Activism

No free speech for animal rights activists

Activism, Dutch politics
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At least not in Zaandam, where a peaceful demonstration opposite a petshop was broken up by the police, who also arrested several of the people involved. As syou can see on the video below it’s clear that these activists were no threat to anyone, didn’t do anything criminal, just
leafletting, but still the police went in heavyhanded:

You do not need a permit to leaflet, you don’t need permission to demonstrate and while some cities demand advance notification of demos, even the lack of such a notification does not make it illegal –the courts have rapped the police on the fingers when they have used this excuse to break up a demo. There was no reason for the police to interfere here, yet they did. Why is that?

Because unfortunately and despite the electoral succes of the Party for the Animals, animal rights activists have the tide against them. In the post-9/11 world, the ploice and security services are suspicious of any kind of activism other than organising bake sales for the local church, and the long tradition of direct action the more radical animal rights groups engage in makes them an easy target. One example was the fight against a science park, which included animal testing facilities, under construction in Venray, where animal rights activists demonstrated at the homes of the managers of the project development bureau that was building the park. This company withdrew and the animal testing facilities didn’t get build, but once again the animal rights movement was seen to engage in terrorism, or something that looked a lot like it. Again, the activists did nothing illegal, but for many people less sympathetic to the movement’s goals, it all looked a bit dodgy. At the very least what happened in Venray is an example of the hardening attitudes within the movement, the willingness to use more radical methods to achieve things that couldn’t be achieved through other methods.

But this radicalisation inevitably brings a backlash, which is what I think happened on Saturday. Because there’s a heightened awareness of the radical nature of at least some segments of the animal rights movement, some police officers are less willing to cut the movement some slack, either because they dislike it more or because they genuinely believe it’s a threat, even in this situation. Which ties in neatly with the discussion I refered to yesterday, in that it shows the dangers for any radical movement in abandoning mass mobilisation for more direct, more agressive forms of protest. Relying on violence, or the threat of violence can lose you legitamicy, can mobilise the forces of the state against you, can isolate you from those that should be your supporters and can hurt less radical members of your movement, as we saw last Saturday.

A storm in a socialist teacup

Activism, British left, socialism
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Over at Lenny’s Tomb, Roobin set the cat amongst the pidgeons with his post on “the just-about-Gramscian theory of successful rioting” last Saturday, with both Louis Proyect and Andy Newman ridiculing it for sections like the one below:

The good news is, given preparation (the opportunity for which, of course, is normally denied), the average citizen can match a police officer blow for blow. A police officer has access to hand arms, in particular clubs, but the ordinary citizen can get and/or easily improvise these. The same is true of body armour and self-defence. The police have roadblocks, the people barricades. The police can use sturdy, powerful vehicles, so can the public. The police can use tools such as water cannons to disperse a crowd but a resourceful crowd can use similar devices to reverse effect. The police can use small firearms. Even in Britain it is not impossible for a member of the public to get hold of some. Any weapons won from the police in battle can immediately be used against them.

At first glance it does sound bad, the worst sort of pseudo-anarchist posturing, or “squadist juvenilia, as Andy called it. Louis Proyect was equally scathing, dismissing it as “complete idiocy”. And they would be right to do so, if it were not for one tiny detail: Roobin isn’t actually calling for fighting the police on their own terms, as the next paragraphs of his post makes clear:

he point is the police rely upon superior organisation and centralised control, not firepower. There are relatively few police officers in any country, never enough to deal with a general movement of people. This is one of the reasons why movements should be as numerous and broad as possible, to reduce the harm to life and limb to a minimum. When 2 million people are intent on using Hyde Park for a demonstration there is nothing the state can do to stop them (without seriously upping the ante).

When 125,000 miners go on strike (in albeit heightened circumstances), and are hung out to dry by union bureaucracy, the state is able to shift thousands of officers to mining areas to attack pickets and lay siege to villages, concentrating its all its power on its scattered, isolated
opponent.

In context it all sounds a lot less silly, doesn’t it? Roobin is making a quite uncontroversial, even obvious point here, which is the opposite of what Andy or Louis accuse him off. He’s actually arguing that you can’t use socalled black bloc
tactics against the police or the state, as they are better organised, better trained and have a greater legitimacy in using violence; instead socialists should organise en masse. Granted, the point could’ve been argued better, but I don’t think Roobin deserves this scolding from Andy and Louis, the more so because they seem to respond more to what they want to read, than what Roobin has actually written.

Little Brother

Activism, Autoritarianism, Civil liberties
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Remember the scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where Manny sketches a structure for an underground organization? Now imagine that, done properly. With X-boxes.
— Ken MacLeod

You may already have seen the hype for Cory “Boing Boing” Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother all over the internet; certainly I’ve seen it mentioned on a fair few of the blogs I frequent. There’s a reason for this, as it’s not just another science fiction novel, or even another young adult science fiction novel, but an attempt to inoculate a new generation against the phony security mindset that swept America in the wake of the September 11 attacks and arguably the UK some years earlier. We’ve all have had to deal with the results, in everything from having to carry an ID with us at all times to stupid rules about how much fluid you can take along on your airplane trip. But for anybody under twentyone it’s worse and it has been worse for much longer. Every inch of their lives is controlled and regulated these days because it has become so much more easier to do so. As Cory puts it in the preface to Little Brother:

The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.

So what Cory does is to give them the tools to take their lives back. Little Brother is basically one long infodump on, well, hacking, in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, packaged in a neat near-future thriller. It’s a novel in the best tradition of didactic science fiction –Ken MacLeod makes the comparison with Heinlein, while the title itself is of course a reference to 1984. But didactic doesn’t mean dull, as the synopsis makes clear:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works –and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Best thing about Little Brother? It’s not just a book, it’s a movement. And Cory is putting his money where his mouth is and made the book available as a free, Creative Commons licensed e-book. In all, this is a noble attempt at not just making people aware of the encrouching security society, but help them find the tools to fight against it, circumvent it, pervert it.

Strawman environmentalists

Activism, Climate change
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Unlike Charlie Stross I was less than impressed with this article on The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn. Perhaps that is because it reminded me too much of the sort of thing Jerry Pournelle used to write in his science columns for semi-obscure science fiction magazines back in the late seventies. It pays some lip service to the idea that “maintaining the environment is a critical issue” but then argues in bad faith, more interested in attacking environmentalists than in contributing to solutions. Take for example, the first thing “environmentalists need to learn”:

10. Go after pollution sources with the highest benefit/cost ratio, not those which are most noticeable – If you are attempting to make a difference in the world, you should start with the largest problems with the simplest solutions and the least cost in remedying.

For example, underground coal fires produce as much CO2 as all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe. The cost of developing a method of fighting such fires and implementing it is likely very low compared to the benefit especially in the context of the amount of effort which has gone into reducing the pollution from cars and trucks.

Now that coal fire example makes me suspicious, as it’s just the kind of pat factiod that appeals to the inner contrarian in all of us. What’s stated here is that coal fires are as big a problem as CO2 emitted by cars, what’s implied is that those silly enivronmentalists are not doing anything about the former but are only concerned with the latter, hence they are hypocrites and can be ignored. Unspoken is the assumption that as long as these coal fires are going on, limiting CO2 emission from traffic is pointless.

But is it actually true that underground coal fires contribute as much CO2 as “all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe”? No figures or references are given, which doesn’t strengthen the author’s case. The Encyclopedia of Earth article on
carbon dioxide says 24% of manmade CO2 emissions is attributable to transport worldwide, while its coal fires article says that “according to most recent estimations coal fires in China contribute about 0.1% to 0.2% of the annual human induced CO2 emissions globally”. There seems to be some sort of mismatch then, though of course the figure of 0.2% is only for China (the world’s largest coal user) while the 24% of transport worldwide needs to be broken down to “all the light cars and trucks in North America and most of those in Europe” to be able to truly compared the two figures. Nevertheless, a case can be made for the author having overstated the contribution of coal fires to manmade CO2 emissions…

But even if the figure was comparable, does this mean tackling underground coal fires is more cost effective than limiting the emissions put out by cars? Not necessarily. Underground coal fires are partially a natural phenomenon, with some having been burning for thousands of years,
while the most famous manmade fire, in Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been burning for some 45 years. By any measures they’re hard and costly to put out, requiring huge investments; according to an article in The Smithsonian putting out the fire in Centralia would’ve cost as much as 660 million dollars.

Producing more fuel-efficient cars suddenly looks a lot more affordable compared to those numbers, especially since a lot can be done without requiring new, exotic technology. Just switching from using inefficient types of car (the infamous Chelsea tractor, or SUV) to existing, more energy efficient cars would help. More and better public transport as an alternative to car use is another obvious measure to limit CO2 emissions. And of course, it’s perfectly possible to both invest in fighting underground coal fires, as is actually already happening (see the Smithonian article) and more fuel efficient cars.

So yeah, if the first bullet point in this essay is already this dishonest, I’m skeptical about the rest of the article, especially in the context of the rest of the blog, which seems largely dedicated to showing how silly and stupid environmentalists are.

Steve Gilliard and Wikipedia

Activism, Numpties, Wikipedia
Published on Leave a comment on Steve Gilliard and Wikipedia

Sadly this past weekend, Steve Gilliard died, which lead to an outpouring of grief in the leftwing part of the blogosphere and also to a long needed Wikipedia entry. Unfortunately, this started another Wikipedia clusterfuck, as the article was nominated for deletion, after having been speedily deleted and then restored first by an editor who was slightly too quick to judge. Needless to say, this did not sit well with the people mourning Steve’s death. The resulting discussion on the proposal for deletion page was an …interesting look at what happens when two online cultures clashed.

On the Wikipedia side, those editors who supported deletion kept hammering on notability as the reason why the article should not be included and that notability should be established by citing respectable sources. What this means is that for Wikipedia, having a popular, much read blog is not enough: it has to be proven this blog has an influence outside itself, preferably by being cited in sources that are not blogs themselves, like newspapers or books. This is not in itself an onerous requirement: most blogs are just vanity vehicles after all, with little impact on the wider world or much to say about them. And while his readers knew how influential Steve was, ths still needs to be established for those who did not know him.

On the blogging side, this all seemed like nitpicking and worse, disrespectful for a much loved blogger who had just died, with several people thinking this was a rightwing attempt to “obliterate [his] memory”. Warnings about this debate therefore quickly spread through various blogs, which lead to an influx of people wanting to register their disgust and/or voice their support to keeping the article. This in turn set off the Wikipedias again, whose more experienced editors know very well how often deletion debates have been derailed by malicious trolls.

Fortunately, there were still sensible people on both sides, with various Wikipedians patiently explaining the policies developed over the years for notability and such, while bloggers went and established this, leading finally to a decision to keep the article. Yet all this uproar had not been necessary had the original editor who proposed to delete it not been so quick to jump the gun and actually investigated Steve first…

There are some lessons for Wikipedians to be learnt from this. First, we should remember that there is life outside of Wikipedia. Vast, cool unsympathetic intelligences may be watching your perfectly legitamite actions on Wikipedia and think you a villain. Recently, Wikipedia has clashed with webcomics fans over the deletion of a whole range of entries about webcomics for not being noticable, with science fiction fandom for thinking James Nicoll was not worthy of inclusion and Teresa Nielsen Hayden wasn’t an expert on sf and now with leftwing political bloggers for the ill advised attempt to delete him from Wikipedia. These actions may all have been undertaken with the best of intentions, without any malice towards the subjects in question, but that is not as it comes across. We need to realise that and be more careful in such conflicts to explain ourselves.

Which leads to the second lesson: Wikipedia is almost impenetrable for new users. It’s supposed to be the encyclopedia anybody can edit, but if you want to do more than just do some little copyediting on some innocent little article, you need to start learning about a lot of policies, a lot of jargon and unfortunately, a lot of politics. In situations such as this therefore, with huge numbers of new people getting their first taste of Wikipedia behind the screens, we need to make sure (again) to explain what we mean, what the policies are and how things work.

The final lesson is that maye, just maybe, the policies on notability are due for a drastic overhaul. They were originally drawn up to protect Wikipedia from spammers and vanity articles, but over the years they’ve hardened to the point that anything that’s obscure or too nerdy is automatically suspect. It doesn’t help that some editors seem to be more active in deleting articles than in writing them… We need to realise that Wikipedia can cope with having articles on semi-obscure webcomics, sf fans and political bloggers, that only true spammers or vanity articles should be deleted, nothing else.