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Parties, seriousness and the death of Web 2.0 | Apr 30, 2007 11:20

A couple of people asked me at Saturday night's wedding party whether I was really going for the job of editing Metro. Y'know, like it said in the paper that I was. I'm not, and have never even discussed the prospect with anyone. A certain diarist just pulled that out of … well, it wouldn't be polite to say where.

It's not that I don't like Metro. I read it every month, and my experience as a contributor for the outgoing editor was entirely satisfactory. But, even if I were to measure up, it would necessitate a halt to most of the other things I've put so much work into, and a couple of things that haven't happened yet, but might by the end of the year. It'd also be a bit like working for the man.

Still, there's no denying the appeal of getting out and researching Metro's Restaurant of the Year Awards. That would be good. My darling and I will consult the new guide when we get out and celebrate her birthday this coming weekend. (The rest of the new Metro, including a useful story on TVNZ by Jan Corbett, which doesn't seem to be pushing any particular agenda, is also pretty tasty.)

It's a busy-assed week, this one. I'll interview Ardal O'Hanlan (of Father Ted fame) for the radio show tomorrow, go along to the Freeview launch on Wednesday, speak at a freelance journalism conference on Thursday (subbing in for David Cohen, who's off in the Middle East) and attend the Magazine Publisher's Assocation awards on Friday night. I'm a finalist in the best business column category, for my regular Left Field piece in Unlimited: I don't think I'll win, but I didn't think I'd win in 2005 and 2006 either, so I guess it's as well that I'm actually going along this time.

I have no print entries in the Qantas Media Awards this year; because I was swamped and busy when the deadline loomed up and for other reasons. But I am entered in the all-new blog category (one of a cluster of online awards to debut this year), and I care more about that anyway.

What's that? Something to chew on? Try Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, which is attracting a notable buzz before it has even been published. Ironically, that buzz is developing through the very media that Keen declares is infantilising us all. Reading his blog, I'm inclined to take Keen in the spirit in which I'd take any contrarian. It's always useful to have one, but bucking established wisdom is not necessarily the same thing as being right, and I don't think even Keen believes everything he writes.

To make his argument fly, Keen is obliged to make some courageous generalisations. Does anybody really believe that all the world's blogs are of intrinsic and equal merit? Of course not.

Keen wants elites. Well, there are elites, all over the place. And those elites are more accessible to the rest of us than they ever were. Do we really want to return to a world where policy documents and party press releases only ever reached a tiny circle of lobbyists and journalists? Look at the sphere of the academic journal: while there's still no substitute for peer review, the journal system is broken in some significant ways, not least in the sheer cost for libraries and academic institutions in maintain subscriptions to journals that only reach a tiny minority of potentially interested readers. Does it benefit me that people in a range of disciplines also choose to communicate directly with a wider readership? Sure does.

We also tend to discount the leap in literacy that has accompanied the mainstreaming of the internet. Yes, you did read that right. How many of us, even us pros, wrote as much 10 years ago as we do now? How many of us ever participated in the kind of lengthy prose debates you see on Public Address System? Is opinion only meritorious if it is printed in a newspaper? And is the world of book really the worse for the rise of Amazon? Is Web 2.0 over because one of the hundreds of millions of people who use the internet killed himself live on his webcam? And where else does Keen think I'd have got the support and information I got from these amateurs when our son was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome? (And for that matter, show me a commentator who consistently nails it the way Autism Diva and her fellow Autism Hub bloggers do.)

So MySpace is mostly trivial. Was it expected to be other than that?

In the end, I have my doubts that the orderly world that Keen would wish would generate any near as much goodness as the disorderly world he attacks. Over the weekend, I watched a great BBC Four documentary called Once Upon a Time in New York, which effectively posits the Big Apple in the 70s as something akin to the South Bank of Shakespearian London. It was corrupt, crumbling and dangerous. And in a few short years it revitalised visual art and gave birth to punk rock, disco and the practical postmodernism of hip hop. That worked for me.

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And, finally, the wedding I mentioned at the beginning was that of my good friends Phil and Renee. They had the ceremony in the garden of the King's Arms and had the party there later on. Blam Blam Blam played. It was great fun. And, having counted Phil and Renee as my partners in crime on any number of nights out in this town, I can confidently say that I've known few couples who complete each the way they do. They truly rock.

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Unusual Democracy | Apr 27, 2007 11:00

Here's a nightmare for Kiwiblog readers: the vote-counting system for the 2008 New Zealand general election is run by a senior Labour Party official. On election night, the government website that updates the official vote tally is, in a highly unusual move, redirected to a server farm that is otherwise occupied by partisan left-wing websites, including helenclark.co.nz, the official Labour campaign website, where it is under the control of Labour Party officials.

The farm is also home to servers associated with the private email system used by senior Parliamentary officials for the Labour Party. (These will later become controversial during an investigation into claims that police and judicial officials unwilling to pursue charges against the National Party for breaches of electoral law in the same election have been forced out of their jobs by Attorney General David Parker. The inquiry will be told that many thousands of relevant emails have simply been "lost".)

Although the votes will never be independently accounted, a number of unusual things happen. Just before midnight, the Labour Party-controlled "official" site shows a narrow but growing lead for National. TV commentators begin to talk about the impending era of John Key, and the rebuilding task facing the Labour Party.

But the official count freezes for 90 minutes. TV commentators run out of things to say. When the count comes back, things have changed: Helen Clark is in the lead she will keep to claim a historic fourth term.

But there are some strange results. Even though the voters of Pakuranga deliver Maurice Williamson his inevitable thumping majority, 10,500 of those voters are recorded by the Labour-controlled vote-counting system as having given their party vote to … Labour.

In at least two other electorates, only party votes for Labour are returned in the last two hours they are open, suggesting that the last few hundred people to vote in those electorates all voted for Labour and not any other party. In those cases, the one-way late votes are enough to tip the result Labour's way.

There are also hundreds of "phantom" votes, at polling places where the number of ballots available for counting are inexplicably lower than the number of people recorded as voting. In other electorates the number of voter is thousands fewer than the number of people recorded as voting. The irregularity will later be discovered by a PhD statistician from Auckland university - after he has waited a year for the release of the records. For the meantime, Labour wins all of these electorates.

Thousands of voter registrations recorded in the system will subsequently come to be regarded as fraudulent. They have all apparently been made on the same day in 1977, in Auckland Central.

A report by National Party researchers, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in 2008, will later cite many other unusual, even impossible, results. Ten thousand votes are mysteriously added to the total just before counting closes in Dunedin North. Waitakere mayor and former Labour Party President Bob Harvey declares a state of emergency in his city, under which security staff are ordered to take ballots to a police-guarded unauthorized warehouse to be counted away from public scrutiny, despite local media protests.

A furious campaign by blogger David Farrar will keep the issue alive, but it is largely ignored by the New Zealand Herald and other key mainstream media organisations.

Well, that, with certain liberties as regards scale and systems, is pretty much what happened in Ohio in the 2004 US presidential election, as explained on TomPaine.com (hat tip: Adam Bogacki) by the authors of a new book, What Happened in Ohio? A documentary record of theft and fraud in the 2004 election. Ohio was, of course, the state that turned the presidency.

Much of what is in the book has been known or suspected for some time: even Christopher Hitchens was moved to declare that Ohio stank of something. You can see the history of the redirects and check out the Sourcewatch page on Smartech, the Republican Party's hosting company.

Even if there's an explanation for the outsourcing of election systems to the Republican Party's internet operation (as Slashdot post points out, it happened again in 2006) that doesn't involve electoral fraud, it's still recklessly inappropriate.

Slashdot also has a thread on the five million missing White House emails, many of them related to domains managed by Smartech.

This wouldn't matter so much, of course, if the US presidency didn't have such an impact on the rest of the world. But if, indeed, something was rotten in Ohio, and in the wider conduct of affairs around Karl Rove, then perhaps there's a poetry to it. Bush bundled out in 2004 would have preserved something of his reputation. There seems little prospect of that now.

Perhaps we should just leave it to the Daily Show's brilliant little Bush v Bush bit this week.

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Campbell Smith was back before a select committee yesterday, this time with his Big Day Out hat on and asking for restrictions on ticket scalping at "major" events to be extended to big concerts. I certainly have some sympathy there; organised scalping is a tawdry business. But people do have months in which to purchase Big day Out tickets.

That's not the case for big rugby games. The bill is, of course, aimed at regulating trade in tickets to World Cup rugby matches. But you know what practice really prevents me, as an ordinary punter, from buying tickets (more specifically: tickets anywhere but the terraces) to rugby test matches?

It's the NZRU's regular practice of selling blocks of tickets, in advance of public sales, to "hospitality" companies that toss in food, drink and a tent (none of which have anything to do with rugby) as an excuse to resell those tickets at a vastly inflated price: like $300 for an uncovered seat or $500 if you 're wild enough to want a covered seat. As a punter, I don't see a functional difference between that and scalping.

The Major Events Management Bill also, of course, cracks down on streakers at major events. This is sledgehammer-and-nut stuff, intended to protect sponsors' investment from guerrilla marketing. But then I read this twaddle from bikini streaker and professional attention-seeker Lisa Lewis:

Her submission, released to the Herald, proposes organised mass bikini-streaks at the end of major sporting events to remove the danger of renegade streakers.

It says streaking added to the excitement at a game, and should be permitted, "with some ground rules".

A bikini "run" at the end of a game could become an institution similar to "the competition at the horse races of hats and best dressed".

She also believed the threatened three-month jail sentence would be "celebrated as a badge of honour".

"Imagine the heroic connotations of being the first person who plucks up the guts to do it anyway."

And I think: Just piss off, you silly tart.

Congratulations to No Right Turn for the swift success of his Sedition law repeal pledge. You can still sign up. More from NRT on the move to get sedition off the books here and here.

If you didn't catch it, the economists arguing about exchange rates and policy on Morning Report today was sort of interesting, if hardly encouraging.

SJD's new song, 'Beautiful Haze' is just possibly the best thing they've ever done - I have been plaguing my family by singing along to it (which is at least, better than me singing along to the Fall's 'Hit the North', which caused my darling to think there was something terribly wrong in the kitchen). Until the new album comes out you can listen to the song at the group's MySpace page.

And, finally, with Leo and Colin on hiatus for reasons that are not clear to me, I commend to you the current big thing: the cat on YouTube that plays piano.

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The A-Word | Apr 24, 2007 10:55

It seems I wasn't the only one thinking the A-word as biographical details of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung Hui emerged. It wasn't that hard: the inability to make eye contact, lack of friends, monotonal voice and history of being bullied are all pretty typical (but not universal) characteristics of people on the autistic spectrum. And this is a condition that at present can only be diagnosed by observing characteristics.

Tze Ming sent me a link to both the Daily Mirror's story on the brutal and spectacular denunciation of Cho by his grandfather and great aunt, which broached the childhood autism diagnosis, and the AutismLink press statement on the issue, with the dry observation that: "We the Asians of the World welcome the Autism Advocates of the World in suddenly needing to issue press releases apologising for and/or repudiating the actions of one of our 'own' and/or begging for tolerance and understanding, in order to fend off revenge attacks (because revenge-attackers always read press releases)."

Clearly, CNN decided it was a sensitive issue. It featured the autism diagnosis in its initial report, then removed all mention of it from its online story. Perhaps that was simply a matter of prudence, given that the news was hearsay, but I'm not sure I'm any more comfortable with the a-word being whisked away than I am with it being sensationalised.

We've been through this before: Martin Bryant, who massacred 35 people in Tasmania, was given a post-killing diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome around the same time we got Jimmy's diagnosis. Let's hear it for the internet and the better information that was available to us in 1996, and wouldn't have been three years earlier. That helped a lot.

Bryant, of course, had many other problems, and I expect that we will discover so did Cho. It's fair to say that when someone on the spectrum gets alienated, they can get really alienated, but that's not the same thing as the emotional and psychological disturbances that appear to have been present in both killers.

I prefer to think there won't be "revenge attacks", or the kind of moral panic that flared up around "goth culture" after the Columbine massacre. In Australia, Bryant's crime did not spark a wave of fear or prejudice against people on the autistic spectrum, but certain sections of American society have been known to over-react.

I think more likely than public prejudice is an anxious new policy setting in schools: the next time an aspie kid says something bad in the midst of a bout of school refusal (believe me, it happens) all hell will break loose and the kid's out of school. And being a "loner" becomes a "warning sign".

Which makes a pretty good segue into Craig Ranapia's thoughtful comment on related issues from Saturday's Public Address Radio.

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Also new in the podcast: a five-minute chat with Steven Price about the Coalition for Open Government.

And some consumer recommendations:

The Murray McDavid Dufftown 1993 (11 year old; Bourbon/Syrah finished) . A really rather splendid Speyside. Don't blow $120 on bloody Laphroiag when this is $83 at Glengarry's and a hell of a lot better.

Booniay!! A Collection of West African Funk and Pere Ubu's landmark The Modern Dance - both available for bugger-all (or as part of your trial 25 downloads) and both really worth owning. If you think you might like that, click on one of the eMusic ads on this site, and we get a little money if you sign up. (Actually, don't be shy about clicking on any ads - it's all good for us.)

And, from BBC Four: Racism: A History. A superb, serious three-parter that may shatter some ideas you have about white folks and civilisation. There are two eps showing up in a torrent search here.

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They faked those moon landings too, you know | Apr 23, 2007 10:06

Over the weekend, Glenn Greenwald turned out a sterling post on the "story" that may well represent the neocon media's final jumping of the shark: a claim that not only did Iraq have WMDs, but that the presence of sophisticated "nuclear, chemical and biological materials" in vast underground bunkers is being covered up by both the Republicans and the Democrats (and the State Department and, well, everyone really) who further know that the nuclear materials were stolen by terrorists, and are even now in the possession of a cabal of hostile nations (Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia and China) who are collaborating on "an Islamic bomb against the West".

These extraordinary claims - and more! - are made in an article in The Spectator by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips. (You may recall her as the journalist plagiarised by the Maxim Institute's Bruce Logan. She was also the subject of a withering recent column by Jonathan Freedland in the Jewish Chronicle.)

Phillips' story is based on an interview with a single individual, Dave Gaubatz, who is, frankly, barking.

And yet, as Greenwald points out, the neocon commentariat is almost universally up for it. The story has been more or less embraced by the whole gang: Instapundit, Malkin, Powerline, Pajamas Media and more. I won't bother repeating the content of Greenwald's post because you can read that yourself, but I did twig a few more things about the "story".

Phillips bolsters her story by citing the support of John Loftus, "a formidably well-informed former attorney to the intelligence world" and the creator of something called The Intelligence Summit. Last month, the St Petersburg Times ran a story about The Intelligence Summit:

During a phone conversation with the St. Petersburg Times, Loftus offered this preview of the kind of "sensational disclosure" that will be revealed at the Intelligence Summit:

"At the end of the Iraq war in 2003, the Bush administration covered up finding four huge storehouses of weapons of mass destruction under 25 feet of water because the stuff was moved and then looted and the administration was embarrassed."

The State Department would not comment on this claim. But Gary Schmitt, former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a security and defense scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he had never heard Loftus' version of events.

"I know nothing about that or the Intelligence Summit," said Schmitt. But he said he had heard of Loftus: "I don't recall him as an intelligence person, but as someone who gives opinions to the press."

According to IRS documents, the main donor to the International Holocaust Education Center from 2004 to 2005 was Michael Cherney, a Russian aluminum tycoon who gave the organization $100,000 that year. Loftus has not yet made the 2005-06 IRS records available to the St. Petersburg Times. He says they show that Cherney donated another $50,000 last year.

Cherney, who Loftus agrees was the summits' main contributor, was invited by Loftus to be the "distinguished guest of honor" at this year's event. But the United States has denied Cherney a visa since 1999 because of alleged ties to the Russian mafia.

Loftus acknowledges the U.S. government's view of Cherney, but says, "He was framed by Negroponte and never committed a crime." John Negroponte, now deputy secretary of state, is the former director of national intelligence. The State Department would not comment.

Oh yes. Negroponte's in on the conspiracy too, as breathlessly revealed by Phillips in a follow-up on her blog:

This is not the first such instance of abuse, nor is the Intelligence Summit the only victim. Mr. Negroponte is the informal leader of a State Department faction, colloquially known as the 'Red Team' because of its support for a dialogue with communist China.

As is the course of such things, this conspiracy hasn't so much sprung into being as evolved over time. Remember last year, when Sen. Rick Santorum claimed that some old, degraded shells that had turned up in Iraq were evidence of Saddam's modern WMD programme? Gaubatz was right in the thick of that one too. He was feeding "information" to Santorum and two Republican Congressmen, who he subsequently accused of running a "slime campaign" against him.

The Gaubatz threat level has escalated rather remarkably since August. Back then, he was warning that because the sites he identified had not been searched, "there is now a possibility the sites were looted and WMD is in the hands of terrorists". A few months later it's an Islamic-bomb slamdunk.

I know that such conspiracy theories bloom across the political spectrum: the Loose Change crazies have convinced a few people that 9/11 was an inside job. But that particular theory hasn't been picked by established liberal commentators: quite the reverse, in fact. Probably the saddest thing about this episode is that Phillips' story ran in The Spectator, which has traditionally kept a decent distance from neocon craziness.

And what on earth is happening to conservatism when it becomes a petri dish for this sort of political fungus? Andrew Sullivan's right: it's going down the gurgler.

PS: On a completely different tip, congratulations to the national Under-19 rugby side, who played simply magnificent rugby to win their World Cup. It's a shame they'll have to come down a level to the Super 14.

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