The Amsterdam Wink

When you tell people you’re weekending in Amsterdam, they give you an odd sort of nudge-nudge-wink response. All of them, regardless of age or class, feel compelled to shake their shoulders and cock their eyebrows. Its sort of charming, really.
We’re landing at 9.30 tomorrow morning Netherlands time. Monday morning we plan on heading on to Rotterdam via the Hague where we want to see the international court of justice. Everyone says Amsterdam is wonderful. I look forward to plenty of happy walking-around, but I also expect it to be cold. I have no idea what to expect of Rotterdam.
This will be my first time out of the UK since July. I am thoroughly excited. It’s been a long period of bedding down, and this is the first sign of coming out the other side.

Like all movie geeks, I follow the Oscars despite knowing its all a sham, a farce, etc etc. Find the funniest coverage on the net at www.fametracker.com, “the farmer’s almanac of celebrity worth”. Seriously worth a look.

Wicked Minds

(More politics. Man, I’ve gone all political this week. Some non-political stuff will come soon, I promise.)
A couple of commenters have pulled me up for not making clear that the either/or rhetoric isn’t exclusive to the political right. It isn’t, of course, and it was remiss of me not to make that a bit clearer. However, I do identify the creation of false dichotomies as a major current rhetorical tactic by the political right, all over the world. I also think it is far less common in the rhetoric used by the political left. Both sides use it, but it fits the right’s agenda more.
This is not to say that the left use less rhetoric than the right – just that this one tactic turns up more on the right than the left.
A counterexample would be the left’s tendency to demonize the right. A great deal of leftist rhetoric revolves around revealing the ‘true motives’ behind a political act, and pointing out how abhorrent the motives are. This rhetorical strategy is appeals to the left’s people-base, because lefties almost by definition tends to view acts in terms of the purity of their moral intention. It is used by the right, but much more so by the left.
A great deal of this commentary is vacuous. (Especially at the extremes, where David Icke-alikes construct ever more absurd conspiracies around what are often fundamentally sound insights.) It’s an effective rhetorical strategy playing to the converted or the wavering, but it is rarely legitimate. Ultimately, it’s too reductive – it reduces complex human beings acting in complex systems to units of simplistic motivation. This is the irony of this talk from the left – the side that prides itself on its humanity is constantly dehumanising its opponents.
A subset of this is to characterise the mass of rightist voters as dupes of the wicked minds of those pulling the strings, along the lines of the old Marxist idea of ‘false consciousness’. This is a rhetorical strategy too, but I am not as quick to dismiss it as vacuous.
While too simplistic, I believe that there such a thing as ‘false consciousness’, after a fashion. I believe that the mass of all people are not ‘self-aware’, in the sense that we do not truly comprehend the implications of our own actions or the meaning of the words we speak.
In fact, I think that this is scientifically and spiritually undeniable. It’s also a pretty tough-sell of an idea.
Hmm. There’s more, but it can wait.

Either/Or

It seems to be an overwhelming tactic of the reactionary right – to structure all issues as an “either/or” choice.
This means that any challenge to their position “x” is taken as proof that the challenger supports position “y”. Instead of defending “x”, they attack “y”.
It is an old, old, old rhetorical trick.
Most recently it has been used, in a bunch of forms, by those who sought to garner support for the war in Iraq. Any challenge to the invasion of Iraq is instantly met with “but the Iraqis are better off!”, as if the choice was between “x” an invasion where lots of innocents died and “y” Saddam Hussein running his totalitarian state unchecked.
The whole point of opposition to the war was that there was *another way*. There were many, many other courses of action that were vastly preferable and at least worthy of exploration but which were completely ignored. They continue to be ignored, because it suits those who went to war to use that simple rhetorical device of “either/or”.
The media do not make this clear. The media, print media especially, seek balance through “quote/counterquote”. So someone says the war was unjust; the counterquote is “but the Iraqis are free”. Nowhere in the mainstream media is the illegitimacy of this argument made clear – it is left to the columns of left-wing pundits, if it is even mentioned there.
Yet this is the most important thing we need to know about the debate over the rightness of the war – the proper parameters of the discussion.
It is not an “either/or”, but the media portrays it as such. Recognise this, and you have a disconnect. A step along the road.

And while I’m thinking about the war, and disconnects associated with it, how come no-one has pointed out the most damning fact to come to light in the whole Hutton inquiry, namely this: Downing Street sought to make the dossier as strong as possible in order to garner support for the war.
The only conclusion one can reach from this is that they had already decided to go to war on grounds other than WMDs.
If they already had enough evidence of WMDs to go to war, they would not have needed to strengthen the dossier.
(There is another possible conclusion, namely that the PM had been convinced but didn’t think his backbenchers would be. This is hardly any more flattering for those involved.)
It’s a logical puzzle and there’s no way out of it that doesn’t make the government look bad. However, the mainstream media has done nothing to point it out. That’s why you’re reading it here in a blog by a New Zealander instead of somewhere more reputable. But hey, don’t take my word for it – do the sums yourself. If they were trying to strengthen the dossier, then they’d already decided to go to war based on reasons other than WMDs.
Maybe this just proves that the real reason they went to war was to liberate the Iraqis, after all. Silly me.

Private Eye and Osama

Further to the rant on disconnection yesterday, Cal and I have been getting the Private Eye this year. It’s a great little satire-paper that comes out ever 2 weeks to rip into all the latest nonsense of the media and government and law etc. I’ve known about it forever, you can pick it up in several mag shops around Wellington, but it really makes a lot more sense when you’re in the UK. It’s even more dense in references to a specific social context than the brilliant sarcastic tech-geek journal Need To Know.
Private Eye is the closest thing I’ve found to the kind of disconnect-encouragement I was talking about. It isn’t exactly right – it’s more about pointing out hypocrisy and manipulation of all flavours rather than illuminating readers as to the ways in which the pop media is limited – but it’s better than nothing. Of course, it’s all very upper-middle-class and wry and arch, so much
so that I suspect it’s pretty much integrated into the whole system here, like a court jester.
Anyway. I like it. Is fun.
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Cal and I went to see ‘Osama’ last night, about a girl posing as a boy in order to get work in Taliban-run Afghanistan. Harrowing. Most reminded me of ‘Bandit Queen’, a similar catalogue of a society’s systematic abuse of women. I have a strand of political indignation running at the moment, though, so one strong reaction was ‘all those who supported the invasion/bombing of Afghanistan will use this film to justify their position, and they have no right to do so’. Grrr.
I’m also grumpy because of the increasing tendency of US liberals to denounce Michael Moore in order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of US conservatives. Moore’s sins are tiny and his positive impact huge – denouncing him only serves the interests of the those you claim to oppose! Grrr again.
And grr to the row of people who talked through the first half of Osama, and harrumphed with indignation when I told them to shut the fuck up. Grrr.
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Enough grr. Love instead. Love to you all.
Especially love to Leon. Verily, he is like unto a god. But more on that later.

[mediawatch] The Power of the Disconnect

(warning: this will be a long train of thought about media and politics and stuff. there won’t be a joke at the end. skip it if this stuff bores you.)
So one of the things I got out of the Palestine event was another angle on the same issue I’ve been messing with for years: the role of the popular media in perpetuating injustice.
I think now, more than ever, people are aware that the mediated presentations of political content can be deceptive. Everyone knows that you can’t trust the media – or at least, everyone says they know. Unfortunately, it continues to be clear that most people aren’t nearly as good as they claim to be at identifying and managing media slant.
There are dozens of ways in which the workings of big media obscure issues, and most of those ways are seized upon and actively exploited by the savvy PR people who are an essential part of the entourage of anyone in the public eye. I’m not going to go into those right now. There’s plenty of other places to read stuff like that.
What we as a society need, then, is a way to take this notion of media-awareness and make it an actuality. And a key tool in that mission is the disconnect.
Everyone has experienced this at some point. Something you know about or care about has turned up in the newspaper or on TV, and you’ve watched/read the coverage and been taken aback by it. Maybe it angered you; more likely it just made you realise how far their portrayal was from your experience.
That is the disconnect.
The disconnect is powerful. Most of us don’t encounter personally-important things in media coverage often enough to experience the disconnect. But I suspect that if someone was to have enough disconnects, in short enough timespan, they would start to identify the patterns behind the disconnects. Their claims of media-awareness would become actual instead of notional.
Consider the marketing goal of imparting the value of a brand or a product through impressions. If I remember right, something like seven impressions (advertisements, people mentioning it, seeing it on display) are needed to convince someone to buy a product they didn’t start out looking for.
So there’s a target for us: as many people as possible, seven disconnects in a year.
Why do we want to do this? Because society is manipulated. We are all caught up in an echo chamber that repeats its truisms in our ears over and over, and the most dangerous thing isn’t that we’ll believe the truisms, but that we’ll forget there’s a lot of other important things that aren’t even being talked about.
The disconnect is when you realise that media coverage is *missing the important point*. No, let me rephrase. The disconnect is when you realise that media coverage is *answering the unimportant question and ignoring the important one*.
How to encourage disconnects?
That’s tricky. My first idea was a regular article in a mag like New Zealand’s Listener, a left-leaning current affairs & TV listings journal that’s utterly part of the mainstream and seems quite unique in the western world – I’ve certainly never encountered anything elsee like it. If they spent one page a week tracking media coverage explicitly – quoting articles, identifying issues, watching the process of media spon – if this was delivered in an attractive visual package, bringing to light the groupthink and caution and quid pro quo that hamstrings mainstream media – I think disconnects could be given on a regular basis, article after article after article.
The blogs are doing this, but it’s piecemeal and caught up in political firestorms. Worthy feature articles on all parts of the political spectrum are likewise doing it, but it’s always long after the fact and always issue-focussed. These approaches are around, if you keep your eyes open. But the problem with the current state of affairs is that the media itself is never the subject. Something needs to alert people to the media as a process and a system, not just a window.
I have other ideas about ways for this to work, but they remain as blue-sky as magically appearing an extra page into the Listener each week. And this entry is long enough for now. I’m gonna leave it there. Turn some ideas over in my head for a week or so. One immediate problem: once people have been ‘disconnected’ from the media feed – then what? What would happen to these people? The only options I can think of are to become massive info-grazers like most of the political bloggers and internet junkies, processing masses of data points from all over into an ‘average’ that hopefully bears some resemblance to what’s true or important; or focusing on one media outlet that seems to share your perspective and letting that be your filter (kiwis could do worse than idiot/savant’s No Right Turn); or just giving up. None of these options appeal to me as a general answer. Is an alternative media a prerequisite for mass-resistance to current mainstream media systems? I dunno.
I’m also wondering whether people should have state-sponsored PR support dished out to the needy public like legal aid. To even the playing field a bit. But that might just be the Friday afternoon madness.
I hope that made sense, because I’m sure as heck not proofing it first. Please comment, too, if you’ve read this far. I might be totally missing some crucial point.

Palestine Event

It’s been almost a year since the massive and historic protests against the then-pending Iraq war. I went to the march in Glasgow, as well as a few other marches and talks earlier and later. They were fascinating, as well as worthwhile, and my belief at the time that they were the point when suspicion of the Bush administration’s push for war became entirely mainstream. I feel that point of view has been utterly vindicated. A documentary was shot over those months about the school students who took days off school to protest, and it has been screening off and on, generating a lot of support for what was widely decried at the time by even the most moderate of commentators. It was an extraordinary moment, and the only time in my living memory when such dissent had been so much a part of the mainstream around me.
Last night Cal and I went to ‘The Road To Peace In Palestine’ at the Edinburgh City Council chambers. Much less of a cause than the Iraq war, but very much continuous with the anti-war movement. The elegant chambers overlooking the royal mile were packed out, and the demographics had shifted even further from the anti-war protests – the largest groups by far were retired white people (Scots, I presume) and middle eastern people in their mid to late 20s. There were only a handful of white faces under the age of 40 – quite a change from every single protest march I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure if that’s a positive step, but if nothing else it makes it hard to tar the concerned people I saw with the brush of ‘foolish middle class white kids’.
Reverend Alistair McGregor of the Church of Scotland spoke first, and his overwhelming message was to go to Israel/Palestine and see the situation first-hand. He emphasised the psychological pressure being placed on the Palestinians by the occupiers. I found his speaking was unpleasantly locked in the Tony Blair Brit politician tradition – lots of ‘friends, believe me’ type rhetoric – but his message of seeing first hand was hard to fault. Also of note, and a big change from last year, was his haste to raise the issue of anti-semitism and proclaim his innocence. It’s a sign of how high that issue has been raised in recent months.
Then Rabbi Cohen spoke. He presented as fact something I’d never heard before – that active modern Zionism, forcefully creating a Jewish state, is actually against God’s will. He spoke movingly, and I certainly wish his interpretation to be correct since it is so profoundly rooted in humane concerns, but if I know anything about Talmudic lore it’s that readings are endlessly disputed. The most valuable contribution he can make, I think, is to give Palestinians a Jewish person to welcome and talk to and debate with, and so demonstrate that the anti-semitism charge made against their whole people is likewise without merit.
Finally, and best of all, Ibrahem Hewitt. A Geordie plain-speaker, he was compelling and sharp, and spoke of how his organisation has been and remains labelled as a terrorist threat by US security, preventing a lot of international freedoms. Of course, it has been thoroughly investigated by UK officials and utterly cleared. A sign of the way in which these matters are dealt with. I felt he was too quick to characterise the enemy (Israeli government, US government) in terms of their most extreme exemplars, which could lead inadvertantly to demonising of the Israeli people, but within its own context he was impossible to fault.
It was an interesting night and raised a lot of questions for me. None of which I’m going to share right now. It’s time for bed.

Sequencing Words and Dealing with Heinlein

I had an elaborate analogy involving writing and DNA sequencing and cloning and genetic engineering and stuff. But I deleted it because it was a bit crap. However, by telling you it existed, I somehow still get the kudos for my amazing ideas, without having to put up with the scorn that would result had any of you read what I wrote. Amazing how that works. Hey, in high school, when arm wrestling competitions were all the rage, I shrugged and refused to take part because I knew I’d lose. Despite me saying this, there was a small section of my classmates who were convinced I’d actually be able to beat them, if only I’d cut loose. See? Credit for nothing, in the face of all available evidence. People are funny sometimes.
Timely: I read in some of the comments on Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s essential blog Making Light that Robert Heinlein was firm that the proper response to the receipt of a rejected manuscript is to package it up and send it somewhere else. Don’t look at it, don’t dare edit it, just send it off. Keep it moving.
Of course, I’m no Heinlein, but I don’t think he meant it to apply only if you’re a writing god. It makes that perfect kind of simple sense – editors refuse good manuscripts all the time, so keep trying, and while you’re still trying, write something else and submit that too.
In the process of getting writing momentum going again I’ve realised that one of my continuing problems is having too many projects on the go at once. I have, seriously, about twenty to thirty live projects at any one time. With that many things in progress, ‘live’ becomes a creative description rather than an accurate one.
Now, on the face of it I don’t have a problem with this – I can justify time spent on every one of them.
The trouble is that they get in the way of each other. It’s too easy, when the going gets tough on something, to let it slide and turn attention to something else. There’s always lots of somethings else to turn to. Hey, that play you’ve been writing for four years about those guys choosing a video? Written twenty pages and some character notes and not sure what to do next? Not a problem, because look over here, it’s that comic script about one-hour parties you left half-done in 2000!
I’ve decided I need to sort this out. In my notebook I’ve made a priority list of projects to get sorted this year. I want to get rid of some of these long-lasting excuses. Bonus: by finishing things, I gain momentum and sense of satisfaction and confidence etc etc.
The dREAL ruleset was the first of these. It’s being distributed on the net at the moment, and people are making use of it, so that’s cool. And it’s a long-term project finished.
I’ve been taking down a few of the smaller ones as well. Now I’m back on to a big fish: Fell Legacy.
Fell Legacy was the fantasy novel I wrote a few years back with the support of Dale Elvy, whose own fantasy trilogy was published by HarperCollins. I wrote a damn good story that was sort of a Lord of the Rings in reverse – a muddy, angry, claustrophobic story about communities and friendships falling apart in difficult times. I sent it, of course, to Dale’s publisher, dropping the name and all. Sadly the manuscript was rejected. (I claim to this day that it was rejected because, of course, they have Dale – why would they need me? As this makes both Dale and me look good, alternative hypotheses have been deemed unnecessary.)
So I got this manuscript back, and then I went to the other side of the world.
It is the height of folly to have a completed, awesome manuscript on the shelf with but one rejection letter to its name. I have done that story wrong through my traveller’s neglect. On my list: Fell Legacy. Get it out there again.
So I have to get it ready to submit. I pulled open the file – 630 or so pages of manuscript. 130,000 words. Cool. And I can make it better.
Heinlein Alert! No, you fool! Wrap it up and send it off! Those who’ve been involved in my writing travails will know I’m always ready to re-draft anything I’ve written. I was sorely, sorely tempted.
But Fell Legacy had something I wasn’t happy with – a saggy opening. The most crucial part of the book, at that. Revise it, the voices said, reviiiiise it!
So I struck a deal with Heinlein. I would re-edit the prologue. And no more. I have forbidden myself to read over what follows.
And a matter of days later I’ve made the opening kick seven times of rear over the old version, and I’ve left the rest alone, and it’s all good. Time to knock on some doors.
Thanks Mr Heinlein. Thanks for helping me kick the habit.
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Everyone should go read Nate Cull’s blog entry on rockets and stuff, too.
~`morgue

Music In Our Message

This computer, our nifty laptop, with speakers, and broadband, is the best soundsystem I’ve ever owned that accepts mp3s. And so I finally catch up to the cool kids!
So I’ve been busily downloading a bunch of music files that have been sitting on the web for some time, and enjoying them tremendously.
Of course the power of knowing the creators led me to start with the files at aquaboogie and nonwrestler – some tracks I’ve heard, some I haven’t (but, sadly no Satan’s Vomit. Stuart, where is the love?) and all now residing merrily on my hard drive.
Next mission: Marxman.
It’s a little known fact that the whole reason I came to the UK was to find a copy of Irish Communist hip-hop outfit Marxman’s second album, Time Capsule. (True. This mission has been, sadly, a failure. In my naivete I assumed that somewhere in the UK there would be record stores along the lines of, say, Real Groovy. Um – no. Nope. No. At least, not anywhere I’ve been.)
Time Capsule was released free on the web by Oisin, the DJ for Marxman. I had a copy of this on one of my previous destined-for-burning hard drives, and listened to it on my tinny wee speakers. I remember the first track, Dazed & Confused, as insanely good and I was pleased to find that it mostly lives up to my memories.
(Marxman – yah!)
Next up – still on the hiphop vibe – Public Enemy’s unreleased ‘Bring the Noise 2000‘. I have a lot of love for late-period Public Enemy, and Chuck D’s messages about the rise of electronic music distribution released a decade ago on ‘Muse Sick in Our Mess Age’ sound pretty on the money now.
And now I’ve rediscovered www.loveisdashit.com which archives Michael Franti’s/Spearhead’s live performances, in the spirit of Franti’s ‘record and distribute my live gigs’ philosophy. And it’s damn cool.
And I’m just scratching the surface of what’s out there. Cool. I should finish with some nifty word-type-image like ‘I’m catching the technology wave’. How about: ‘I’m swaying on the weeble carousel of the new era.’
See, I can do this.
Needless to say, check all this stuff out if you’re so equipped.

One of these days I’m gonna do a serious-type post like I’ve been threatening to do. But Cal just messed up my hair until I screamed. So not now.

Pattern Games

There was a documentary here the other night about Tetris. I didn’t watch it. I was scared I’d get the urge again.
Tetris was one of the best of what I call the ‘pattern games’. Solitaire, Freecell, Minesweeper – all the same. They consist of a procedure of pattern manipulation that is highly repetitive and simple combined with a large variety of possible patterns. They are utterly engrossing, and I think that’s because they take work in perfect step with the brain itself.
My university training was in psychology, principally cognitive functioning such as memory. I was, and remain, fascinated by non-conscious processing – basically, where the neural system in your brain busily tracks or recognises or prompts something without your conscious awareness of what it’s doing.
The other day I started singing ‘there were green alligators…’ out of the blue, wondered what came next and eventually realised it was that song about noah’s ark leaving the unicorn behind. Then I did a double-take, for right next to me was a picture of a unicorn. My brain was processing stuff and spitting it out, and I wasn’t at all aware.
Brains are good with patterns. In a sense, patterns is all they are and all they do. Our brains are extremely good at noticing patterns and structuring our behaviour accordingly, much better than we usually realise. Our brains don’t tell our conscious awareness what they’ve noticed or figured out though – we just act accordingly. Even if we reflect on our actions, there’s usually no hints that some of our behaviour was prompted by recognising a pattern. Fortunately our conscious selves are very good at coming up with reasonable-sounding explanations for everything we do, so it isn’t much of a problem.
Tetris and the other pattern games exploit this. Our conscious effort is united with our non-conscious function to recognise and manipulate a pattern. Combined, they can provide an incredibly involving experience.
I remember when I was playing a lot of Tetris – I’d throw on a CD and listen to it while the blocks came tumbling down. My mind would wander incredibly, in and out of the music and the game-playing experience in front of me. It’s the closest to dreaming I’ve ever been while awake. And, not surprisingly, when I put my head down to sleep I would still have one foot in Tetris – the patterns would continue in my head, blocks coming down not as if I was seeing them but as if I could feel my brain playing out the patterns over and over and over again.
Which it was.
I didn’t watch the documentary but I did read the Guardian’s article about it. It mentioned a woman who spent a day seeing people talking in Tetris, their words falling from their mouths in patterns like blocks. This is how the brain works. It’s a crazy thing to put a mind in, I reckon – not that we have a choice in the matter.

Because I know you’ve all been aching for it, that rpg.net thread is here.
And handsome tall man Chuck, and my own handsome fizzog, are temporarily visible at Cal’s blog.
EDIT: and the book we are holding up is, spookily, pattern recognition. That’s the unicorn factor at work again, perhaps?

Trees and Mud

Waitangi Day – New Zealand’s national day. There’s a lot I could say about this but I will again resist temptation (aided of course by my desire to go to sleep).
Instead I will highlight two quotes from two different folk involved in the tumult of Waitangi Day 2004:
“Mud throwing is not the way for New Zealand to advance to the future.”
– Don Brash, after being splattered with mud
(from here)
“Go up and find out for yourself.”
– tree-climbing protester when asked by a reporter what it was like up the
tree
(from here)
Non-Kiwis won’t get enough context to get more than mild amusement at the state of our politics. Locals, though, might appreciate the richness of how these two quotes symbolise the issues. At least they do for me. Maybe I’m just reading too much in.
Amusing, anyway, alongside the seriousness of it all. Yes, it can be both at once. Politics usually is.

Went to see ‘Taking Sides’ tonight at Kings Theatre. Julian Glover. Just felt the need for some stage-stuff, and the queue for the free preview of Death of a Salesman was ten million people long.
It was… okay. I dunno why I didn’t warm to it more, given how it touched on many themes dear to my heart in ways I thought were clever and even wise – , maybe it was because it was built around a conundrum which I resolved to my satisfaction a decade ago.
Certainly the sheer theatricality of the production startled me. Actors booming their lines out into the audience, exaggerating their gestures, dialogue that sound like Highly Charged Aphorisms strung together. I’ve gotten so used to naturalism that I couldn’t get past it in this show. Although it could just have been that the show itself was badly written and directed.
Nah.
Anyway, much cheaper stuff at the festival was much better. Of course.
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I’ve just web-published a long-term project. It’s a roleplaying game ruleset, and I’m quite proud of it. However, if you’re not interested in the nuts-and-bolts side of RPGs then don’t bother following this link for more info.