. Even today that audience is notoriously webshy and technophobe so it maybe that this online disappearance of the newspaper is of less importance than that people like us, for whom nothing exists if not reachable online would assume. That we don’t notice Times generated buzz doesn’t matter, as long as the politicians and Westminister orientated media still do…
Storch Heinar has been around since the winter of 2008, and is the brainchild of a left-leaning youth group called Endstation Rechts — which translates as “last stop for the right wing” — set up to combat right-wing extremism in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony. As members of the groups discussed the opening of a “Nazi shop” selling, among other things, Thor Steinar in the middle of Rostock over a bottle or two of wine one night, they decided to respond by starting their own clothing label. And so the tale of the unhappy stork was born. “We were not drunk though,” Mathias Brodkorb, a Social Democrat and member of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state parliament, one of the people behind Storch Heinar, told the daily Die Tageszeitung.
Storch Heinar’s popularity has increased over time, no doubt due partially to increased local media coverage of the brand — the range of goods available via their website is now large enough to include baby bibs and Frisbees and the brand has around 4,000 fans on Facebook. The label has sold “more than we thought it would,” Brodkorb told news weekly Focus. The profits fund the work of Endstation Rechts. Storch Heinar is only a small, and relatively uncomplicated, part of their work, Brodkorb, 33, who studied philosophy and classics, explained to Die Tageszeitung: “We are all fixated on neo-Nazis and often we overlook more subtle opportunities for people to be inhumane and right wing extremist.”
[...]
Unsurprisingly, Mediatex GmbH, do not like any of this. The owners of Thor Steinar are known for their litigiousness and, as one local commentator put it: “Right wing extremism and humor go together like combat boots and Birkenstock sandals.”
Brodkorb told local media that the day after Storch Heinar was founded, the company that owns Thor Steinar tried to copyright the avian name. They were rejected. Mediatex then filed a complaint against Brodkorb, saying that Storch Heinar was injuring and “disparaging Thor Steinar.” The case went to court on Wednesday in Nuremberg. The small group behind Storch Heinar has been raising funds to fight the case — they even have a new T-shirt for sale that boasts the garment’s owner is part of the rescue team for the beleaguered bird.
Germans do have a sense of humour, but those who hanker back to the good old days of the Third Reich? Not so much.
Plenty of metal bands starting with “R”, but none that I actually like all that much. Rainbow? Rush? Not my cup of tea to be honest. The only band I actually got music from at the moment is Rammstein and personally I always think of that as industrial rather than metal, though I do have a fairly personal definition of industrial, true. So what the hey, let’s have some Rammstein anyway.
The band is actually named after that US Airforce base, Ramstein, which you may know of that horrible airshow disaster back in ‘88. Their self-titled song on their first album Herzeleid refers back to that disaster:
As per usual when any German band actually sings in German, goes for a heavy sound, goes for militaristic looking outfits and dark lyrics, they’re accused of glorifying nazism or terrorism. To be fair, Rammstein does like to challenge their critics, with songs like this:
Actually one of their less offensive songs about (homo)sexuality and such — Buck Dich:
And let’s end with two videos for the (old) superpowers — Amerika:
