Wis[s]e Words – Page 597 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Women write science fiction??!

Published on July 17, 2007

Not a new discovery one should say, what with some women sf writers even winning Hugo Awards these days, but apparantly shocking enough for online sf magazine Helix, run by professional not very loveable curmudgeon William Sanders to bring out an entire issue full of wimmin writers and then complain bitterly when the rest of the world shrugs its shoulders:

There’s been a lot of talk in the SF community – some of it rather intemperate, as always happens in such cases – about “gender bias” in the genre or in certain magazines, about the largely estrogen-challenged Hugo list, etc. You’d think that there would be a favorable reaction when a magazine comes out with an all-women’s issue. Realistically, I don’t expect it’s going to happen, to any great extent – that’s how it goes, people yell and scream about something and then when somebody does something about it they don’t have a word to say – but somebody ought to say SOMETHING.

And somebody damn well ought to be reaching for that Paypal button. If they’re serious about their feminism, well, here’s a chance to put their money where their phosphors are. I’m going to be pretty damn disgusted if the donations don’t go up this quarter.

Now I’ve only followed Sander’s editorial career from a distance, but I cannot remember him striking any great blows for feminism or gender equality before, more the opposite. This is just a cheap stunt which won’t strike a great blow against gender bias and has nothing to do with feminism. Female science fiction writers are neither rare nor obscure, haven’t been for fifty years, so any sf magazine worth its salt doesn’t need to do “special” issues, but has a mix of male and female writers as a matter of course. So don’t break an arm patting yourself on the back, Sanders.

Thanks James!

Our Orwellian world

Published on July 17, 2007

Item one: a man is jailed for three-and-a-half years for carrying a blueprint of a rocket through Luton Airport:

British man who was found with blueprints for a rocket in his luggage at Luton Airport has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.

Yassin Nassari, 28, from Ealing, west London, was earlier found guilty at the Old Bailey of possessing documents likely to be useful to a terrorist.

[…]

Sentencing him, Judge Gerald Gordon said: “I have come to the conclusion that, sadly, like a number of young Muslims, you have somehow been indoctrinated into beliefs supporting terrorism by others.

“I have no doubt you wanted to immerse yourself in this fundamentalist trash, but in the material available to me there is nothing to indicate that any actual terrorist use would have been made of it by anyone.”

Nassari’s hard drive contained documents about martyrdom and weapons training, as well as instructions on how to construct the Qassam artillery rocket – a home-made steel rocket used by terrorist groups in the Middle-East.

So even though there was no evidence that this guy was involved with any terrorist organisation or intended to perform any terrorist acts himself, the mere fact of possessing documents that are a bit dodgy landed him in jail. Really, you don’t need to be an evil terrorist to be interested in the sort of material described in the last quoted paragraph; who hasn’t downloaded The Anarchist Cookbook at one point or another out of curiosity? There are plenty of people interested in weapons, guns, warfare etc. who aren’t terrorists or even terrorist sympathisers; remember Gareth the T.A. nerd from the Office?

Item two: The Metropolitian Police is given real-time access to London’s congestion charge cameras:

Police are to be given live access to London’s congestion charge cameras – allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone.

Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time.

They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith blamed the “enduring vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” for the change.

The thing is, a) the only true “vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” was organised by the Keystone Cops branch of Al Queda, b) you cannot tell from the outside if a car is a terrorist car c) if you know enough to know which car to track, you also could’ve gotten permission to do so anyway under the old rules. In his science fiction thriller Whole Wide World Paul J. McAuley predicted that ultimately, all of the UK’s CCTV cameras would be linked up into one giant network, controlled by police computers; this seems like a step in that direction. The Met says this capacity will only be used to fight terrorist activity, but once a capability is there, other uses will be found for it, as the internet itself has shown us.

Item three: The association of Chief Police Officers wants unlimited detention without charge, again for the noble cause of fighting terrorism. And again the question crops up, what is the purpose of locking people up if you don’t have the evidence to charge them, let alone convict them?

Item four: the Dutch police can now keep records of anybody who interacts with them — detainees, suspects, victims, witnesses, literally anybody– for up to five years (Dutch). In the first year, any police officer can look into these records, afterwards it’s only accesible to those who have “a good reason” to do so. But that’s not all, as it’s not just the police who can view these records, but also other parties with a vested interest: social workers, housing societies, even shopowners. All in the name of fighting crime.

Twentieth century battlefields

Published on July 17, 2007

Ellis Sharp does not much like Peter and Dan Snow’s latest television series, Twentieth Century Battlefields:

I taped and have now just watched the Snow family show on the 1968 Tet offensive, commonly regarded as a key moment in the Vietnam war (as it is called — though funnily enough the Vietnamese call it ‘the American war’). It was a lazy, reactionary, offensively shallow programme. I guess the BBC is selling it on to American TV networks, since it was hegemonic to an absurd degree. South Vietnam,
Snow senior explained, was run by ‘a military elite’. Euphemising a client dictatorship doesn’t get much blander than that.

[…]

The programme was nauseating in its thrilled-adolescent approach to aerial warfare. The U.S. “deployed…the might of its air force.” Cut to exciting computer models of B-52 bombers zapping hillsides, interspersed with old newsreel footage, all resting on a bed of thumping Wagner-type ersatz classical music. And waddaya know — “some of the targets were near populated areas…inevitably civilians were killed.”

I don’t disagree with any of Sharp’s criticisms, but I think he misses the point of the series. It is after all supposed to be an examination of great battles of the twentieth century, tailored to a lay audience, in which the political context is almost irrelevant, other than to explain briefly why this particular battle happened. This is why the story the Snows tell of how the Tet offensive came about is so reactionary, because it isn’t important to the programme the writers fall back on the stories that need the least work to be explained to the audience, that work with their expectations.

I also agree that the programme is part propaganda for the British Army (the cringeworthy segments in which one of the Snows gets to play soldiers), but on the whole I think the series has been worthwhile despite this and the lazy assumptions about the context of the battles they talk about. Because the heart of the series, the battles themselves, are handled very well and in such a way that it becomes clear why a battle enfolded the way it did, how the strategy and tactics chosen by the combatants played their part in determining the battle’s outcome, how the terrain of the battlefield helped or hindered both sides, etc. S— said that the programme on the Tet Offensive was the first time that this really clicked for her, that she understood how battles work. That makes the series worthwhile to
me.

Basket case

Published on July 9, 2007

Since it’s Monday, have a kitten in a basket. That’sa Sophie, the youngest of our three. She’s also called “princess paddy-paws”, “little madam” or “that bitch cat” by Sandra, depending on how annoying she’s behaving this time. Though I’m loath to ascribe human behaviour or motivations to an animal, I have to admit she’s a very girly cat, the kind of cat that would wear sparkly makeup if she could. She’s also the only cat I’ve ever seen who likes to play damsel in distress, deliberately hiding
herself behind the television table in the corner of the living room and then making out like she can’t get out again…

Our other two cats are both male and somewhat less bright. Heckie is amiable but dim in that sort of rugby playing, Giles Wemmbley-Hogg way. Very sweet though, with not a hint of a mean streak in him.

Monty, our eldest on the other hand was a stray cat my parents took in when he came begging for food in their garden and which we took over a few years ago, He’s not so much smart as streetwise; that is, he knows which street he lives on.

Steve Gilliard and Wikipedia

Published on June 5, 2007Leave a comment

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.