Real Life Revolutions

Flickr used bogus copyright to censor the Egyptian revolution

Internet, Life under Capitalism, Real Life Revolutions
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Egyptian blogger 3arabawy has done sterling service in documenting the Egyptian revolution over the past few months, putting up thousands of essential pictures both taken by him and other Egyptian photographers. There’s just one problem: Flickr’s guidelines says you cannot put up photograps you yourself haven’t taken and that’s why they’re disabling his account. Never mind that thousands of other Flickr users — including president Obama — do the same and are not interfered with, never mind that 3arabawy has permission from the original photographers, rules are rules and hence the account is disabled. As the Flickr p.r. flacks point out, they could’ve deleted the account outright but wanted to be reasonable about it. (Not that this wasn’t an implied threat if 3arabawy would continue to complain of course). Plenty of people in the thread are also very helpfully explaining why Flickr was right and why violating house rules is so much more important than chronicling the Egyptian revolution and beside, you’re just vain and egocentric.

What bugs me is that Flickr seems to enforce its terms of service much more strictly when it concerns political activists, punishing them for supposed bad behaviour not used against “normal” users. The rule that you cannot post pictures you haven’t made yourself normally has only been used to swat obvious spammers stealing pictures from e.g. the NYT or something, not people who upload their mum’s family album. I suspect that Yahoo/Flickr, like most Big Business, is allergic to everything political, its basic instinct to delete anything controversial. It’s a painful reminder for all political activists not to put their faith in the cloud; while it’s easy, cheap and the best way to quickly spread news, using a commercial service like Flickr always makes you vulnerable to censorship. And it’s not just Flickr, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and any other popular “web 2.0” service have proven to be vulnerable to political pressure, whether external or self imposed.

That’s the fundamental paradox for political activist using the cloud/web 2.0 services: you need to use them if you want people to pay attention, yet using a commercial service like Flickr rather than creating your own makes you vulnerable to its owners. You’re using it on sufferance.

That LSE – Khadaffi scandal

Life under Capitalism, Real Life Revolutions, Sleaze, UK politics
Published on 2 Comments on That LSE – Khadaffi scandal

Justin puts it in perspective:

So, we’re all jolly cross at the London School of Economics for taking Gaddafi’s cash. We’re less cross (if at all) at the arms trade for doing the same. I haven’t heard any calls for the head of BAE Systems to resign, for instance. After all, BAE Systems were only flogging anti-tank missiles while the LSE were flogging management training, the bastards.

Which is fair enough, but when this sentiment mutates into something like what Charli Carpenter argues:

The graduation of a plagiarist raises my eyebrows (as you might guess) but as recent discussions have suggested going easy on academic dishonesty is hardly a problem limited to LSE. And simply the choice to make good-faith engagements with authoritarian elites or their children should not be treated, in hind-sight, as evidence of collusion.

Then methinks you’re protesting too much. If getting easy PH.Ds for the children of dictators as part of a general buttering up for the purpose of getting lots and lots of arms and other sales for British industry is not collusion, what is? Why should the LSE “make good-faith engagements with authoritarian elites”9or their children) in the first place? What does that even mean?

From where I’m sitting it’s clear the LSE let itself be used in a general campaign to butter up Khadaffi so that he would buy loads and loads of weapons and other equipment from British industry while also allowing Khadaffi to improve his own p.r. image through that research fund his son set up at the LSE. Now it’s reaping the whirlwind of that decision to get in bed with a dictator. That this is s.o.p. for most or even all UK elite universities does not make it right. It’s hard to feel sorry for them and it’s no use to bray about “politics of the mob” when you’re so clearly in the wrong, even if others were just as wrong or more so. That just means there are others that need to make amends too. No gangster’s pal ever won his trial by pointing out others were friends with Capone as well.

More generally, this attitude that it’s alright to do business with dictators as long as they’re our dictators is why the Middle East has never managed to become free: because our governments, businesses and universities always priviledged money over morality. It no longer suffices to argue that we should be realistic and not blame people for getting into bed with dicators because there was no alternative: the people of Egypt, Libya and Tunesia have shown us otherwise.

Libya says: No Foreign Intervention

Real Life Revolutions
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no foreign intervention

Libya says: no foreign intervention. Jamie spells it out:

I think it’s a reasonable supposition that the banner represents the broad opinion of the insurgents. It’s natural to want to finish your own revolution. Whether it represents the opinions of the civilians stuck in the middle is another matter. But that in itself points up that if you do decide to – say – return the Sixth Fleet’s Marine Expeditionary Force to the shores of Tripoli, then you’re going to have a lot of angry revolutionaries to deal with as well as Gaddafi’s mob. And if you want to influence the eventual political outcome of a revolution, the first people you need on your side are the ones who took up arms.

The Rodent is even more blunt in his assessment of the chances of US/UK military intervention succeeding:

Let’s do the maths once more here, for clarity. In the past decade, Britain and/or the Americans have either bombed, invaded and/or occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; our wacky allies have bombed Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, and the United States also maintains military bases in Bahrain, Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

You can assess that using whatever justifications and euphemisms you like, but any major campaign against Libya is going to be a hard, hard sell to the UN as disinterested humanitariansm, even if it’s exactly that. Assuming we’re bothering with the formalities this time, that is.

Still, the British government, eh? All the memory capacity of a geriatric goldfish in a body filled with adventuresome spirit and a few hundred bloody bulletholes. What a plucky bunch we are.

But, as Louis Proyect reports, that doesn’t stop some on the left from automatically taking a pro-khadaffi, or as they call it, a anti-anti-khadeffi stance just because the US and UK are making some noise about maybe doing something about Khadaffi. It’s a blindingly stupid attitude, both to not support a popular uprising because you think the US might profit from it and to think that this is actually could be an American engineered revolution. Anybody with half a brain can see that the US and EU were both taken completely by surprise by the developments in the Middle East, had no idea about how to respond to the uprisings and are still trying to regain control somehow. To think any of this was engineered by anybody is so clueless it edges into Glenn Beck territory.

All the talk about no-fly zones and intervention, though it should resisted of course, is just an attempt to spin events in such a way to put the western powers back in the driving seat, or at least give the impression they are in control again and on the side of angels. Reality is otherwise: it’s the people of Libya, Egypt, Tunesia, Yemen, Oman, Bahrein and so on who are, for the first time in decades, in the lead.