Monthly Archives: December 2010

The grass may always be greener, but…

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So, I’m spending my winterval holidays with my parents in Germany. I’ve not really been following German politics for years now, but a few things have jumped out at me over the last couple of days which I thought I’d share.
Germany is currently governed by a government which, in name at least, doesn’t look that different from our glorious overlords: a coalition of the main centre-right party with a smaller liberal party. And yet, here are just a couple of the news headlines I’ve picked up over the last few days:

  • The government, the opposition and pretty much the entire political establishment have unequivocally rejected demands from the airport security industry to introduce passenger profiling. All the comments I’ve heard have been along the lines of “WTF, that’s racist!” So proud of Germany.
  • The government has announced that they will cut down the number of practically-unpaid, benefit supported private sector jobs (where tax money is basically used to subsidise businesses who don’t pay their employees enough to live on) and instead create more public sector jobs.

And of course LibCon has already covered the story of the German government’s approach to the recession and how Germany is now reaping the rewards with strong growth and low unemployment.
Just to provide some balanced coverage and show that the grass isn’t always greener, another topic currently under discussion is the introduction of a national minimum wage, which still doesn’t exist in Germany. (In all fairness, there is less of a need for it as trade unions are still relatively strong here and tend to negotiate minimum wages for their industries as part of the regular pay negotiations.) Still, the government is actually beginning to move in the right direction on this too.
But yeah… food for thought on what a centre-right government could look like. There are a few bones I have to pick with the CDU, but looking at the snapshot above I’ve little trouble believing that they are genuinely motivated by working in the national interest. With the Tories… well, you decide.

[Elsewhere] How do you solve a problem like copyright?

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A few weeks ago Cooks Source, a small for-profit magazine, published a piece on medieval apple pie recipes by Monica Gaudio. They had picked up the piece from a website Gaudio had published it on and neglected to inform her that they were using her writing, or to compensate her. When the writer complained, the Cook’s Source editor responded with the claim that everything published on the Internet is in the public domain.
Read more at ORGZine.

Changing the world…

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Cross-posting this from the Yes to Fairer Votes North East blog…
I have a confession to make (in case you hadn’t noticed): I’m a huge West Wing geek. One of my favourite moments is when President Bartlet hires Will Bailey at the end of the fourth season. The President says: “There’s a promise that I ask everyone who works here to make: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Do you know why?”
And Will replies, “Because it’s the only thing that ever has.”
The Yes to Fairer Votes campaign office in Newcastle is hardly the White House, but that statement is as valid here as anywhere else.
Sometimes, when you’re really really passionate about something, it’s very easy to feel that you’re the only one in the world who cares, that no-one else feels the same way, and that you’re swimming upriver. When I first got involved with the Yes campaign, I felt that way. I checked for local Facebook groups, I checked all of the affiliated organisations like Take Back Parliament, but somehow the North East seemed terribly under-represented. Since then, though, we have reached out to campaign supporters across the region and we are starting to build a solid network of passionate and committed volunteers across the region.
Every time I speak to a supporter – on the phone, in the office, or at campaign events – I am struck by the passion I encounter for electoral reform. People are tired of MPs who have jobs for life and no incentive to actually represent their constituencies. They are tired of not being able to vote for the party they actually support and having to vote tactically. They are tired of having their votes wasted. And they are jumping at the chance to have a go at changing the world.
I hear a lot of first-hand accounts of how our current electoral system lets people down. My own MP, a former cabinet minister and Labour whip, is in a seat so safe that he won’t even turn up at campaign events if there are other candidates there. Unlike one of the MPs down the road, my one at least holds a surgery – once a month, and in public. Last year, when the government pushed the highly controversial Digital Economy Bill through the wash-up process before the general election, I tried to get in touch with my MP: I wrote three separate letters, and called both his Parliamentary and constituency office twice, to no avail. This is how our democracy lets us down because MPs like mine can get elected with only 42% of the vote – or even less!
But I’m digressing. What I really want to get across is how amazing it is to be able to come together with a group of like-minded individuals and change the world. Every time I have reached out to our volunteer network and asked for help I’ve been overwhelmed by the response: whether it’s been for a street stall in Newcastle, our phone bank, or our campaign launch event on the Millennium Bridge, people have happily given up their time, travelled long distances, battled the snow, and tried something new they’ve never done before (anything from telephone canvassing to giving television interviews!) – all for this campaign.
We come from all walks of life, all ages, all political backgrounds. We are a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, and we’re changing the world.

[Elsewhere] Dead tree functionality

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I was both amused and puzzled by the recent news that Amazon is to allow book lending on the Kindle. At first glance this is great news: e-books will finally match some of the basic functionality available in the dead-tree format! At least this move shows that the content industry is beginning to get its collective head around some of the problems created by locking down and controlling users’ devices and the content they have paid for.
Read more at ORGZine.

ORGZine launches today!

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Today sees the launch of ORGZine, a “space to debate digital rights issues and related areas” brought to you by the amazing people at the Open Rights Group.
I hope ORGZine thrives as a space for open debate, a space which brings together activists but also reaches out to the general public to raise awareness of digital rights issues.
I’ve quoted this once before here and I’ll do it again:
“It’s not just about abortion, it’s about the next 20 years. Twenties and thirties it was the role of government, fifties and sixties it was civil rights. The next two decades it’s gonna be privacy. I’m talking about the Internet. I’m talking about cell phones. I’m talking about health records and who’s gay and who’s not. And moreover, in a country born on the will to be free, what could be more fundamental than this?”
Sam Seaborn says this in the first-season West Wing episode “The Shortlist”. Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the show, understood this back in 1999 – it is time the rest of us dragged our culture and our politics into the 21st century too. Digital rights are the defining political issue of our time.
So I’d encourage you to make your way over to ORGZine now, have a read, and add it to your RSS feed. (And yes, you might spot the occasional article by yours truly over there too.)

On the edge of the Newcastle University Occupation

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Like the rest of the country, I’ve been watching the London student demonstrations over the past month and been absolutely appalled at the behaviour of the police. Unlike the rest of the country, I grew up in a totalitarian state and have always been wary of the police. The Met have not exactly done anything to challenge my prejudice: Charging on horseback into a crowd of children, keeping said children in a confined space in the freezing cold for hours without access to food, water, toilets or medical care, pulling disabled people out of their wheelchairs and beating at least one protester to within an inch of his life – all of these incidents have only served to confirm my prejudice. So it was refreshing to see on Sunday that things can be different.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Newcastle University Occupation. I’ve not been as involved with it as I would have liked to. I took some food to them, and I tried to get in to talk to them about electoral reform, but by the time I got my act together the university had stopped letting non-students into the building. I retweeted some of their tweets when I saw them, read their blog.
Throughout, I’ve been extremely impressed with the occupation. Their acts of protest have been incredibly imaginative, especially given the scarce resources they had. They were clearly committed to education and learning, putting on an alternative lecture programme when the university decided to move the lectures which were scheduled to take place in the occupied Fine Arts Building, even though both the students taking part in the occupation and the lecturers concerned were quite happy for them to take place there. When they finally suspended the occupation, one of the key reasons was to allow students who needed the Fine Arts Building for their learning to return and complete their degrees. During their action on the Tyne Bridge, the students made sure they only blocked the middle two lanes so as not to cause too much disruption. Leftover food at the end of the occupation was donated to an asylum seeker charity. The students I spoke to were all friendly, passionate and committed, and I was sorry to see the occupation suspended.
I was lucky enough to be in town on Sunday for the students’ post-occupation carnival and march. A crowd of between 50 and 100 people came down Northumberland Street and to Monument, flanked by police. They were dressed up and making noise. Once they got to Monument, the students (and a not-insignificant number of lecturers) lined up and between amusing and imaginative chants (“Cameron has a shiny face, it’s so shiny!”, “Nick Clegg is Tory, he wears a Tory hat, when he sees tuition fees he says ‘I’ll treble that!'”) members of the occupation, lecturers and union representatives addressed the crowd, thanking us for the support given.
By far the most impressive and inspiring moment was when a member of the occupation thanked the police who – by all accounts, including an incident when the occupation called the police in response to the university trying to remove one of their locks – have had a collaborative approach throughout the past month and have ensured the safety of everyone involved. One of the policemen came forward and shook hands with the student.
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This shouldn’t be news. This should be how policing works. I am glad this is how it works in Newcastle.
And just because it was so much fun, here are a couple more pictures from the carnival.
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The flip side

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Imagine you’re at a party with someone. They’re someone you admire, someone a lot of people around the world admire. You’ve been talking all night, flirting a little maybe. You both have had a drink or two. You’re having so much fun, you feel like telling the world about it. Thank fuck for Twitter!

You get this feeling that they might be, you know, interested. It might be quite fun to sleep with them actually, you think. Maybe you even hope for more than just sex.

They kiss you and you kiss them back. Things go a little further. You’re having fun. At some point you fish a condom out of your pocket and hand it to them. They agree to use it. It’s common sense, right? Right. You’re still having fun. It’s all good.

But at some point something changes. Maybe it hurts when they penetrate you. (You do not need a vagina to play along with this game. Go on, try to imagine.) Maybe they’re simply not that good in bed, and you’re not having fun anymore. Maybe they’re not using that condom you handed them and you’re worried about your health. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’re not having fun, you don’t want to do this anymore, you ask them to stop.

And they don’t. They keep, you know, fucking you. There is a foreign object inside your body, moving in and out. There is another person on top of you, clearly enjoying themselves, while you may be in physical pain, and even if not, by this point you’re alomst certainly emotionally traumatised. They finish, roll off you and go to sleep.

You, on the other hand, lie awake wondering what you did wrong. Were you not clear enough when you asked them to stop? Should you have struggled? Maybe it was a misunderstanding? You know, they’re from a long way away, you’re speaking to them in a language foreign to you. You feel violated; you feel ashamed. And they’re this incredibly cool person everybody likes, so it must have been you doing something wrong, right?

You wake up next to them the next morning. They’re staying at your house for a couple of days which makes things awkward. You don’t feel that same happiness and elation being around them anymore. You remember you told the world how awesome it all was? You’re not quite sure anymore, you’d like to take that back actually. So you delete your tweets.

A few days later you meet someone who’s also slept with your partner. You talk to them for a while and a picture begins to emerge. Their story is a little different, but there are enough similarities that suddenly you don’t feel quite so alone and isolated anymore. Maybe if there’s two of you it’s not you who did something wrong. Maybe this incredibly cool person whom all the cool kids like is actually at fault. An ugly word enters your brain. Were you raped?

It takes another couple of days for your mind to wrap itself around this. The sense of shame and self-blame don’t exactly subside. You’re this strong person, you’re a public figure, you’re well known for your work on gender equality. How did you let yourself be raped? What did you do wrong? But a few days later you eventually gather all your courage, hold you head high, repeat to yourself three times “It was not my fault”, and walk into the police station.
At which point the entire internet turns on you.

***

Point being this: I don’t care if you’re a left-wing feminist man who’s struggling with the idea of a freedom of information campaigner not being pure and perfect, or if you’re simply an Assange fanboy who’s never even considered how a woman might feel about sex. Please try to remember that there are two sides to every story. Oh yes, she might once have met someone who met someone who had a second cousin twice removed who worked for the CIA. She might be a public figure and an outspoken feminist. She might have been a groupie, she might have been drunk, she might have slept with all of Sweden before she slept with Assange, and she might have deleted those Tweets. And almost certainly, her case is being used by Assange’s enemies to discredit him and make his life difficult. None of that matters. What matters is what happened between Julian Assange and those two women, and none of us know any of it. Maybe one day it will all come out in court, maybe it won’t. But smearing an alleged rape victim because you can’t cope with the moral ambiguity of someone who does good work in one area also having committed a crime in another area is not the way to make either yourself or the person you’re trying to defend terribly popular.

Support WikiLieaks. Even donate to the Assange defence fund – he, like anyone else, has the right to a fair trial. Make your voice heard to ensure that any trial will be fair and transparent. But whatever you do, do not blame the alleged victim. Do not seek to smear the alleged victim. Even if it’s just for one minute, consider how she might feel, why she might have done the things you accuse her of having done, how this looks from her point of view and what impact it’s having on her life.

PS This is a direct response to this article, which someone on my Twitter feed called a brilliant piece of investigative internet journalism.

Sex, politics, espionage, and the internet – the tangled mess that is Julian Assange

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A quip I made last night on Twitter seems to have struck a chord, and I wanted to examine it beyond the 140-character limit. What I said was something along the lines of “If all alleged rapists got the kind of police attention Mr. Assange is getting, maybe 200 women a day wouldn’t get raped in the UK.”
Sex, politics, espionage, and the internet: it’s the perfect storm really, and I find it quite difficult to figure our where to even start untangling this one. But let me try.
I don’t know if Julian Assange raped anybody, or if the accusations are fabricated by some sort of CIA conspiracy, or if they were fabricated by a crazy woman out for revenge – these are all theories I’ve heard, and I simply do not know enough of the facts (or Swedish law!) to make a judgement on this. In fact I suspect that no-one – not even Assange and the women involved – know all the facts anymore. Between potential third-party interventions and all the media spin we’ve been getting, I can see it being difficult to keep this one straight. Not to mention that the technicalities of Swedish law involved are… interesting to say the least.
Next. Rape is a damn serious issue. And rape comes in all sorts of varieties. The traditional public perception of a rape victim is someone who was beaten black and blue as well as being raped. One of the things I’m reasonably sure of is that this is not the kind of rape we’re talking about in the Assange case. But rape is any form of sex without consent – whether the woman was drunk, or changed her mind halfway through, or was too scared to protest, or it happened in a relationship, or a whole number of other situations, having sex with someone without their consent is rape (though sometimes the law distinguishes different kinds of non-consensual sex, and what Assange is accused of under Swedish law is not quite sraight forward). To say it is incredibly traumatic for the victim doesn’t even begin to cover it. So no matter how much I agree with Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks work, no amount of good work he does entitles him to rape, and if indeed he did so I would like to see him face justice. Just as no amount of good (or otherwise) work Roman Polanski has done in his job as a film director entitles him to rape children, and I would still like justice to be done in that case too.
Here’s the catch though: if good work doesn’t atone for bad deeds, those same bad deeds do not negate the good work done. If I liked Polanski’s movies, I could still enjoy them while he spends the rest of his life in prison. Equally, even if it does some day turn out that Julian Assange raped a woman, I am still going to broadly agree with his political aims and what he is doing with WikiLeaks. Because let’s face it, even if the rape allegations aren’t a government conspiracy, any government Assange has pissed off recently is absolutely delighted that every time you google his name the word “rape” appears next to it. Humans aren’t terribly good at making subtle distinctions between the different things another person does – we like things to be neat and fit in nice labelled boxes. So the label “rapist” (no, nothing as subtle as “alleged rapist”) hangs over Assange’s head, and in a lot of people’s minds that is enough to cast doubt over everything else the man has ever done.
Finally, it seems obvious to me that the level of police attention the rape allegations against Julian Assange are getting across Europe is politically motivated. The last rape case that got anywhere near the amount of international police attention was the aforementioned Mr. Polanski, and he got off on a technicality. I would absolutely love our police to put this kind of effort into every rape allegation. Maybe our conviction rate would make it into the double digits then. Maybe a small fraction of the 200 women who get raped in the UK every single day would be spared the ordeal. Maybe it would finally send out the message that we as a society do not tolerate rape. The Assange case, on the other hand, has none of those effects and sends no such message. The only message I’m getting from it, loud and clear, is that if you piss off the state, no stone will be left unturned in the effort to make your life a living hell.