US politics: the Deomcratic candidates and the Press

I think I've come up with a way to figure out how to predict the outcome of the Democratic Primaries: examine what the American press says, and whatever the opposite of what they're saying is, that's what'll happen.

Obaman winning Iowa was a "surprise win". Clinton winning New Hampshire was a "shock comeback". Now the story appears to be that the race will be a tightly-fought contest between the two of them. If the pattern holds, then the Democratic candidate for the Presidency is going to be John Edwards. The media just doesn't seem to think his campaign is worth covering. On that basis, it's probably the one most worth watching.

This isn't just some contrarian tendency on my part. I think there's a significant perception amongst some American voters that the American press is trying to actively determine who should be the next President rather than simply report on the race. At least that's the impression I get from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers who stated:

I think Obama won Iowa because voters resented Hillary's coronation.

I think Hillary won New Hampshire because voters resented Obama's coronation.

Are Americans actively trying to go against the media narratives that are being pushed upon them?

Child Wise statistics - why these ones?

From Child Wise's media releases page, dated 14 August 2006 we have the article "Australians say no to child porn". It cites the same Newspoll study that Bernadine cited in her recent op-ed in The Australian regarding the attitudes of internet users over 18. Newspoll is generally reliable, so I see no particular reason to doubt the statistics presented.

I am curious about two statements from that press release, though. Child Wise is devoted to prevention of child sexual exploitation, so I wonder why the findings "78% believe that ISPs should offer customers the choice of blocking all pornography" and "64% are not confident that home based internet filters are effective" are quoted as if they're somehow relevant to that task. Home-based filters are of course entirely voluntary, and designed to prevent minors from accessing adult content. They are NOT designed for preventing universal access to illegal content such as child porn. So why even mention them?

The curious inclusion of a statistic about what people think about ISPs offering to block (presumably legal) pornography has no relevance to Child Wise's mission either that I can see. There might be a tortured argument in there about how preventing children from accessing adult sexual material might prevent "mental sexual abuse" from the imagery or somesuch, but I don't think that's the reasoning that Child Wise employs. The relevance to Child Wise's mission of the distinction between child pornography and legal pornography seems completely unconsidered here.

The press release here pre-dates Stephen Conroy's "if you don't support our filter plan then you love paedophiles" smear by over a year, so I don't think the conflation is part of any intentional political smear campaign. I suspect that the conflation is unintentional. But I think that only makes it more problematic. It shows a genuine inability to distinguish between filtering illegal content and filtering adult content only. I think that a lot of Australians share this blind spot. And I fear that that's going to make things very hard for people arguing against this censorship proposal.

Stephen Conroy's hawking his filter to News Ltd now

But first, an op-ed on Stephen Conroy from 2004. He was Deputy Senate Opposition leader at the time. It's not a flattering article.

In contemporary news, from today's Australian we have this: Conroy wades into child porn net flood. Now there's an alarmist headline.

Some interesting quotes in it, such as "Senator Conroy will seek to halt access to child pornography, X-rated and violent material for all home users through mandatory filtering by ISPs so children can be protected from net nasties."

Curious, but unsurprising, that The Australian has lumped child pornography, regular pornography and violence all into one. I expect the confusion between "adult content" and actual illegal content is stemming from Senator Conroy's office. I hope less net-ignorant old media outlets can do better than this confused mess, but I'm not optimistic.

The article also explicitly states that "Senator Conroy has been prodded into action by Family First senator Steve Fielding, and the Australian Family Association, which scorned the former government's $85 million free filters for families package as wholly inadequate." No idea if that's true or just editorialising upon the writer's part. It jibes with what people have been speculating to date though, given the make-up of the Senate come July.

Anything else? The Childwise organisation mentioned in the article as a source of statistics has nothing on its homepage that suggests they're actually on board with this government proposal: they want to stop child sexual exploitation, not just hide the evidence of it from the eyes of other children. Might be worth looking into them further, see if they've been misquoted.

Edit: Oh dear. I guess Bernadette McMenamin of Childwise wasn't misquoted in the slightest. Interesting that she's describing the filter as a blanket means of "blocking child pornography and other illegal content" rather than the "child-safe feed with adult opt-out option" that's the supposed proposal on the table, though. Who's been told fibs? Ms McMenamin? Or the Australian public?

Internet censorship: some numbers, some publications, some thoughts

A paper from the Australian Institute (homepage here) published in 2003 outlines a proposal for a mandatory filtering system which looks broadly similar to the one Labor wants to go ahead with, although their proposals went further. I don't know if this is the basis of Labor's policy, but there are some interesting (and from an anti-censorship viewpoint, worrying) statistics on support for censorship among parents of teenagers on pages 22-24 of the paper:

Newspoll was commissioned to survey the attitudes of parents with children aged 12 to 17 (inclusive). The survey was conducted over the weekends of 13-16 and 20-23 February 2003 and the sample size was 377 randomly selected households with at least one child in the specified age group. The margin of error is five per cent or less.

[...]

Seventy eight per cent of these households report having access to the Internet at home, a much higher proportion than the average, which is closer to one third.

On the question of censorship, when these parents were asked "Would you support a system which automatically filtered out Internet pornography going into homes unless adult users asked otherwise?" the result was the following:

Ninety-three percent of parents of teenagers support this proposal while only five per cent oppose it, with three per cent unsure. One might expect that younger parents would be less in favour of these strategies given more sexually liberal views among younger adults. Instead, our survey finds that younger parents, those in the 25-34 age bracket, are 100 per cent in favour (compared to 92 per cent of those aged 35-49 and 93 per cent of those aged 50 and over).

Of course, not all Australian citizens are parents, and not all parents are parents of 12-17 year olds (inclusive), but that's still a pretty hefty voting bloc there with an incredibly unified viewpoint, a statistic which I don't think it's possible to disregard just because of the relatively small sample size.

My initial belief that people support mandatory censorship due to unfamiliarity with the Internet may not hold water given the high uptake of Internet use among this censorous segment of the population. It might be the case that the Internet connection at these households is usually purchased for the benefit of the teenagers rather than the adults, who don't use it. I could see how a combination of parental unfamiliarity with something that's right in their homes, where their children are in reach, could contribute to alarmism.

But that would only be a theory. It could just as easily be the case that these parents have plumbed the depths of what's out there, and don't want to think about even the minutest possibility that their children might come across something untoward. It would also explain the even higher rate of support for mandatory filtering among parents aged 25-34, who I would expect to have some Internet experience as a teenager/young adult under their belt, as well. (Parents as young as 25 with children as old as 17? Or even 12? Something about those statistics at the low end of the parental age bracket is skewed).

As to Labor's policy itself, it probably would've been a good idea to pay more attention to it prior to the election. Their pre-election proposal, "Labor's Plan for Cyber-Safety", is still available for download here.

Apropos of nothing in particular, the insistence on prefixing anything net-related with "cyber-" sets my teeth on edge: "cyber-safety", teaching children to be "responsible cyber-citizens", "cyber-bullying", "cyber-stalking" - it might make sense within the whole "net as cyberspace/virtual reality" paradigm of the 80's and 90's, but I don't think it's accurate or productive to continue treating online material as somehow separate from mundane reality. Today's Internet is a part of everyday reality, not separate from it, and cybertalking in cyberlanguage about cyberactions that supposedly only have cybereffects in cyberspace just doesn't help address the new media issues of today in a realistic manner.

Anyway, here's a curious sentence from Labor's fact sheet on page 5: "Labor’s ISP policy will prevent Australian children from accessing any content that has been identified as prohibited by ACMA, including sites such as those containing child pornography and X-rated material". [emphasis added]

Prominent Australian political blogs like The Bartlett Diaries and the Road to Surfdom have picked up on Senator Conroy's "civil libertarians = kiddyfiddlers" comment, and consider it a baseless political smear. If it is just a cynical smear that Conroy doesn't himself believe, I wonder why his pre-election fact sheet includes this conflation of X-rated material with child pornography, and seems to assume that the issue of child porn online has been adequately dealt with when children have been restricted from accessing it? Perhaps the Senator really is so confused about the issue that he can't tell the difference between the two different Internet boogiemen of children accessing pornography, and anyone accessing and/or distributing child pornography?

I think I'm going to buck the conventional wisdom that the Senator is cynical, and favour the assumption that he's stupid: he genuinely believes that "restricting children's access to online child pornography and X-rated material" is a coherent policy goal. Perhaps he assumes, as too many ignorant people do, that vast tracts of illegal and disgusting material are strewn all across the Internet within easy reach of anyone, and all that can be done about it is to reign in those young people who have not yet succumbed to its alleged allure.

The question I guess, then, is "is the rest of the Australian public also that stupid?". If this was a sane discussion, I'd have faith in Australians to come to the right conclusion, but I fear on the issue of the Internet, fearmongering and alarmism could beat out sanity very easily. In fact judging by the statistics of what Australian parents of teenagers want that I listed above, they've already done so.

Internet censorship rant

"If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree."

So sayeth our new Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy when defending Labor's intention to force ISPs in Australia to filter internet content.

It should be mentioned here that the planned internet filtering is being presented as a means of protecting children from material that is inappropriate for them, with an "unfiltered" option available to adults who want to opt out. In other words, it has NOTHING to do with tackling child pornography - unless of course the Senator is suggesting that anyone who wants an unfiltered feed wants it so they can access child porn. What is Senator Conroy talking about?

(1) The most cynical interpretation is that the good Senator knows damn well that the proposal has nothing to do with child porn and is knowingly trying to confuse the two in the public's mind. If so, it seems to have succeeded in the case of Daily Telegraph writer Galen English. Her column merrily bobbles along saying things like "Besides, what evidence is there that young children using the web are regularly stumbling across child pornography? Sites used by paedophiles are well hidden and frequently relocated to avoid detection", acting for all the world as if child porn is not already illegal to access and possess for both children and adults.

I believe one implication of Senator Conroy deliberately trying to confuse the public by engaging in a smear that he knows to be baseless is this: he has no intention of responding to any protests on this issue, his only intention is to discredit the protesters. Appeals to the government directly will not work. Appeals must be made to the public at large. The effectiveness of that approach will I think depend on how knowledgeable the public is about the Internet these days. I fear that they aren't knowledgeable enough.

(2) Alternatively, Senator Conroy himself might not be knowledgeable enough, and might just be stupid and incredibly ill-informed about his own portfolio. Some research from uni I came across last year suggested that far too many people view the Internet in a way that isn't entirely rational. Rather than a tool or a mere network of computers exchanging data, many people see it as a kind of gateway to the unconscious, a dangerous other place where dark and secret desires that have been stifled by the conscious mind are free to roam. While adults can usually navigate the pathways without too much trouble, children are seen as vulnerable due to their immature judgement, and when porn or violence suddenly leaps out at them they'll end up psychically damaged and end up, say, thinking that suicide and self-harm are wonderful things.

In such a view, much of the content of the Internet seems to exist outside of rational, conscious legal control: all you can do is try to block it out. The confusion between "adult content" and actual illegal content like child pornography would indeed seem blurry if you don't understand that both moral and legal norms do already exist with regard to what is available on the Internet, both in Australia and around the world. They only need to be applied in a sensible way. If Senator Conroy is stupid rather than malicious, it's a failure of both government policy that they're concentrating on blanket censorship rather than working with the Internet community to try and address the existence of morally and legally problematic content. It lacks imagination, ignores the advice of people with actual knowledge of the issue, and shows a terrifying deficiency of technological understanding from a government that's promised us a technologically spurred "education revolution".

****
My uni degree is supposedly teaching me to, among other things, be a more intelligent activist. I don't know how well it's succeeding. But from my less than perfectly worded speculations above, as well as a few other thoughts, I can think of a few suggestions that I would make to anti-censorship activists were I in a position to make some:
First, don't assume that the government is going to listen to your concerns in good faith. Assume that they are out to get you. They may not be, they may be nice, but don't count on it.
Second, reach out to the general public as much as you can. This especially includes off-line activity targeted at people who don't use the Internet. Assume that such people don't understand the Internet. Suggest that the supposed danger of it, particularly to children, has been vastly exaggerated. Seek to explain why. But whatever you do, don't patronise them.
Third, don't take being called child pornography supporters lying down. I would note that some civil libertarians have expressed concerns that anyone who wants to opt out of the ISP censorship regime might get stigmatised in the future. I point out that this is happening right now, and it's coming from the man charged with creating the censorship regime: Stephen Conroy in his comment above has as good as said that anyone who wants uncensored net access wants the freedom to access child porn. Call him on it, if possible. I wish I knew the right question to ask, but "I want to opt out of the ISP regime. Why do you think that means I want access to child pornography?" sets the tone about right I think. It needs to be snappier, though.
Fourth, the Rudd government may be vulnerable to an oblique attack: the promised education revolution, particularly when talking about its promises of making Australia more proficient in IT training, could conceivably become a vector for concerns about internet censorship. This could conceivably overcome attempts by the Rudd government to ignore democratic objection to Conroy's proposal if it's seen as a betrayal of one of Rudd's core election promises, and not just as a side issue. Keywords so far describing the problems with the censorship proposal have been "oppressive" and "expensive". I would like to add another: stupid.

After all, this proposal is stupid. It's been hatched together by people too stupid to understand the Internet, it's attempting to address issues related to the Internet in a stupid way, its defense relies on convincing people that it's alright to be stupid and let the government take care of all their thinking for them, and it's going to destroy the promise of the education revolution that it would make our economy more knowledge-based: nothing discourages intelligence and encourages stupidity like censorship does.

Focus on Australia Foundation/The Exclusive Brethern

John on Vox has expressed interest in finding more information about the Focus on Australia Foundation and its links with the Exclusive Brethren, and possibly the Australian Liberals as well.

Focus on Australia Foundation has a website

From a commentor: http://www.imsure.com.au

The site doesn't show up easily from a Google search because it's all done in Flash. I mean its all done in Flash. Yick.

Whois lists the registrant of the domain name as Allan David Green, same person that owned Focus on Australia Foundation's trustee company Kuduru Pty Ltd before he handed it off to Gayle Le Bon on October 23. All their claymation ads are available from the site: anti-union, pro-Workchoices, anti-green (or possibly anti-dodo, it's kind of hard to tell), pro-mature aged education. That last one seems kind of random.

Their policies are in that Flash awfulness as well, which makes copy-and-paste hard: they aim to "promote and foster" things like "freedom of contract between commercial parties", "fair and equitable workplace relations laws", "public policy which supports and encourages families as a social unit in Australia", access to high quality healthcare and education and..oh hell I'm not going to type all that out, suffice it to say that they're looking to give money to institutions and people that promote their goals and to enter into alliances and what have you with organisations that promote similar goals to their own. Their main schtick seems to be pro-business, which seems intermingled with a pro-family agenda too. That's an odd combination. Well, maybe not for Hillsong, but they're a New South Wales outfit aren't they? These FOAF people are in Queensland.

Anything else? They're wanting FOAF to be "a collective voice that reaches out to our nation promoting Values that sustain our Australia's abundance" (the capital V on Values and the use of the grammatically weird but plausibly accurate phrase "our Australia's abundance" are both in the original website). Their contact address is a PO Box, which is different from their registered place of business in Coomera.

My tentative impression is either astro-turfing body or (far less likely) slush fund. I'm not sure for who.

That fake "Islamic Australia Federation" ad

Courtesy of my boyfriend Nick, here is the full text of the leaflet that Federal Liberal MP Jackie Kelly's husband, Gary Clark, and member of the NSW Liberal Party state executive, Jeff Egan were distributing in St Marys (a place where I very briefly went to high school, incidentally). Full details are in many Australian papers, including the Daily Telegraph somewhat suprisingly to me:Libs handed out fake Muslim flyers.
UPDATE: here's a PDF which includes the graphics used and the "Ala Akba[sic]" at the end: click here

The role of the Islamic Australia Federation is to support Islamic Australians by providing a strong network within Islamic Australia.

Muslims supporting Muslims within the community and assisting and showing christian Australians the glorious path to Islam.

In the upcoming federal election we strongly support the ALP as our preferred party to govern this country and urge all other Muslims to do the same.

The leading role of the ALP in supporting our faith at both state and local government levels has been exceptional and we look further to further support when Kevin Rudd leads this country.

We gratefully acknowledge Labor's support to forgive our Muslim brothers who have been unjustly sentenced to death for the Bali bombings.

Labor supports our new Mosque construction and we hope, with the support or funding of local and state governments, to open our new Mosque in St Marys soon.

Labor was the only political party to support the entry to this country of our Grand Mufti reverend Sheik al-Hilaly (sic) and we thank Hon Paul Keating for over-turning the objections of ASIO to allow our Grand Mufti to enter this country.

Jackie Kelly's response has been that it was all a "Chaser-style" prank. The Chaser's response: "It's a bit of a worry when the best argument you have to defend your ethical practices is that you were doing what The Chaser does".

In any case, it should be possible for people to judge for themselves whether or not they agree with Mrs Kelly's claim of the text printed here that "If you read it you would be laughing".

Article on Focus on Australia Foundation: "Small business funds trust behind television ads"

Full text of the Australian Financial Review article found in the Deep Web (gotta love that database access). This probably isn't that big a deal given the extremely primitive nature of the ads, but I think it should always be possible to have at least some idea of who's responsible for political advertising.

***
Small business funds trust behind television ads
Fleur Anderson
159 words
20 November 2007
Australian Financial Review (Abstracts)
11
English
Copyright 2007 Media Monitors Australia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved

A number of small businesses have funded an anti-union advertising campaign that has been running on commercial television networks and on SBS in recent weeks. The Gold Coast-based Focus on Australia Foundation's ads urge voters: 'Don't give your vote to unions' and 'Thinking clears the vision, WorkChoices is a bright idea.' The campaign was authorised by Gayle Le Bon, the sole director, secretary, and shareholder of Focus' trustee company, Kuduru Pty Ltd. Australian Securities and Investments Commission records show the company was previously set up, owned and run since 1997 by Allan David Green, who resigned as director and secretary and transferred his three shares to Ms Le Bon on October 23. No suggestions of improper conduct were made against Mr Green.

Political ads: who is "Focus on Australia Foundation"?

I was watching the morning news and was a little surprised by the sheer number of ads that the Coalition has apparently bought - I swear there was at least one warning about a Labor government run by "union fanatics" (Gillard), "environmental extremists" (Garrett) and "learners" (Swan and Rudd) every single ad break. But I also saw two odd political ads from an outfit I've never heard of before. I can't find the first ad on youtube, but it featured a short claymation skit of a voter putting his vote into some sort of monster thingy that had "union" written on it, which got activated by the vote getting put into it and then ate the voter. The voice-over message was something like "know what it is you're voting for". Pretty standard anti-union/anti-Labor stuff, except it never mentioned Labor even once.

The second one got put up on Youtube by someone because they thought it was so odd:"it's a green dodo!".

So: anti-union/anti-Labor, and anti-environmentalist/anti-Green I guess, although it is kind of hard to tell what the hell that green dodo's supposed to be about. It's very childish.

Both ads listed the sponsor of the ad as something called the "Focus on Australia Foundation", based in Coomera, Qld. Standard google search turns up, in total, someone asking about them on pollbludger.com in the comments about an AC Nielson poll on Wentworth, and noting that they seem to be very much an "under the radar" sort of set-up.

Google blogsearch comes up with this person also wondering what's up with the green dodo crap. He says he found something in ASIC but I can't find what he's referring to as yet.

I did find this in the ABN register: the ABN of the Trustee of the Focus on Australia Foundation Trust: 19 779 196 982. Postcode for this is 4209, same as Coomera. The ABN has been active only since 24 Oct 2007. It's a "discretionary investment trust" per the ABR. A discretionary trust is apparently a "A trust that is neither a fixed trust nor a hybrid trust and under which a person or persons benefit from income or capital of the trust upon the exercise of a discretion by a person or persons, usually the trustee." As a discretionary investment trust "the main source of income of the discretionary trust is from investment activities" (thank you ABR help glossary).

I'm really not sure what this is about, but I don't like it. Independent organisations putting up political attack ads isn't bad per se, but I generally like to know who's doing it and why (case in point: Getup). For this FOAF thing, there's no website, no contact details and the only easy-to-acess business record suggests that money's being funneled to it via a trust. Am I correct in my suspicions that this set-up very effectively conceals the source of its funding and the identity of the person who's running it?

The only other lead is that the actual person who authorised the ads was named "G. Lebon". I don't expect much luck in tracing that. I have my suspicions about who's behind all this naturally: Family First or The Exclusive Brethren would be the people I'd name as willing and able to do these sorts of under the table shenanigans. But as yet there's no proof of anyone's involvement.

I intend to keep looking through other sources of information available to me as time permits.

Social study of emo

Last semester I didn't get a chance to do some at least vaguely academic study of "emo" in the wake of those two teen girls in Victoria committing suicide earlier this year. This semester I may get a second chance if my Contemporary Cultures tutor lets me expand an essay supposed to be about "moral panics" and goth/metal/punk subcultures to include the newly-created media conception of an "emo" subculture.

Why focus on emo? It seems like a subculture regarded with contempt rather than fear by most internet denizens. Mass media representations (the means by which the majority of the population still gets their news) on the other hand are a little different.

A few of the headlines from Australian and New Zealand newspaper headlines that came up in my initial forays into the databases to which the university so helpfully gives me access:

Sinister messages and warnings in self-loathing world of Emo
Internet an outlet for the darkest teen angst
Fears for teens in dangerous subculture
Teenagers' secret world
'It's over for me, I can't take it!' The tragic last words of MySpace suicide girls
Lost in cyberspace: Fears that new networks are breeding grounds for real-life tragedies

To be fair, there's also:

Music takes another trip down the scapegoat road, and
Ignore the scaremongers Emo is not a dirty word

but the "moral panic" aspect is pretty clear. I hope I have room in the essay to illustrate the role of the Internet as the "folk devil" for the panic, in the absence of any human being to fill the role.

Anyway, these are my favourite two quotes from the newspaper search so far based on just how poor they show elite understanding of the issue really to be:
From Tasmanian Catholic Schools Parents and Friends Federation president, Bill Button: "Parents are concerned because all of a sudden their child, if they have access to a computer, can turn into an Emo."
From Tasmania's Department of Health and Human Services Community Resilience and Mental Health Promotion, project officer Dion Butler: "I understand that some Emo groups require youth to cut themselves as an initiation -- if they don't cut, they can't join"

APEC Protestors allegedly admit "violent" plan

Headline from news.com.au of a few days back: APEC protestors admit "violent" plan.

Somebody found an online post circulating from Melbourne anarchist group claiming that it endorsed violent action. The allegedly incriminating line is "By the very praxis of stepping out and challenging their control of space, we are committing what is regarded as a violent act".

It seems dubious that this is an intention to cause harm to person or property. They seem to be saying that they'll be CALLED violent, but not actually advocating it.

The full text of the anarchist group's announcement is here. I'll quote again, adding the next sentence that news.com.au left off: "By the very praxis of stepping out and challenging their control of space we are committing what is regarded as a violent act. It is the violence of articulating resistance; it is a violation against their understanding of our lives."

I think that reads slightly differently.

Curious how the way of talking about the APEC protests has neatly categorised the possible protest into one of only two categories: peaceful and good, or violent and evil. This group is advocating something that doesn't fit neatly into that dichotomy: from my reading, their intention is not to cause direct harm or damage, but to deliberately trespass. That's not violent. It is, though, definitely illegal, and dead certain to provoke a forceful response from police.

So...is it "violent protest" if a person knowingly commits a non-violent but illegal act which the police will, I believe, be obliged to respond to with force?

For uni, I'm reading about sati, a practise in India where a woman who was widowed was burnt to death. The British forcibly put a stop to the practise when they were occupying the country in the 19th century.

Reading Sir William Bentick's reasoning on enforcing a ban on the practise gives me a strange feeling about the whole affair. I'm happy with the result, but the reasonins seems so...nineteenth century: the argument against trying to enforce a ban was that it might lead to a revolt and end to British supremacy in the region, which would have deprived the natives of even more "benefits of civilisation" than just the abolition of this one practise.

I can't help thinking of modern-day justifications for attacking Islam on the grounds that it oppresses women either through enforced wearing of a burkha(the view on this varies by sect) or through toleration/advocation of honour-killing (not a practise actually condoned by Islam). Sure, I think both such things are problematic, but it seems like something else is at stake, ideologically speaking...

Is it common for Western concerns with injustice in other civilisations to focus so specifically (and, it seems, exclusively) on the injustices suffered by women?

This post is on less certain ideological ground than I'm accustomed to being on.

The reason for Last.fm's popularity

I've been thinking about last.fm and about how such a fairly simple concept has so many people, including me, going "wow that's so cool!".

A lot of the stuff at last.fm is pretty standard web 2.0 stuff: friendslists, blogging, tagging, etc, but the key feature that sets it apart in my eyes is the scrobbling: the way it aggregates the music you listen to and provides handy charts to display based on this aggregation.

The coding to collate and display this data probably isn't that complicated, but the result seems to me to have a social resonance that goes well beyond something I'd expect from a "mere" aggregation of data.

Part of it's obviously the type of data. Musical preference is a much more personal thing than, say, a person's preferred shopping habits, so that has an impact. But I think it's also the way in which we talk about music that allows last.fm to augment music buff's intercommunication about music so effectively.

There are two main questions that a music buff wants to answer, even without being asked: "what are you into?", and "what are you listening to right now". Last.fm's overall chart and weekly chart provide a neat answer to both. The assumption is that your musical preference can be quantitively scaled by collating the number of times you listen to each track and each artist. The process can be cheated obviously, but the overall result translates extremely well: Artists and tracks you like score highly while less well-liked artists score less well.

It seems so obvious, but I only really thought how useful it is to do that when I saw Last.fm (then Audioscrobbler.com) doing it. A few other things that make the process so effective:
It's transparent. Once the plug-in for music player X is installed, the process of collation(scrobbling) is automatic. Many of the modern linux players even have the process built-in, so that commencing scrobbling is as simple as checking a box then forgetting about it.
It's efficient: the time it takes to detail musical taste, even to the point where you can point out what's currently tickling your eardrums and providing an approximate ranking of your taste, is practically instantaneous.
It's emergent: neat word that. Basically it means that you don't know what the chart's going to look like until after it's completed. You can actually be surprised by the results and think things like "wow, I didn't know I was listening to Muse that much!".
It's "push": I guess by this I mean that you can provide this neatly aggregated and quantified snapshot of your musical taste to people without them asking for it. Just lay it out on your blog, Myspace or whatever and you answer the two questions above to anyone who looks at your personal space whether they were going to ask you or not.

I guess overall that it seems to me like last.fm combined some fairly obvious ways to use software in a manner that allowed people to communicate about music in a way that had never been done before. That really is cool.

GodTube, the Christian Video Sharing Site

Seriously?

Oh dear, Israel/Palestine again (again? Yes, again)

Palestine just went kablooie again. Metaphorically speaking.

On the Israeli side, little of immediate note beyond the election of a new Labor Party leader who's calling on current Israeli PM Ehud Olmert to resign. That's not really new: most prominent Israeli citizens and politicians have had it in for Olmert ever since his unsuccessful military campaign failed to eliminate Hezbollah.

On a non-headline note, I had opportunity to watch a documentary on SBS called "Judah/Mohammed" a few nights back. The documentary traced the lives of two 15-year olds - one Israeli named Judah, one Palestinian named Mohammed - for a time, without them ever actually meeting. What struck me most about their leaves was how their whole society seemed destined to mold both of them into thinking of each other as the enemy.

In Judah's classroom at school, students were taught about the Israeli war of independence and how the new nation of Israel defended itself against unprovoked attack from Arab nations. The teacher was tried to get an analysis going of the pros and cons of various peace plans but was constantly battling against complaints about any attempt at peace by students yelling out things like "but teacher, you know what Arabs are like!"

Mohammed for his part seemed a lot more well off than what I would have expected given what I know about the demographics of the Palestinian territories. He wasn't from a poor family - lower middle class would probably be about right - and went to a typical Western-style school, where he learned about the creation of Israel, or as the Palestinians refer to it, the Catastrophe. Mohammed himself was arrested at one point for participating in a demonstration against occupation - we got a lovely camera shot of a pursuing Israeli army officer laying the boot in - and being held in detention for a few days before returning to his family and school, pending trial. He was officially welcomed back as a hero for the Palestinian cause by his school and community. The charges against him were upheld, but the Israeli judge took into account his physical mistreatment at the hands of Isreali captives while he was in detention. He was given a fine and forbidden from participating in any demonstrations for, um, I think it was six months. Mohammed was at a demonstration again a month later.

All things told, my main impression was how much effort went into instilling a deep sense of pride in the respective heritages of both Israeli and Palestinian youth. So much pride, and so much destruction because of it.

The passive aggression of Cardinal Pell and his defenders

Let's see, how did it go down?

1) Cardinal Pell warns that there would be consequences for Catholic MPs who voted in favour of NSW legislation that would allow therapeutic cloning.
2) Catholic MPs, including those who were planning to vote against the legislation, react angrily to Pell's attempt at intimidation. The bill easily passes in the NSW Lower House.
3) But now people, including our possible future Prime Minister, are leaping to Pell's defense, insisting that he "had every right to speak out on behalf of the church".

Which would be a legitimate complaint, if the angry reaction was a response to Cardinal Pell expressing an opinion. But the angry reaction was never about Pell merely expressing an opinion: it was about Pell making threats.

I guess the fact that Pell never outlined what he specifically meant by "consequences" makes it easier to get away with misrepresenting his threat as a mere "forceful expression of opinion". But Pell made a threat, and it's passive aggressive behaviour to try and portray legitimate hostility to that threat is somehow unfair on Pell.

PR by redefinition of words

Minor newspeakification of note: Some commercial sites such as salon.com and forbes.com redirect you to a page devoted entirely to serving up an ad before letting you proceed to the article you want to read. Both at least give an option to click a hyperlink that skips past the adpage with minimal fuss. The text for the hyperlink that lets you at salon.com is "Skip this ad".

The text for the hyperlink at forbes.com is "Skip this welcome screen".

I can accept the need for acquiring revenue by force-serving advertising, but trying to redefine the imposition as a pleasing "welcome message" isn't going to make me suddenly start wanting it. Let it go, Forbes.

Citizenship test

The sample questions for the proposed Australian citizenship test confirm my impression that it's ideologically-driven bullshit. First point of note: despite the Herald Sun calling it an "exclusive look" at the questions being considered by the Federal government, now that people have had a chance to look at them and criticise them Howard and Andrews are claiming that "those questions in the paper this morning are not ours". Riiiight. Handling backlash 101: disclaim all responsibility.

But most disturbing is question 15:
15. Australia's values are based on the ...

a. Teachings of the Koran

b. The Judaeo-Christian tradition

c. Catholicism

d. Secularism

The answer should be (d) in my book. But the government says it's (b). Andrews is standing by this Christianist revisionism of Australia's secular history, according to the Herald Sun: Significantly, Mr Andrews said immigrants would have to acknowledge the Judeo-Christian tradition as the basis for the nation's values system.

That last link claims majority support for the citizenship test based on an online poll. Hoo boy. The news.com.au arm of the Murdoch Empire on the other hand has the headline "readers slam citizenship test", so at least there's some effort to recognise that this whole farce isn't necessarily being dumbly accepted by the majority of the Australian public.

Jeez, what a joke. I can only hope this pointless theatrical display only means something to people who believe that anything with the label "keeps foreigners out" is automatically good. Especially pathetic considering it won't even do that: the test isn't a barrier to immigrants arriving here, just a barrier to them gaining citizenship afterwards.

The conflict between democracy and religious extremism in India

A reporter concerned about the rise in power of Hindu extremism in India, providing some info about the current status of the world's largest democracy. An insightful article, here.

Nice to see someone noticing that the overall problem isn't "Islamic extremism" or "Hindu extremism" but extremism, period.