From The Morgue

Frankly, I’ll take the peace where I can get it. Condi can take all the glory she likes as long as the world gets something that looks like a positive step.
Well, to be more precise, it’s the opportunity for a positive step. Nothing’s actually changed. The onus is still on Israel to start making some changes.
The Palestinian hardliners, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have both pledged to honour the ceasefire and watch to see what Israel will do. Whether because they’ve been battered by Israel or because they’ve always been open to compromise, it’s a definite claim for progress.
It’s the Israeli hardliners who are the real problem. They are a large political bloc and they’re not satisfied with how things are going. They want greater Israel, regardless of pragmatism or justice. They have enough electoral power to make Sharon’s position fragile.
I figure that Sharon will do his best to keep Israel’s side of the ceasefire until the Gaza pullout is underway. The hardline Israelis are increasingly a thorn in Sharon’s side, and they are expected to protest the pullout with violence. Such violence, set against a wider peace, will allow Sharon to marginalise them. (Of course, once the Gaza pullout is complete, all bets are off.) (And the Gaza pullout itself is a problematic thing, but we won’t go there in this post.)
Of course, the whole thing is fragile – it will only take a couple of whackjobs in Palestine deciding that the ceasefire is a failure and violating it with a bombing to send the whole place spiralling back down. Or some Israeli army nutjob taking the approved levels of oppression and control a few steps too far. And I’m sure there are plenty in positions of authority in the Israeli army and in Hamas/Islamic Jihad who will soon be itching for the resumption of hostilities.
But it’s too easy to be cynical. For all these problems, it is a peace. I hope it lasts, and I wish the people of Israel and Palestine well.
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Now you’ve read that, read this reality check from the always-fascinating Rafah Pundits.

Mongoose Publishing‘s magazine Signs & Portents is running another of my articles in issue 21, out in April:
Derailed – If you enjoyed the Breakout Control setting from S&P15 then you are going to love this. So shocking and disturbing that Matt Sharp had to seek counselling from Monty the Mongoose after he edited it!

I’m kind of surprised they’re running it, to be honest. When I’d finished it I wondered if anyone would dare. It isn’t your typical gaming scenario, that’s for sure.

I’ve also got something special lined up that will probably appear in issue 22, but I can’t talk about that yet.

In other news, took delivery of the Freaks & Geeks Deluxe Yearbook Edition DVD Set Thingy. It is an astonishing thing. Best. TV show. Evar.

[Man, I’m sure this is going to do wonders for my reader base. “Hurrah! More wordy pseudo-intellectual wank from morgue!” Oh well, tough. I blogged about the etch-a-sketch pen, didn’t I?]
As always, read the comments. Matt’s response to my post was longer than my post 🙂 The main point to come out of that discussion, to my mind, is this quote from Matt:
I suppose a part of Morgues new vocab could be a way of referring to news media without referring to each individual company or without referring to them all as media as whole. The first is too fine grained and the second not granular enough.
This is one important axis in which the vocabulary is limited. We talk about a biased media, but both of those words get loaded with meanings that suit whoever is deploying them. This is how language is meant to work, after all – flexibility of meaning is an incredibly handy thing.
In this kind of battleground of ideas and propaganda, however, terminology as loose as that can cause major problems. It’s too important an area to allow these problems to remain.
(It’s important to recognise, too, that the looseness of definition serves both ‘sides’ of the debate, as it allows both of them to sustain their mythologies of victimisation. If the vocabulary is to grow, and meanings are to become more useful, we who aren’t directly involved in spinning the argument will have to do it from out here. We’d be doing the reverse of Syme’s Newspeak – adding new words to express gradations and meanings that currently obscured. Allowing new consciousness and new understanding.)
So. More process thinking… how can we think about ‘media bias’? What questions could this new vocabulary address?
Media:

• What media are we talking about?
• What form of outlet (print, radio, etc)?
• What organisation (NBC, Instapundit, The Guardian)?
• To what extent can we group different media forms and organisations together?

Bias:

• What sources of bias are there? (Author’s or publisher’s opinion, structural effects, deliberate strategic misrepresentation, genuine error or foolish interpretation…)
• How sensible is it to talk about bias, singular? How can we tell how many different influences are at work? Do conflicting influences cancel each other out or make an item more biased? Does it make a difference to the consumer of information where the bias comes from?
• How informed is the consumer as to the potential for bias? How powerful is the consumer in filtering out that bias?
• Is it ever possible to have reporting without bias? If there is always some bias, at what point do we start worrying about it? Is there an ‘acceptable bias threshold’?

Let’s connect this to a real-world example, too.
During the attack on Iraq, the BBC was seen as carrying a pro-American bias by the UK left. The very same service was seen as carrying an anti-American bias by the US right. (Granted, the definitions of left and right differ from UK to US, but that alone can’t account for the difference.)
So. Was the BBC biased pro-USA or anti-USA? How can we tell?
I don’t know. I just wish I had something good to say to those morons on the internet who still call it the Ba’athist Broadcasting Corporation.
(And lets not forget, as no doubt everyone reading this realises, that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are themselves little more than useful labels that have been calcified through spin and overuse to the point where they obscure the reality of political thought and activity.)

Aaron is now gone.
It was pretty cool to see him again. Leon and I met him in Portugal in the tail of 2002, and the three of us went down to Lagos together for random fun in the sun. Those of you who have seen the hidden surprise pictures on the Leon Is A God site will have seen some of the beach we hung out on.
Edinburgh was full of great weather for his visit. We went up Arthur’s Seat and almost got blown to Fife, and generally stomped around and talked a lot of shit. As you do.
Aaron is a chef by trade and, uniquely, appears as himself as a chef in ‘Ron the Body’. Well, so far only his footsteps have been heard, but he gets a whole chapter named after him fairly soon.
Some people at work have vaguely coalesced into a writing circle; we’ve set up a “secret room” on the work intranet where we post stuff we’ve written and discuss. There’s only three active people so far, plus two invited yet-to-participate lurkers. It’s always a pleasure to be reminded of the energy of sheer creativity going on just out of view everywhere around us. On top of that, it’s genuinely excellent stuff – and I’ve read a lot of people’s writing over the years, so I’m not exactly speaking from ignorance.
Waaaaaay better than everything at that Masters in Creative Writing performance night I snarked about a month or two back.
I finally got around to making that donation I promised. I decided to donate to the Al-Rowwad Centre in Aida Refugee Camp, Palestine. (Do click through if you have a moment, it’s fascinating and there are lots of great photos of the kids performing.)
The work they do there is incredibly valuable and it really made an impression on me when we visited in April. Hmm, I don’t say much in the writeup though, do I? Oh well. It’s nice to send them some support, however small. The irony, of course, is that the director of Al-Rowwad was the one who said to us “We in Palestine don’t want you to send us money! We don’t need cash donations – we need an economy!” I trust he’ll forgive me 🙂
(NB: T and newly-daddy-for-a-third-time Matt both commented on that original post that sponsoring a child might be a good option; I’ve decided not to do that with this windfall because of its one-off nature, but the seed of an idea has well and truly been planted.)
I have a whole bunch of comments to reply to in the last month’s worth of posts. A few go back even further than that. And the world has kept going in the mean time, giving me more to write about to boot. I’ll see what I can do over the next week.
Cal flies home to NZ on the 25th of this month. It’s gonna be strange with her gone.

My friend + boss T has returned from Florida with a lovely new pen that I intend to use for all important meetings.

It’s an etch-a sketch pen! And the little etch controls are Mickey-hands!

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Aaron Andrews is staying with us. It is good. Still very busy. More soon. As usual, read the comments if you’re not already, fascinating stuff in there.

I seem to be behind on everything. Although I haven’t actually done very much in the last few days, I have piled up a lot of stuff-not-done. Yelp. Blogging-related things have slipped down the list. I have about three weeks worth of blog entries sitting unwritten in my head. Aaargh.
Read the comments. Buddhist-spammer and Christian-spammer are engaged in a great discussion about the different ways in which I was wrong in a recent posting… I feel bad about how I raise these questions, then all these interesting things get put in comments, then I don’t reply. Am determined to reply. Soon, soon.

Please, all and sundry, check ye out Scott’s LJ where he asks for comments, positive and negative, on the bypass in Wellington. He’s trying to get a handle on it. It’s a nice opportunity to crystallise your thinking, and mine for that matter, and the two comments there as I write are great.

It is a nice belt. It has four holes. I use the second hole. It comes from the Gap. I know, what was I doing in the Gap? I was looking for a belt. A belt! Me! I can hardly believe it myself.
I have nice jeans. They fit me, which is something I find very strange, because none of my clothes have fit me since I was in single digits of age. Sadly, the button at the top of the fly came off.
(This happened about six months ago. I have spent six breezy months with fastener at the top of my fly absent, and the denim flaps untethered and askew.)
((Bear in mind also that these jeans are basically my only lower-limb clothing option. I have kept to my ‘travel light’ principles even though I’m not travelling at the moment and even though i’ve accumulated lots of books, but books have a separate principle like how ice cream has its own stomach, so shut up.))
I found a belt at The Gap. It cost me a grand total of GBP3.97, down from GBP22. Who says there aren’t bargains to be found on the High Street?

I like my belt. My belt stops my jeans from low-riding. I have these jeans on right now and right now I can feel them fitting me around the arse.

Let me tell you, when you’ve never worn clothes that fit you ever in your life, it is very unnerving to walk around in public with jeans vaguely conforming to the shape of your bum. I feel like Christine Aguilera.

Luckily I have a damn sexy arse. It was a requirement when I became one of the Lovegods (hi Hoa, Anne, Leon!) and that dash of early divinity has stuck with me through the last decade. So I’m not worried.

Sexy arse. Jeans that fit. Belt. Finally the pieces are all in place. Today, I become a man.

That’ll do, belt. That’ll do.

(PS: As of this evening I’ve got new jeans, and they still have the button at the top of the fly… FOR NOW.)