/2014

Jagal - The Act of Killing
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tILiqotj7Y

avec sous-titres
▻https://amara.org/en/videos/lCHCQE8uqUJb/en/749348
à 00:16:00 un gangster parle de sa passion pour le cinémà et comment c’était pratique d’avoir les locaux pour tuer et torturer en face de la salle de projection.

C’est le film le moins apprécié par l’office de tourisme indonésien car il montre que le pays est gouverné aujourd’hui par les assassins de 1965/66 qui se font un plaisir de se vanter de leurs crimes devant la caméra.

BACKGROUND | The Act of Killing
▻http://theactofkilling.com/background

CONTEXT, BACKGROUND AND METHOD
First Encounter with the 1965-66 Massacres – The Globalization Tapes
In 2001-2002, Christine Cynn and I went to Indonesia for the first time to produce The Globalization Tapes (2003), a participatory documentary project made in collaboration with the Independent Plantation Workers Union of Sumatra. Using their own forbidden history as a case study, these Indonesian filmmakers worked with us to trace the development of contemporary globalization from its roots in colonialism to the present.

The Globalization Tapes exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the global economy, and explores the relationships between trade, third-world debt, and international institutions like the IMF and the World Trade Organization. Made by some of the poorest workers in the world, the film is a lyrical and incisive account of how our global financial institutions shape and enforce the corporate world order. The film uses chilling first-hand accounts, hilarious improvised interventions, collective debate and archival collage.

Several scenes in The Globalization Tapes reveal the earliest traces of the methods we refined in the shooting of The Act of Killing: plantation workers stage a satirical commercial for the pesticide that poisons them; worker-filmmakers pose as World Bank agents who offer microfinance to ‘develop’ local businesses – offers that are both brutal and absurd, yet tempting nonetheless.

While shooting and editing The Globalization Tapes, we discovered that the 1965-66 Indonesian massacres were the dark secret haunting Indonesia’s much-celebrated entrance into the global economy. One of the military’s main objectives in the killings was to destroy the anti-colonial labour movement that had existed until 1965, and to lure foreign investors with the promise of cheap, docile workers and abundant natural resources. The military succeeded (The Globalization Tapes is a testament to the extraordinary courage of the plantation worker-filmmakers as they challenge this decades-long legacy of terror and try to build a new union).

The killings would come up in discussions, planning sessions, and film shoots nearly every day, but always in whispers. Indeed, many of the plantation workers were themselves survivors of the killings. They would discretely point out the houses of neighbors who had killed their parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles. The perpetrators were still living in the same village and made up, along with their children and protégés, the local power structure. As outsiders, we could interview these perpetrators – something the plantation workers could not do without fear of violence.

In conducting these first interviews, we encountered the pride with which perpetrators would boast about the most grisly details of the killings. The Act of Killing was born out of our curiosity about the nature of this pride – its clichéd grammar, its threatening performativity, its frightening banality.

The Globalization Tapes was a film made collectively by the plantation workers themselves, with us as facilitators and collaborating directors. The Act of Killing was also made by working very closely with its subjects, while in solidarity and collaboration with the survivors’ families. However, unlike The Globalization Tapes, The Act of Killing is an authored work, an expression of my own vision and concerns regarding these issues.

THE BEGINNING OF THE ACT OF KILLING

By the time I first met the characters in The Act of Killing (in 2005), I had been making films in Indonesia for three years, and I spoke Indonesian with some degree of fluency. Since making The Globalization Tapes (2003), Christine Cynn, fellow film-maker and longtime collaborator Andrea Zimmerman and I had continued filming with perpetrators and survivors of the massacres in the plantation areas around the city of Medan. In 2003 and 2004, we filmed more interviews and simple re-enactments with Sharman Sinaga, the death squad leader who had appeared in The Globalization Tapes. We also filmed as he introduced us to other killers in the area. And we secretly interviewed survivors of the massacres they committed.

Moving from perpetrator to perpetrator, and, unbeknownst to them, from one community of survivors to another, we began to map the relationships between different death squads throughout the region, and began to understand the process by which the massacres were perpetrated. In 2004, we began filming Amir Hasan, the death squad leader who had commanded the massacres at the plantation where we made The Globalization Tapes.

In late 2004, Amir Hasan began to introduce me to killers up the chain of command in Medan. Independently in 2004, we began contacting ‘veterans’ organizations of death squad members and anti-leftist activists in Medan. These two approaches allowed us to piece together a chain of command, and to locate the surviving commanders of the North Sumatran death squads. In early interviews with the veterans of the killings (2004), I learned that the most notorious death squad in North Sumatra was Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry’s Frog Squad (Pasukan Kodok).

During these first meetings with Medan perpetrators (2004 and 2005), I encountered the same disturbing boastfulness about the killings that we had been documenting on the plantations. The difference was that these men were the celebrated and powerful leaders not of a small rural village, but of the third largest city in Indonesia (Greater Medan has a population of over four million people).

Our starting point for The Act of Killing was thus the question: how had this society developed to the point that its leaders could – and would – speak of their own crimes against humanity with a cheer that was at once celebratory but also intended as a threat?

OVERVIEW AND CHRONOLOGY OF THE METHODS USED IN THE ACT OF KILLING

Building on The Globalization Tapes and our film work outside Indonesia, we had developed a method in which we open a space for people to play with their image of themselves, re-creating and re-imagining it on camera, while we document this transformation as it unfolds. In particular, we had refined this method to explore the intersection between imagination and extreme violence.

In the early days of research (2005), I discovered that the army recruited its killers in Medan from the ranks of movie theatre gangsters (or preman bioskop) who already hated the leftists for their boycott of American movies – the most profitable in the cinema. I was intrigued by this relationship between cinema and killings, although I had no idea it would be so deep. Not only did Anwar and his friends know and love the cinema, but they dreamed of being on the screen themselves, and styled themselves after their favorite characters. They even borrowed their methods of murder from the screen.

Of course, I began by trying to understand in as much detail as possible Anwar and his friends’ roles in the killings and, afterwards, in the regime they helped to build. Among the first things I did was to bring them to the former newspaper office directly across the road from Anwar’s old cinema, the place where Anwar and his friends killed most of their victims. There, they demonstrated in detail what they had done. Although they were filming documentary re-enactment and interviews, during breaks I noticed that they would muse about how they looked like various movie stars – for instance, Anwar compared his protégé and sidekick, Herman to Fernando Sancho.

To understand how they felt about the killings, and their unrepentant way of representing them on film, I screened back the unedited footage of these early re-enactments, and filmed their responses. At first, I thought that they would feel the re-enactments made them look bad, and that they might possibly come to a more complex place morally and emotionally.

I was startled by what actually happened. On the surface at least, Anwar was mostly anxious that he should look young and fashionable. Instead of any explicit moral reflection, the screening led him and Herman spontaneously to suggest a better, and more elaborate, dramatization.

To explore their love of movies, I screened for them scenes from their favorite films at the time of the killings – Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah and, ironically, The Ten Commandments topped the list – recording their commentary and the memories these films elicited. Through this process, I came to realize why Anwar was continually bringing up these old Hollywood films whenever I filmed re-enactments with them: he and his fellow movie theatre thugs were inspired by them at the time of the killings, and had even borrowed their methods of murder from the movies. This was such an outlandish and disturbing idea that I in fact had to hear it several times before I realized quite what Anwar and his friends were saying.

He described how he got the idea of strangling people with wire from watching gangster movies. In a late-night interview in front of his former cinema, Anwar explained how different film genres would lead him to approach killing in different ways. The most disturbing example was how, after watching a “happy film like an Elvis Presley musical”, Anwar would “kill in a happy way”.

In 2005, I also discovered that the other paramilitary leaders (not just the former movie theater gangsters) had other personal and deep-seated relationship to movies. Ibrahim Sinik, the newspaper boss who was secretary general of all the anti-communist organizations that participated in the killings, and who directly gave the orders to Anwar’s death squad, turned out to be a feature film producer, screenwriter, and former head of the Indonesian Film Festival.

In addition to all this, Anwar and his friends’ impulse towards being in a film about the killings was essentially to act in dramatizations of their pasts – both as they remember them, and as they would like to be remembered (the most powerful insights in The Act of Killing probably come in those places where these two agendas radically diverge). As described, the idea of dramatizations came up quite spontaneously, in response to viewing the rushes from Anwar’s first re-enactments of the killings.

But it would be disingenuous to claim that we facilitated the dramatizations only because that’s what Anwar and his friends wanted to do. Ever since we produced The Globalization Tapes, the thing that most fascinated us about the killings was the way the perpetrators we filmed would recount their stories of those atrocities. One had the feeling that we weren’t simply hearing memories, but something else besides – something intended for a spectator. More precisely, we felt we were receiving performances. And we instinctively understood, I think, that the purpose of these performances was somehow to assert a kind of impunity, to maintain a threatening image, to perpetuate the autocratic regime that had begun with the massacres themselves.

We sensed that the methods we had developed for incorporating performance into documentary might, in this context, yield powerful insights into the mystery of the killers’ boastfulness, the nature of the regime of which they are a part, and, most importantly, the nature of human ‘evil’ itself.

So, having learned that even their methods of murder were directly influenced by cinema, we challenged Anwar and his friends to make the sort of scenes they had in mind. We created a space in which they could devise and star in dramatisations based on the killings, using their favorite genres from the medium.

We hoped to catalyze a process of collective remembrance and imagination. Fiction provided one or two degrees of separation from reality, a canvas on which they could paint their own portrait and stand back and look at it.

We started to suspect that performance played a similar role during the killings themselves, making it possible for Anwar and his friends to absent themselves from the scene of their crimes, while they were committing them. Thus, performing dramatizations of the killings for our cameras was also a re-living of a mode of performance they had experienced in 1965, when they were killing. This obviously gave the experience of performing for our cameras a deeper resonance for Anwar and his friends than we had anticipated.

And so, in The Act of Killing, we worked with Anwar and his friends to create such scenes for the insights they would offer, but also for the tensions and debates that arose during the process – including Anwar’s own devastating emotional unravelling.

This created a safe space, in which all sorts of things could happen that would probably elude a more conventional documentary method. The protagonists could safely explore their deepest memories and feelings (as well as their blackest humor). I could safely challenge them about what they did, without fear of being arrested or beaten up. And they could challenge each other in ways that were otherwise unthinkable, given Sumatra’s political landscape.

Anwar and his friends could direct their fellow gangsters to play victims, and even play the victims themselves, because the wounds are only make-up, the blood only red paint, applied only for a movie. Feelings far deeper than those that would come up in an interview would surface unexpectedly. One reason the emotional impact was so profound came from the fact that this production method required a lot of time – the filmmaking process came to define a significant period in the participants’ lives. This meant that they went on a deeper journey into their memories and feelings than they would in a film consisting largely of testimony and simple demonstration.

Different scenes used different methods, but in all of them it was crucial that Anwar and his friends felt a sense of fundamental ownership over the fiction material. The crux of the method is to give performers the maximum amount of freedom to determine as many variables as possible in the production (storyline, casting, costumes, mise-en-scene, improvisation on set). Whenever possible, I let them direct each other, and used my cameras to document their process of creation. My role was primarily that of provocateur, challenging them to remember the events they were performing more deeply, encouraging them to intervene and direct each other when they felt a performance was superficial, and asking questions between takes – both about what actually happened, but also about how they felt at the time, and how they felt as they re-enacted it.

We shot in long takes, so that situations could evolve organically, and with minimal intervention from ourselves. I felt the most significant event unfolding in front of the cameras was the act of transformation itself, particularly because this transformation was usually plagued by conflict, misgivings, and other imperfections that seemed to reveal more about the nature of power, violence, and fantasy than more conventional documentary or investigative methods. For this same reason, we also filmed the pre-production of fiction scenes, including castings, script meetings, and costume fittings. Make-up sessions too were important spaces of reflection and transformation, moments where the characters slip down the rabbit hole of self-invention.

In addition, because we never knew when the characters would refuse to take the process further, or when we might get in trouble with the military, we filmed each scene as though it might be the last, and also everything leading up to them (not only for the reasons above), because often we didn’t know if the dramatization itself would actually happen. We also felt that the stories we were hearing – stories of crimes against humanity never before recorded – were of world historical importance. More than anything else, these are two reasons why this method generated so many hours of footage (indeed, we have created a vast audio-visual archive about the Indonesian massacres. This archive has been the basis of a four-year United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council project called Genocide and Genre).

After almost every dramatization, we would screen the rushes back to them, and record their responses. We wanted to make sure they knew how they appeared on film, and to use the screening to trigger further reflection. Sometimes, screenings provoked feelings of remorse (as when Anwar watches himself play the victim during a film noir scene) but, at other times, as when we screened the re-enactment of the Kampung Kolam massacre to the entire cast, the images were met with terrifying peals of laughter.

Most interestingly, Anwar and his friends discussed, often insightfully, how other people will view the film, both in Indonesia and internationally. For example, Anwar sometimes commented on how survivors might curse him, but that “luckily” the victims haven’t the power to do anything in today’s Indonesia.

The gangster scenes were wholly improvised. The scenarios came from the stories Anwar and his friends had told each other during earlier interviews, and during visits to the office where they killed people. The set was modeled on this interior. For maximum flexibility, our cinematographer lit the space so that Anwar and his friends could move about freely, and we filmed them with two cameras so that they could fluidly move from directing each other to improvised re-enactments to quiet, often riveting reflection after the improvisation was finished.

For instance, Anwar re-enacted how he killed people by placing them on a table and then pulling tight a wire, from underneath the table, to garrote them. The scene exhausted him, physically and emotionally, leaving him full of doubt about the morality of what he did. Immediately after this re-enactment, he launched into a cynical and resigned rant against the growing consensus around human rights violations. Here, reality and its refraction through fiction, Anwar’s memories and his anticipation of their impact internationally, are all overlaid.

The noir scenes were shot over a week, and culminated in an extraordinary improvisation where Anwar played the victim. Anwar’s performance was effective and, transported by the performance, the viewer empathizes with the victim, only to do a double take as they remember that Anwar is not a victim, but the killer.

The large-scale re-enactment of the Kampung Kolam massacre was made using a similar improvisational process, with Anwar and his friends undertaking the direction. What we didn’t expect was a scene of such violence and realism; so much so that it proved genuinely frightening to the participants, all of whom were Anwar’s friends from Pancasila Youth, or their wives and children. After the scene, we filmed participants talking amongst themselves about how the location of our re-enactment was just a few hundred meters from one of North Sumatra’s countless mass graves. The woman we see fainting after the scene felt she had been possessed by a victim’s ghost. The paramilitary members (including Anwar) thought so, too. The violence of the re-enactment conjured the spectres of a deeper violence, the terrifying history of which everybody in Indonesia is somehow aware, and upon which the perpetrators have built their rarefied bubble of air conditioned shopping malls, gated communities, and “very, very limited” crystal figurines.

The process by which we made the musical scenes (the waterfall, the giant concrete goldfish) was slightly different again. But here too Anwar was very much in the driver’s seat: he chose the songs and, along with his friends, devised both scenes. Anwar and his cast were also free to make changes as we went.

In the end, we worked very carefully with the giant goldfish, presenting motifs from a half-forgotten dream. Anwar’s beautiful nightmare? An allegory for his storytelling confection? For his blindness? For the willful blindness by which almost all history is written, and by which, consequently, we inevitably come to know (and fail to know) ourselves? The fish changes throughout the film, but it is always a world of “eye candy”, emptiness and ghosts. If it could be explained adequately in words, we would not need it in the film.

For the scenes written by the newspaper boss Ibrahim Sinik and his staff, Sinik enlisted the help of his friends at state television, TVRI. He borrows the TVRI regional drama studios, and recruits a soap opera crew. In these scenes, our role was largely to document Anwar and his friends as they work with the TV crew, and to catalyze and document debates between fiction set-ups. In our edited scenes, we cut from the documentary cameras to TVRI’s fiction cameras, highlighting the gap between fiction and reality – often to comic effect. But above all, we focused our cameras on moments between takes where they debated the meaning of the scene.

The Televisi Republik Indonesia “Special Dialogue” came into being when the show’s producers realised that feared and respected paramilitary leaders making a film about the genocide was a big story (they came to know about our work because we were using the TVRI studios.) After their grotesque chat show was broadcast, there was no critical response in North Sumatra whatsoever. This is not to say that the show will not be shocking to Indonesians. For reasons discussed in my director’s statement, North Sumatrans are more accustomed than Jakartans, for example, to the boasting of perpetrators (who in Sumatra were recruited from the ranks of gangsters – and the basis of gangsters’ power, after all, lies in being feared).

Moreover, virtually nobody in Medan dares to criticise Pancasila Youth and men like Anwar Congo and Ibrahim Sinik. Ironically, the only significant reaction to the talk show’s broadcast came from the Indonesian Actors’ Union. According to Anwar, a representative of the union visiting family in Medan came to Anwar’s house to ask him if he would consider being president of the North Sumatra branch of the union. According to Anwar, the union was angry that such a large-scale production had occurred in North Sumatra without their knowing about it. Luckily, Anwar had the humility to tell them that he is not an actor, that he was playing himself in scenes made for a documentary, and therefore would decline the offer.

Anwar and his friends knew that their fiction scenes were only being made for our documentary, and this will be clear to the audience, too. But at the same time, if these scenes were to offer genuine insights, it was vital that the filmmaking project was one in which they were deeply invested, and one over which they felt ownership.

The Act of Killing : don’t give an Oscar to this snuff movie | Nick Fraser | Film | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/act-of-killing-dont-give-oscar-snuff-movie-indonesia

It has won over critics but this tasteless film teaches us nothing and merely indulges the unrepentant butchers of Indonesia

The Act of Killing won the documentary prize at the Baftas last week and is the favourite to win the much-coveted Oscar. I watch many documentaries on behalf of the BBC each year and I go to festivals. I’m a doc obsessive. By my own, not quite reliable reckoning, I’ve been asked by fans to show The Act of Killing on the BBC at least five times. I’ve never encountered a film greeted by such extreme responses – both those who say it is among the best films and those who tell me how much they hate it. Much about the film puzzles me. I am still surprised by the fact that so many critics listed it among their favourite films of last year.

For those who haven’t seen the film, it investigates the circumstances in which half-a-million Indonesian leftists were murdered in the 1960s, at the instigation of a government that is still in power. You might think this is a recondite subject, worthy of a late-night screening for insomniacs or atrocity buffs on BBC4, but, no, the film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer has made the subject viewable by enlisting the participation of some of the murderers. He spent some years hanging out with them, to his credit luring them into confessions. But he also, more dubiously, enlisted their help in restaging their killings. Although one of them, the grandfatherly Anwar, shows mild symptoms of distress towards the end of the film, they live in a state of impunity and it is thus, coddled and celebrated in their old age, that we revisit them.

So let me be as upfront as I can. I dislike the aesthetic or moral premise of The Act of Killing. I find myself deeply opposed to the film. Getting killers to script and restage their murders for the benefit of a cinema or television audience seems a bad idea for a number of reasons. I find the scenes where the killers are encouraged to retell their exploits, often with lip-smacking expressions of satisfaction, upsetting not because they reveal so much, as many allege, but because they tell us so little of importance. Of course murderers, flattered in their impunity, will behave vilely. Of course they will reliably supply enlightened folk with a degraded vision of humanity. But, sorry, I don’t feel we want to be doing this. It feels wrong and it certainly looks wrong to me. Something has gone missing here. How badly do we want to hear from these people, after all? Wouldn’t it be better if we were told something about the individuals whose lives they took?

I’d feel the same if film-makers had gone to rural Argentina in the 1950s, rounding up a bunch of ageing Nazis and getting them to make a film entitled “We Love Killing Jews”. Think of other half-covered-up atrocities – in Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa, Israel, any place you like with secrets – and imagine similar films had been made. Consider your response – and now consider whether such goings-on in Indonesia are not acceptable merely because the place is so far away, and so little known or talked about that the cruelty of such an act can pass uncriticised.

The film does not in any recognisable sense enhance our knowledge of the 1960s Indonesian killings, and its real merits – the curiosity when it comes to uncovering the Indonesian cult of anticommunism capable of masking atrocity, and the good and shocking scenes with characters from the Indonesian elite, still whitewashing the past – are obscured by tasteless devices. At the risk of being labelled a contemporary prude or dismissed as a stuffy upholder of middle-class taste, I feel that no one should be asked to sit through repeated demonstrations of the art of garrotting. Instead of an investigation, or indeed a genuine recreation, we’ve ended somewhere else – in a high-minded snuff movie.

What I like most about documentary film is that anything can be made to work, given a chance. You can mix up fact and fiction, past and present. You can add to cold objectivity a degree of empathy. You will, of course, lie to reluctant or recalcitrant participants, in particular when they wish not to divulge important pieces of information. And trickery has its place, too. But documentary films have emerged from the not inconsiderable belief that it’s good to be literal as well as truthful. In a makeshift, fallible way, they tell us what the world is really like. Documentaries are the art of the journeyman. They can be undone by too much ambition. Too much ingenious construction and they cease to represent the world, becoming reflected images of their own excessively stated pretensions.

In his bizarrely eulogistic piece defending The Act of Killing (of which he is an executive producer), Errol Morris, the documentary maker, compares the film to Hamlet’s inspired use of theatre to reveal dirty deeds at the court of Denmark. But Hamlet doesn’t really believe that theatrical gestures can stand in for reality. Nor, we must assume, did his creator. A more apt analogy than Morris’s might come from Shakespeare’s darkest play, Macbeth. What would we think if Macbeth and his scheming wife were written out of the action, replaced by those low-level thugs paid to do bad business on their behalf? We might conclude that putting them centre stage, in the style of The Act of Killing, was indeed perverse and we’d be right.

There are still half-forgotten, heavily whitewashed atrocities from the last century, such as the Bengali famine allowed to occur during the second world war through the culpably racist inattention of British officials; the never wholly cleared-up question of Franco’s mass killings; or the death of so many millions in the 1950s as a consequence of Mao’s catastrophic utopianism. Those wondering how to record such events will no doubt watch The Act of Killing, but I hope they will also look at less hyped, more modestly conceived depictions of mass murder. In Enemies of the People (2010), the Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath goes after the murderers of the Khmer Rouge. He finds Pol Pot’s sidekick, but it is the earnest, touching quest of Sambath himself that lingers in the mind, rather than the empty encounters with evil-doers. Atrocity is both banal and ultimately impossible to comprehend.

Writing in 1944, Arthur Koestler was among the first to gain knowledge of the slaughter of eastern European Jews and he estimated that the effect of such revelations was strictly limited, lasting only minutes or days and swiftly overcome by indifference. Koestler suggested that there was only one way we could respond to the double atrocity of mass murder and contemporary indifference and that was by screaming.

I’m grateful to The Act of Killing not because it’s a good film, or because it deserves to win its Oscar (I don’t think it does), but because it reminds me of the truth of Koestler’s observation. What’s not to scream about?

Nick Fraser is editor of the BBC’s Storyville documentary series

#film #documentaire #Indonésie #hécatombe

The bigger the haystack, the harder the terrorist is to find | Coleen Rowley | Comment is free | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/28/bigger-haystack-harder-terrorist-communication-future-attacks

Un article de Novembre 2014 : d’un point de vue prévention contre le #terrorisme, #métadonnées, mégaerreurs

... as an FBI whistleblower and witness for several US official inquiries into 9/11 intelligence failures, I fear that terrorists will succeed in carrying out future attacks – not despite the massive collect-it-all, dragnet approach to intelligence implemented since 9/11, but because of it. This approach has made terrorist activity more difficult to spot and prevent.

Almost no one now remembers the typical response of counter-terrorism agency officials when asked why, in the spring and summer of 2001 in the lead-up to 9/11, they had failed to read and share intelligence or take action when “the system was blinking red” (the actual title of chapter eight of the US’s 9/11 commission’s report) and when the US director of central intelligence and other counter-terrorism chiefs were said to have had “their hair on fire”.

The common refrain back then was that, pre 9/11, intelligence had been flowing so fast and furiously, it was like a fire hose, “and you can’t get a sip from a fire hose”. Intelligence such as the Phoenix memo – which warned in July 2001 that terrorist suspects had been in flight schools and urgently requested further investigation – went unread.

Although “can’t get a sip” was a somewhat honest excuse, it was undercut when the Bush administration, days after the attacks, secretly turned on their illegal “Presidential Surveillance Program” to collect more, by a factor of thousands, of the communications of innocent American citizens, as well as those of billions of people around the globe.

So the “fire hose” turned into a tsunami of non-relevant data, flooding databases and watch lists. The CIA had only about 16 names on its terrorist watch list back in September 2001 and probably most were justified, but there’s no way the million names reportedly now on the “terrorist identities datamart environment” list can be very accurate. The decision to elevate quantity over quality did nothing to increase accuracy, unblock intelligence stovepipes or prevent terrorist attacks.

In fact, years ago a study commissioned by Homeland Security and conducted by the National Academy of Sciences found that no existing computer program was able to distinguish the real terrorists – those who would go on to commit violent acts – from all the “false positives” .

This was corroborated when NSA director Keith Alexander and others, under great pressure to justify their (illegal) “bulk” collection of metadata, pressed underlings to produce 54 examples to prove that “total information awareness” type collection “worked” to identify and stop real terrorism, only to have the proffered NSA examples fall apart under scrutiny, leaving only one flimsy case of a taxi driver in San Diego who had donated a few thousand dollars to al-Shabab-connected Somalians.

Governments rely on costly “security theatre” – the practice of investing in countermeasures to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually achieve it. But it seems to do more to dupe fearful taxpayers into believing that massive, unwieldy “intelligence” systems will protect them, than to intimidate would-be attackers or reduce terrorist organisation recruitment.

After Edward Snowden described just how massive and irrelevant the US and UK monitoring had become, people started to grasp the significance of the saying: “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, how does it help to add hay?”

The fearful citizen may not realise how difficult it is to search and analyse content due to sheer volume. They want to believe in the magic of data-mining to somehow predict future criminal behaviour. If only more contractors are hired and more money is spent to increase monitoring, if only laws can be passed forcing internet companies to constantly surveil every post and kitten image, coded and uncoded, in a multitude of languages, for signs of danger, the Orwellian argument goes, we will find the enemies.

But the real purpose in the egregiously stupid push to assign Facebook the fool’s errand of monitoring everything seems to be to spread the blame. Leaving aside the privacy implications, what people need to grasp is that this is the kind of security thinking that doesn’t just fail to protect us, it makes us less safe.

Dette illégitime, une analyse de Razmig Keucheyan (le Guardian)

The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway | Razmig Keucheyan | Comment is free | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/09/french-public-debt-audit-illegitimate-working-class-internationalim?CMP

This deliberate organisation of ignorance – agnotology – in neoliberal economies intentionally renders the state powerless, even when it could have the means to know and act. This is what permits tax evasion in its various forms – which last year cost about €50bn to European societies, and €17bn to France alone.

Hence, the audit on the debt concludes, some 60% of the French public debt is illegitimate.

An illegitimate debt is one that grew in the service of private interests, and not the wellbeing of the people. Therefore the French people have a right to demand a moratorium on the payment of the debt, and the cancellation of at least part of it. There is precedent for this: in 2008 Ecuador declared 70% of its debt illegitimate.

The nascent global movement for debt audits may well contain the seeds of a new internationalism – an internationalism for today – in the working classes throughout the world. This is, among other things, a consequence of financialisation. Thus debt audits might provide a fertile ground for renewed forms of international mobilisations and solidarity.

#dette

Art (#music) is a #business – and, yes, artists have to make difficult, honest business decisions | Amanda Palmer | Comment is free | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/13/amanda-palmer-art-business-difficult-honest-decisions

#Jack_Conte, one-half of the indie duo #Pomplamoose, is confronting this paradox the hard way in the wake of his recent post on Medium in which he lays bare the nuts, bolts, nets and grosses of his group’s 24-show American tour. Pomplamoose decided to pull out most of the stops and hire a full crew (sound, lights, tour manager, merch person), spare few expenses (buying new lights and road cases for their gear), and they freely admitted to considering the undertaking an investment in their future as a touring band. They lost about $12,000 after grossing a total of $136,000. I looked at that and barely blinked.

Metaphorically, the band didn’t even fly first class, but that didn’t stop armchair critics from complaining that Pomplamoose didn’t deserve to get on the plane to begin with, those plane-taking wankers. And there are those angry at Pomplamoose’s abilty to absorb a #loss-leading #tour because they’re making enough #sustainable #income through their #pledge-per-song system on #Patreon (a platform Conte started 2 years ago, because no #online system existed for #YouTube-star bands to convert millions of views into actual revenue). But he could afford to the lose the money! some musicians complained. This isn’t a fair representation of middle class touring at all!, others wrote. The indie bands who’d toured in vans, slept on floors, and had nothing but chips and salsa on their riders said things like These guys spent their money like idiots!

The critics are partially correct: Conte’s accounting is not how they’ve toured, or might tour if given the same budget. But it is how Pomplamoose chose to tour: at a loss, and as an investment. If there was any naiveté in Jack’s post, it wasn’t in how the band spent their money but rather in his assumption that a compassionate universe was ready to accept his transparency as an important contribution to the music information economy instead of a mercenary gimmick promoting his own cause.

But losing money on a mid-level tour is more common than anyone apparently thinks – it’s just that there are few artists masochistic enough to put the information transparently into the public domain.

When The Dresden Dolls were invited to open up for Nine Inch Nails’ summer tour in 2005, we were ecstatic. We were offered $500 per show to perform about six shows a week. We had to hire a tour bus and driver (no amount of sleeping-in-the-van or cheap flights could match the speed of the NIN caravan), and we had to hire our own sound guy. I have not, until now, written about the huge loss we took on that tour, nor would I ever criticize Trent Reznor for not offering us a “living wage”. He made the offer; we didn’t have to take it. To this day, I still meet people who discovered my music because of that tour: they became fans, they supported my Kickstarter, they come to my shows, they bought my book. We figured we’d make it back when we went back on our own tour as headliners. And …we did.

Risk-based investing exists everywhere but the arts (and, one could argue, in the non-profit world), where it is considered absolutely déclassé. In the tech industry – and the restaurant industry, or any industry, really – it is considered necessary to spend, experiment, fail, struggle, borrow capital and ultimately find a healthy balance between expenditure and income. Wired’s Erika Hall recently even wrote of the tech world that “Somewhere along the way, it got to be uncool to reduce one’s risk of failure.”

Perhaps the stickiest problem when comparing art and business is that the definition of “success” becomes muddied when you opt for a career in music. On the one hand, you’re told you haven’t “made it” until you’re a megastar – making a living at your art isn’t enough – and, on the other hand, musicians aren’t supposed to be concerned with profits if they’re “real” artists – Didn’t you get into this job just for the love of it?

I launched my now-infamous #Kickstarter for my own album, tour and art book in 2012 and, while it grossed over $1.2m, it netted – when all was said and done – close to zero. I actually chose to run the Kickstarter as a loss leader: I wanted to impress my fans, and the critics of crowdfunding who I knew were going to judge and criticize me - and the project - no matter what. I deliberately used high-end, expensive packages when manufacturing the CD-books, the vinyl, the hand-painted record players and art-books I’d convinced 25,000 people to #pre-purchase. I even wound up chronicling my projected budget. Why? Because there was a bizarre impression that I’d somehow been handed a million-dollar check and was going to spend my year languishing in a swimming pool filled with hundred dollar bills. But I hadn’t: like a shoe store, or a restaurant, I was running a business with the obligatory expenses, like a full staff on payroll, a shop to rent, and a million dollars worth of pre-ordered shoes to design, inspect, manufacture and mail out to my customers.

Meanwhile, even as I was only breaking even on the Kickstarter with an optimistic vision of future earnings (which did eventually manifest as a larger fanbase, more profitable tours, and a book advance), I got widely raked over the coals in the media for not paying fans who’d volunteered to come to my show and play with me and the band for two or three songs in exchange for tickets, backstage beers and hugs. This wasn’t my salaried band or crew we’re talking about – these were local sax and violin players showing up for an impromptu jam session that lasted one evening. I’d been doing these sorts of trades for years and they’d worked out just fine for everyone, until people got the sense that I was a millionaire (or, at least the wife of one) running a rock’n’roll sweat shop.

The irony? Some of the exact same journalists and bloggers are now lambasting Jack Conte for paying the professional musicians he hired to toured with Pomplamoose (which is usually a two-person band that use loops to fill out their sound). Will Stevenson, a band manager himself, asked in the Alternative Press: “But why would the rest of you and your band need salaries? If you aren’t making the money, why would you pay it out to people?”

The backlash (Amanda, pay your volunteers! Jack, don’t pay your band!) is laughable, but it speaks volumes about the double standards with which the world tackles the #music_industry: you’re damned if you play by the rules, and you’re damned if you find a creative way to thwart them. We – Taylor Swift, Trent Reznor, Zoe Keating, Pomplamoose, U2, Radiohead, me – are all just trying to find a way to create and monetize our creations at the same time.

And if there are going to be a million new paths to sustainability for a million different artists, we’d best stop bickering amongst ourselves about the validity of each and every path these artists are stumbling down – or at least step out of the way if we can’t lend a hand.

• This article was amended on 14 December 2014 to clarify that Mick Jagger attended, but did not graduate from, the London School Of Economics.

Has North Korea found a friend in President Putin ? | Natalie Nougayrède | Comment is free | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/23/north-korea-putin-sony-kim-jong-un-russia-cyber-warfare

La rédac’cheffe du Monde signe au Guardian. Je résume : Sony, cyberattaque sur l’Estonie, Ukraine,… Poutine, Kim Jong Un, le Joker (ah, non, pas lui).

Je retiens juste cette phrase…

This is a new era of hybrid warfare and deniable attacks.

It’s not #Cuba that has just decided to rejoin the modern world – it’s the US | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/18/cuba-rejoin-modern-world-us

During the signing of the Versailles treaty in 1919, it is said that a delegate left the conference muttering: “What on earth will the historians say about all this?” When the remark was reported to the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau produced a characteristically good retort – Clemenceau was, after all, a journalist. “Well, one thing they won’t say is that Belgium invaded Germany.”

A modern version of Clemenceau’s robust comment applies equally pointedly in the context of this week’s news that the United States and Cuba are finally to normalise their relations. It is tempting to treat the half-century standoff across the Florida Straits as a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. Yet one thing the historians cannot say is that Cuba ever attempted to invade or annexe the US. As in the first world war, the big power takes the big responsibility.

Cuba’s extraordinary global medical record shames the US blockade | Seumas Milne | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/03/cuba-global-medical-record-shames-us-blockade-ebola

There are now 50,000 Cuban doctors and nurses working in 60 developing countries. As Canadian professor John Kirk puts it: “Cuban medical internationalism has saved millions of lives.” But this unparalleled solidarity has barely registered in the western media.

Cuban doctors have carried out 3m free eye operations in 33 countries, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and largely funded by revolutionary Venezuela.

That’s how Mario Teran, the Bolivian sergeant who killed Che Guevara on CIA orders in 1967, had his sight restored 40 years later by Cuban doctors in an operation paid for by Venezuela in the radical Bolivia of Evo Morales.

#cuba #santé #ebola (cette dernière phrase sent légèrement la propagande… mais le reste du papier donne quelques chiffres intéressants, et montre qu’une partie de l’establishment démocrate à Washington fait campagne pour la levée du blocus)

Climate change’s first victims are always those least to blame
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/03/climate-change-yanwana-amazon-floods-lily-cole

In September 2014, a report published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) found that 20.6 million people were displaced by extreme weather events in 2013. That’s almost three times as many as those fleeing current conflicts.

The number one cause of global relocation now is climate change – yet there is no international recognition for the status of climate change refugees, and no insurance policies for them. They are in the shadows of international media, and often have little access to support in their home countries.

In a cruel irony, some of the world’s most fragile communities – the ones most closely connected to the natural world, who have lived most sustainably and have had the least impact on our changing climate – are the first to suffer as a result of its changes.

#temps #climat #déplacés #réfugiés

Horrific pictures of dead bodies won’t stop wars
Paul Mason

People who believe that showing violent images from conflict zones will deter killing are mistaken

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Nearly four months on from the Gaza conflict, the image I remember most is this: we are in the crowded triage room at Al-Shifa hospital, whose tiles are echoing with wails and screams. A group of men is staring at a pile of curtains, blankets and towels on the floor. Then somebody uncovers what’s beneath.

If you watched TV reports that night you would have seen the blurred bodies of six children. My cameraman took a shot of blood being mopped off the floor to signify what we could not show.

But on Twitter they don’t blur things out. If you follow the Syrian conflict, you will see horrific pictures of dead children and their grieving relatives several times a week. If you’re following the Islamic State story on social media, you will see crucifixions, executions, beheadings – often posted by people trying to convince us that IS are bad and should be blown to smithereens themselves.

We are besieged now by images of the dead in conflict, usually published by people who believe it will either deter killing, expose the perpetrators or illustrate war’s futility and brutality.

It is an old illusion and we can trace it back to a precise moment in history. In 1924, the German anti-war activist Ernst Friedrich published a shocking book called War Against War!.

Friedrich had been jailed during the war for sabotaging production in an arms factory, and was a wild leftwinger. By the early 1920s, he had assembled a comprehensive collection of photographs showing the reality of the first world war. Probably the most offputting are those of facial mutilations endured by surviving soldiers.

But there is also documentary evidence of the brutalities of war: the hanging of a priest by a triumphant German soldier; a starved Armenian child, captioned by the words of a German politician who had claimed that “every mercy shown to lower races is a crime against our mission”.
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Often Friedrich himself indulged in crude propaganda: a picture of “Papa” posing proudly in his uniform on recruitment, juxtaposed with his shattered body three weeks later, with the comment “not included in the family album”.

Though hounded by censors and lawsuits, Friedrich’s book went into 10 editions before the Nazis banned it. The “international anti-war museum” he had opened in a terrace house in Berlin was closed by Hitler’s stormtroopers in 1933 and turned into a torture chamber.

Friedrich’s work represented a breakthrough. Before then, imagery of war had been subject to absolute censorship during conflict and diluted for the sake of “taste and decency” by the media during peacetime.

So War Against War! – republished in facsimile this year in the UK by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation – poses a relevant question: why is it that showing people gruesome photographs of war injuries does not deter war? In a conflict such as Israel-Palestine, people on both sides feel compelled to fight. Other conflicts are wars of choice. Professional soldiers know what they are signing up to. One day spent on a trauma first aid course, even with fake blood spurting out of rubber prosthetic wounds, is enough to illustrate what it is going to be like.

The closer I get to conflict, and the people who endure it, the more I think: nothing we know about war can deter us from it. In fact, in the 90 years since Friedrich’s book came out, we’ve developed coping strategies to assuage the feelings of horror such imagery arouses.

Faced with horrific injuries, we develop prosthetic technologies and plastic surgery. Faced with lethal weaponry – we develop Kevlar or drones and stand-off weapons to keep our own soldiers safer. We professionalise armies and improve survival rates for the wounded.

Plus there’s international law. Today, no day of conflict passes without somebody accusing someone of breaking the Geneva Conventions. The implication is that war conducted according to the rules is regrettable but all right. Instead of the language of the jingoist, which Friedrich ridiculed, we have the language of the technocrat: collateral damage, civilian deaths to be regretted.

Finally, while the first world war was begun in ignorance about the horrors of war, by the mid-century, belligerents had learned how to use images of atrocity to fire people up to fight.

But why do we then report war? Last week, I attended the Rory Peck awards, where my Gazan producer Khaled Abu Ghali won the Martin Adler prize for the work he did for Channel 4 News. The room was full of people who risk their lives to get pictures of horrific injury, cruelty and death, and the executives who send them there.

There’s a growing frustration in this milieu not just that journalists are being targeted, but that a disbelieving public has come to see all graphic imagery of war as potentially fake, manipulated or propagandist.

Adler, a Swedish film-maker murdered in Mogadishu in 2006, imbued his camerawork with an unflinching gaze. It was the absurd human situations, the disarmed honesty of the combatants and pointlessness of conflict that he was there to record, not the mutilated faces.

Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the horrific photographs, that the war had embodied the noblest and most exhilarating aspects of human life; and specifically that warfare represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom. This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless, fun or simply heroic. Adler, and others like him, understood that showing absurdity is more important than showing injury.

I have no doubt the men clustered around the children’s bodies in Al-Shifa thought the war they were fighting was just. But the collective sigh when they saw the injuries convinced me they had seen through any illusions as to the conflict’s glory.

Pictures of war should not only show us what bodies look like. They should educate us about the absurdities, the accidents and pointless killing.

▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/23/horrific-pictures-of-dead-bodies-wont-stop-wars

#the_guardian #war #photo #photograpy #violence #photojournalism #reportage

Stop calling me ’the Ebola nurse’ | Kaci Hickox | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/17/stop-calling-me-ebola-nurse-kaci-hickox

I never had Ebola, so please stop calling me “the Ebola Nurse” – now!

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This is what did happen: I was quarantined against my will by overzealous politicians after I volunteered to go and treat people affected by Ebola in west Africa. My liberty, my interests and consequently my civil rights were ignored because some ambitious governors saw an opportunity to use an age-old political tactic: fear.

#ebola #peur #bien_envoyé

If you thought the Isis war couldn’t get any worse, just wait for more of the CIA | Trevor Timm | Comment is free | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/17/isis-war-cia-arming-rebels-syria

Même la CIA le dit : se servir de nous pour armer les rebelles modérés, c’est une très mauvaise idée !

But the information on the secret weapons that were already flowing into Syria has been kept in hiding from most of Congress. John Kerry refused to answer any questions about the CIA’s activities in Syria when asked by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite the news of the agency’s involvement in Syria being on the front page of newspapers for years. “I hate to do this,” he said. “But I can’t confirm or deny whatever that’s been written about and I can’t really go into any kind of possible program.”

Perhaps the most shocking part is that we know Barack Obama himself has read the CIA study and knows that arming rebels in Syria – or anywhere – was an incredibly dangerous idea. Seemingly referencing the study, Obama told David Remnick of the New Yorker earlier this year:

Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much.

So even though the CIA “couldn’t come up with much” proof of any time when sending tons of weapons into a war zone full of extremists has worked in the past, or that the agency itself has told Congressmen arming the rebels was “doomed to failure,” the Obama administration is ready to do just that.

No one doubts that Isis is a horrific terrorist group that’s terrible for the entire Middle East – as it proved over the weekend by barbarically beheading another innocent aid worker – but further entrenching the CIA and its weapons into an already awful situation can really only make things worse. Much worse.

British MP: “The #GCHQ boss is wrong. We can have both security and privacy”
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/04/gchq-security-privacy-robert-hannigan-tech #privacy #surveillance #UK

The Futility of #Fatwas Against Isis | Nesrine Malik
▻http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/nesrine-malik/isis-islam-fatwas_b_6076310.html

This does indicate that there is a mainstream rejection of ISIS, and this consensus is new and significant. And yet it is #futile. The ideological response to ISIS must be cast from outside the realm of religious authority altogether . You see, Islam in particular, and holy text religions in general, are open to interpretation and selectivity. By responding to ISIS from within its own paradigm, one only validates its basic premise - that there is some authority to be derived from religion, and that there is one valid interpretation that trumps all others. There isn’t. ISIS has used religion as vehicle for a political project, rather than used politics to advance a religious vision.

There is still no honest reckoning about this, and the fact that many Muslims are indeed selective with literal application of the religious text. To admit this would be to concede to the fact that Islam should be a personal matter, not imposed by the state or any political body in any form, and open the doors to secularism.

This is the knot at the heart of the question of Islamic ’reform’. Where is the so-called ’moderate Muslim’, the promised ISIS vanquisher? The Muslims that Ben Affleck pointed out just want to go to work and eat some sandwiches, and not kill any infidels? In many parts of the Muslim world, they are stuck, certainly not endorsing extremism, but living in societies where notional endorsements are implicitly made every day. A simple survey of alcohol consumption in private across the Arab world is a basic but effective indicator of the schism between private irreligious practice under cover of darkness vs pious public dissimulation during the day.

The Arab Muslim state, from Egypt to the UAE, is the most complicit in this hypocrisy, promoting non-negotiable religious values and enshrining them in the constitution, education and public order laws , in a sort of ’curated’ Islam (dare I say, a ’real Islam’), that dovetails as closely as possible with the government’s political needs.

Most Arab states share Isis’s ideology. They’re trying to have it both ways | Brian Whitaker | Comment is free | theguardian.com
►http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/28/arab-states-share-isis-ideology-islam

As far as many of the Arab public are concerned, discriminating against members of the “wrong” faith, or those who hold unorthodox views, is not only acceptable, but the right thing to do. For Arab governments, enforcing religious rules and allying themselves with God helps to make up for their lack of electoral legitimacy.

#hypocrisie #sectarisme #Arabes

Occupy Democracy is not considered newsworthy. It should be | David Graeber | Comment is free | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/27/occupy-democracy-london-parliament-square?CMP=share_btn_tw

There was no plan to turn this into a permanent tent city, which are now explicitly illegal. True, this law is very selectively enforced; Metropolitan police regularly react with a wink and a smile if citizens camp on the street while queuing overnight for the latest iPhone. But to do it in furtherance of democratic expression is absolutely forbidden.

“#monde_libre”

The Tunisian election result isn’t simply a victory for secularism over Islamism | Monica Marks | Comment is free | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/29/tunisian-election-result-secularism-islamism-nidaa-tounes-ennahda?CMP=t

A self-styled, secular, modernist party called Nidaa Tounes won against the Islamist Ennahda party in the Tunisian election this week. For many, the subsequent headline – “Secularist party wins Tunisia elections” – will seem more impressive than the fact Tunisia just completed its second genuinely competitive, peaceful elections since 2011.

Indeed, in a region wracked by extremism and civil war, the secularists’ victory will strike many as further proof that Tunisia is moving forward and is the sole bright spot in a gloomy region. Some may prematurely celebrate, yet again, the death of political Islam, arguing that Tunisians achieved through the ballot box what Egyptians achieved through a popular coup, rejecting the Brotherhood and its cousin-like movements once and for all. We should exercise caution, however, in labelling Nidaa Tounes’s victory part of a seamless sweep of democratic achievements, or seeing Sunday’s vote as a clear referendum against all varieties of political Islam.

#Kuwait, #Qatar, #Saudi_Arabia, #Sudan, #Yemen and the #UAE – where #apostasy carries the death penalty.
►http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/28/arab-states-share-isis-ideology-islam #Islam

You might be a politician if ... you tried to defund Ebola research, only to campaign on Ebola fear | George Chidi | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/21/politician-ebola-campaign-fear-crisis

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told (...) that the NIH had been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. “Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

Spending on Ebola vaccine research fell from $37m in 2010 to $18m in 2014 – forcing the NIH to shelve a quarter of its grants on Ebola research, according to the Washington Post.

Republicans have been quick to note that the Obama administration’s budget for 2013 and 2014 cut spending for the CDC, but that Congress boosted it above the budget request – calling foul on Democratic campaign ads highlighting reduced expenditures. They have been less eager to note that spending has fallen in both nominal and real dollars for most of the last decade, largely as a function of general budgetary intransigence instigated by Republicans.

#recherche #santé

When #Wall_Street and #Silicon_Valley come together – a cautionary tale
►http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/25/darker-side-pay-per-laugh-innovations-silicon-valley

... Having wired up the world, Silicon Valley assured us that the magic of technology would naturally pervade every corner of our lives. On this logic, to oppose technological innovation is tantamount to defaulting on the ideals of the Enlightenment: Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg are simply the new Diderot and Voltaire – reborn as nerdy entrepreneurs.

And then, a rather strange thing happened: somehow we have come to believe that the second kind of disruption had nothing to do with the first. Thus the rise of massive open online courses (#moocs) has been narrated without much reference to the shrinking budgets of universities: no, the mooc-mania was just the natural result of Silicon Valley’s embrace of innovation – hackers-turned-entrepreneurs have come to “disrupt” the universities the way they have disrupted music or journalism.

I volunteered to fight Ebola in Sierra Leone with MSF. Here’s what happened | Natasha Lewer | theguardian.com
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/volunteered-fight-ebola-sierra-leone-msf

I’ve never met people who work so hard. The medics are reprimanded for staying too long inside the high-risk zone. Anything over an hour becomes physiologically dangerous. It’s so hot inside the layers of protective clothing that by the time you come out, you have to pour the sweat out of your boots.

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In Egypt, an authoritarian regime holds sway again | Ahdaf Soueif | Comment is free | The Observer

▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/19/cairo-egypt-government-crackdown-adhaf-soueif

Nine thirty pm in Cairo and sounds of intermittent explosions come through the living-room window. Most people can identify them, but I can’t – yet. They might be gunfire, or teargas – or fireworks. And fireworks might be people celebrating a wedding, or fighting the police, or setting off fireworks for fun. So I carry on with what I’m doing: writing a letter that a young prisoner’s sister may be able to give to him when she visits him tomorrow. It’s just a comfort letter, really, to remind him that he’s not forgotten, that many of us on the outside have made it our mission to get him and others like him out of jail.

Since 30 June 2013, some 40,000 people have been arrested and 16,000 of them remain in prison. The majority probably belong to the now outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, of whom some will have committed acts of violence; most will not. The rest, maybe 8,000 or 9,000, are split between revolutionary activists and bystanders caught up in police dragnets and used to make up required figures.