Oct 30, 2006 4
Oct 29, 2006 5
late and bored and lonely
that he should mention edward bernays and the creel commission kind of made me glad, because it is entirely timely and necessary, but also filled me with a little dismay; times are grim when rushkoff is making reference to the likes of bernays. i tried not to link to a wikipedia entry there but i’m particularly lazy right now and i honestly looked for the lip magazine feature article, which i read in hard copy and wanted to link to, but couldn’t find online.
combining that pretty lucid rushkoff commentary with this report on worsening conditions for reporters around the world (courtesy of kenny) and the o’reilly vs letterman rematch made me do a double-take.
like i was saying to doug earlier:
me: but don’t you find it a little strange?
me: even when the argument is SOO logical that the alternative is absurd
me: there is still this notion of a necessary ‘debate’?
doug: lol yea it is kinda strange
doug: but the guest has to fill that 5 minute spot
doug:
me: sometimes i find myself totally baffled
me: but like, you know shit’s obvious when it’s being sounded off on network tv
me: and yet … nothing
me: hehe
doug: yea, i read an article in newsweek about just that
doug: how we’re kind of all just standing around on the outside of the unstoppable brawl
doug: and dinner’s getting cold
doug: but we can’t leave because they have the keys
the only way someone like david letterman would make vocal his opinion on someone like bill o’reilly, on a nationally televised network talk show, is if his point of view were overwhelmingly obvious … and it is, what he’s saying isn’t new and barely even begins to touch the surface of ‘what’s wrong’. and yet, this ‘democracy’ carries on, with its faux debates, and the totally absurd notion that being fair to ‘both sides of the argument’ should involve equally weighted consideration of reports like this (thank you kenny again). and thank you, national post, for dedicating an entire article on a report with this to say about its source:
“Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, said not much was known about the author of the document, Hossam Abdul Raouf, except that he is described as a member of al-Qaeda’s information and strategy committee and editor of the electronic periodical Vanguards of Kharasan.”
*sigh*
… though i never expected this blog was gonna turn into a personal ‘rant-space’ i’m left wondering now what else it could have been.
Oct 25, 2006 7
myspace and you
here’s the deal with web2.0, there’s no doubt about its success being a function of online social interaction – there are a million articles written every day about it. despite its cult-of-buzz and despite its near-spontaneous creation by the web’s most influential person nobody’s heard of, tim o’reilly (unless you read wired magazine, itself a real springboard for everything web2.0) there definitely is something about web2.0 that interests and (*gasp*) excites people like me. this blog and wordpress are a testament to that.
so yay for web2.0 …
backtrack a little, who remembers the early days’ attempts at social networking through personal sites? geocities? angelfire? tripod? they had ‘communities’ and ‘neighbourhoods’ and all that other crap. and, most importantly, and especially compared to the elegance with which more and more websites are being designed, they were UGLY. music would just spontaneously start playing (not REAL music, but the most hideous thing ever to pretend to be music: MIDI!), images would cover so much real estate as to require sidescrolling, get stretched to infinity, distorted, barely fit inside borders, grouped between random spurts of retarded text, yada yada yada. nothing had come out before or after with such a haphazard attempt at aesthetic design … until myspace showed up.
to say myspace has “showed up” is a gross understatement, this shit’s virtually taken over and i don’t even know what the fuck makes it so special.
here’s an excerpt from an angry email i wrote earlier today which provided a link to a myspace profile page:
“jesus christ, i can’t even scroll down this page. look, here’s the deal with webpages, unless it’s a fucking photo-essay I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SIDESCROLL to view the content. if the internet were a comedy club, myspace would be amateur hour and people would vomit. i don’t hate gay people, but myspace is a fag.”
if you’re reading this (there’s only two of you anyway) and wondering: “how come waleed, handsome devil that he is, hasn’t linked to myspace at all?” well, cause it sucks. if you don’t know what myspace looks like, i envy you like i envy young children and i’d rather not be the one who rips that innocence away from you.
i hate myspace. i’d rather not live in a world whose future is myspace.
Oct 22, 2006 6
barren election
on november 13 we’ll be having province-wide municipal elections in ontario. being a resident of mississauga this ostensibly deserves my attention.
a quick google search for: mississauga municipal elections results in little more than the official mississauga.ca Vote 2006 microsite … except for a handy guide to maintaining pro-life voting consistency a few results down, as useless as that is.
…not very much to build on.
getting a list of the candidates in my ward was easy, but apart from peter ferreira, the incumbent in the race, none of the other candidates has any web presence. the same goes for all the other wards as well. virtually ZERO web presence.
alright, so maybe municipal politics doesn’t need to exist online, it is after all of mainly local consequence, a grassroots thing spreading through the community by word of mouth and the local media (more on that later). ya fucking right! the very idea that the local affairs of a city as big as mississauga can live OFF the web is completely detached, especially when an organization such as the fcm can have the influence it does on federal decisions and without which a guy like jack layton wouldn’t be where he is now.
anyway, off to the trustworthy local media:
well, our only local ‘media’ source, the mississauga news – an envelope of flyers in print form and a similarly barren eyesore in electronic form (despite having won the newspaper website of the year award from suburban newspapers of america, an american trade association that has very little to do with news and very much to do with ad-driven revenue) – has actually reported on a few candidates in the lead up to the election.
the newsworthy items are:
1. carolyn parrish – tales of potential bribery in ward 6
2. adnan hashmi – also mentioned in the above article. this ward 10 candidate actually was charged with bribery
3. eve adams – strong-arming residents to put her signs on their lawns.
too bad all of this coverage has everything to do with why we SHOULDN’T vote.
so where do i get information on the councillors in my ward?
how can a democracy function like this? especially on a level where decisions affect citizens locally … things like schools, strip malls, public transportation, the environment, local police, in the case of mississauga, more strip malls.
somehow, our collective decision to focus on gay marriage, or terrorism, or haiti is leaving local policies and politicians unchecked … how long can we keep ourselves divorced from what happens in our neighbourhoods?
i haven’t been alive long enough to really know this, but i’m pretty sure that for some time now a deceitful mediated narrative has gradually been replacing genuinely reasoned skepticism, dilligence and deference.
internationally, we’re fucking great at espousing the virtues of freedom and democracy – collectively sermonizing and enforcing what we aren’t, while increasingly deviating from what we should be. what we aren’t is a properly functioning democracy and what we are becoming is a rhetoric machine, a menace to future generations who will hopefully look back on this period with condemnation instead of continuing a legacy of active ignorance.
