Found this video by accident, a couple of young dudes on a road somewhere in the US being stopped by a copper because the passenger is videotaping his mate, which is supposedly illegal.
What I actually wanted to see was this video, for Palau: a baby sloth yawning:
Which just is the most adorable thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Interesting new research paper on the decline of long lived coup regimes:
In this paper, we use new data on coup d’etats and elections to uncover a striking change in what happens after the coup. Whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1990 installed their leaders durably in power, between 1991 and 2001 the picture reverses, with the majority of coups leading to competitive elections in 5 years or less. We argue that with the end of the Cold War, outside pressure has produced a devel- opment we characterize as the “electoral norm†– a requirement that binds successful coup-entrepreneurs to hold reasonably prompt and competitive elections upon gaining power. Consistent with our explanation, we find that post-Cold War those countries that are most dependent on Western aid have been the first the embrace competitive elections after the coup. Our theory is also able to account for the pronounced decline in the non-constitutional seizure of executive power since the early 1990s. While the coup d’etat has been and still is the single most important factor leading to the down- fall of democratic government, our findings indicate that the new generation of coups have been considerably less nefarious for democracy than their historical predecessors.
Of course, as the Egyptians know, there’s more to democracy than just holding elections and a return to democracy after a military coup is often only cosmetic; even Burma has elections. Coups and military dictatorships are too heavyhanded for the modern totalitarian: better to give the semblance of democracy to the people, let these elections even be meaningful, if unthreatening. Even (especially) in democracy’s “heartlands” a lot of the system cannot be changed through elections and we’re only offered a choice between New and Classic Coke. That’s the pessimist take.
The optimist’s take on these developments is that even phony democracy is better than none and cynical election manipulation is still better than bullets in the streets, but also that democracy can and often will lead to more democracy, that acting out the trappings of democracy makes it real as people demand their rights supposedly safeguarded by it. That’s also what we saw in Egypt, where the slender space given to democracy and opposition against Mubarak in the end erupted and forced him to abandon power.
Jack of Kent on why the Twitter Joke Trial matters:
The Paul Chambers case – known as the “Twitter Joke Trial” – has three points of significance:
– how relentless administrative and judicial stupidity can end in a conviction;
– how the CPS are wrongly using criminal law in respect of electronic communications; and
– how a criminal record can change a person’s life for the worse.
Let us hope Doncaster Crown Court can reverse this injustice on Friday and allow Paul to rebuild his life.
He explains succinctly why and how these points matter for Paul Chambers, the poor guy whose life was ruined through this case, but it has of course broader considerations too, especially the first point. Chambers was originally convicted through a long chain of people and institutions unable or unwilling to apply common sense about what was essentially the kind of stupid joke you’d make to your mates or cow-orkers, but on twitter. You could’ve had the same sort of case thirty-forty years ago as well, if some passing police officer had taken offense to a similar joke by some local wit. But whereas then you had to have had spectacularly bad luck to say something stupid in front of a copper himself dumb enough to take an obvious joke seriously, if you do the same on the internet, your bad joke can land you in hot water long after you’ve made and forgotten it.
Twitter is meant for ephemeral conversation, but they don’t disappear when you stop talking. Once it’s on the internet it’s there forever, barring acts of god or Google. Which means that many more people can read and misinterpret your comments than just your mates and it only takes one blockhead to ruin your day. What’s more, because it’s so easy to gather data online, you have whole classes of professional blockheads, in government as well as working for private companies looking for “threats” and it’s not in their interest or power to treat anything like a joke. As with airport police, these people have no sense of humour and are obliged to treat any bomb joke like a real threat, no matter how stupid.
This is not to blame Paul Chambers for his misfortune, rather the fault lies with institutions like the police, like the Crown Prosecution Service and like the Robin Hood Airport security department for not using common sense or rather having institutionalised processes in which the right thing to do is to not think for yourself but follow procedures. That’s always been a bad thing, but it’s made worse when such a dumb organisation is fed the huge amounts of data gathered on us routinely every day and starts to datamine. No government and damn few private companies truly understand information technology and the simple fact that it’s not how much but what kind and which quality of data you gather and how you use it that’s important. So you get things like airport security officers googling for their airport to detect threats and then using inflexible, dumb procedures to process these “threats” because the only thing their organisations understands is “more data good”, “common sense bad”.
That’s the spectre we’re all living with, of huge unaccountable organisations fucking over our lives not out of malice, but out of wilful stupidity because of something we said online.
This op-ed by the US ambassador to the UN human Rights Commission Eileen Donahoe is devoid of reality that you have to laugh, if you don’t want to cry. Every paragraph is an exercise in chutzpah and quote worthy but this is I think the worst:
Time and again human rights defenders underscore the importance of our public statements as an essential tool against government repression. The power of truthful words, spoken by the United States, should never be denigrated or underestimated. Those words provide hope and courage to those who fight against the worst rights abuses.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth:
Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a “black site” detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as “Albert” tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland.
Al-Nashiri is the suspected mastermind behind one of the first large al-Qaida attacks, which targeted the US destroyer USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in October 2000. According to former CIA agents who prefered to remain anonymous, Albert tortured the suspect for two weeks in December 2002. The claim is backed up by a review by the CIA’s inspector general, which reads: “The debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded.”
Sure, apologists will claim that this was an “isolated incident”, a “bad apple”, that this does not happen anymore under Obama. Yet Guantanamo Bay is still open, the Obama administration uses the same excuse of national security Bush used to hide the details of what’s going on in its War on Terror and nobody is even talking about any of the other nodes in the American gulag. The United States is not leading the world in human rights, it’s leading the world in ignoring them.
Please help save the indispensible Refugee and Migrant Justice:
A consortium of charitable trusts and city law firms, supported by Simon Hughes MP, are putting together a proposal to Government to save Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ). The proposal asks the Government to at least pay the money that it would have to pay anyway on insolvency on the understanding that this will be matched with up to £1,000,000 by way of grants, secured loans and donations to meet cash needs to finance work in progress.
We need concrete commitments for these funds today or as early as possible tomorrow – actual cash can come a bit later. So far today, we have been pledged £193, 625. Significantly more could follow from charitable trusts and others we are already talking with. But at this point it is clear that this is going to be a very considerable challenge without some additional help.
The aim of the plan is to enable, with full transparency and without prejudicing the position of creditors, a 3 month period in which the Government can consider whether it might change the payment system, there might be time to look at some innovative solutions with the Office of Civil Society and banks and RMJ would demonstrate that it had a viable forward business model. If all that fails, at least it would provide time for an orderly transfer of our clients’ cases. We have 10,000 clients, including 900 unaccompanied children who may otherwise be left in limbo.
We are appealing for donations, however small, to help save RMJ and secure its services over the next three months. If funds from both Government and other funders can be agreed, RMJ’s administrators would, in principle, support the proposal to take RMJ out of administration.
To make a pledge, or for further information, please telephone Kathleen Commons on 07872 161 271 or email savermj@gmail.com
Refugee and Migrant Justice is one of the few organisations on the side of socalled illegal migrants or “bogus asylum seekers”, helping to defend some of the most vulnerable people in Great Britain. If it should disappear through lack of funds it would be a disaster.