by David Steven | Dec 7, 2008 | Influence and networks, Off topic, UK
Prepare yourself for a bad-tempered row over UK attempts to censor Wikipedia. The reason? Virgin Killer – a 1970s album from German heavy metal band, Scorpions. The result: Wikipedia is now shut to (anonymous) edits for large swathes of the British population.
The album cover features a picture of a prepubescent girl and was banned in many countries – though you can still buy it (with the original cover art) on amazon.co.uk. The Wikipedia page discussing the album, and the controversy around its cover, has now been blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation, a quasi-official body that censors “images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere in the world”.
IWF’s blacklisting has led to six ISPs blocking the page – something they’ve done by filtering all traffic through two proxy servers (if this reminds you of the Great Firewall of China – it should).
Unfortunately, the result of this is to make it seem as if vast swathes of the British population are visiting Wikipedia from the same IP address. That makes stopping abusive edits more or less impossible – so Wikipedia has had to ban all these users from anonymous editing:
Wikipedia has been added to an Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, the method they are using makes it impossible for us to differentiate between legitimate users and those abusing the site. As a result, we have been forced to block several IP addresses from editing Wikipedia.
Reports that all 1970s heavy metal are to be removed from the Internet on the grounds of musical taste, meanwhile, have been denied by the Internet Watch Foundation…
by Charlie Edwards | Dec 6, 2008 | Conflict and security, Global Dashboard
46°14?00?N 63°09?00?W Prince Edward Island, Canada.
I’m taking part in a roundtable on community resilience, 4&5GW and the decline of the state. The aim of the roundtable is to bring together individuals from a range of backgrounds to challenge current thinking and assumptions in our present political and societal systems. Two presentations which I’ll be live blogging on will be Chet Richards on Mindsets and Character and John Robb on Community Resilience. There is no set agenda for the conference. This afternoon we will be running a series of open sessions… one of which is likley to be on community resilience.
If you have a question for Chet or John send me a tweet. Update: Thanks for the questions – answers will be tweeted soon.
Update: Notes from John Robbs’ presentation after the jump + MP3 of Chet.
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by Alex Evans | Dec 5, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Relatively little media coverage so far on the UN climate talks currently underway in Poznan – but that’s not to say that nothing interesting is happening there.
Item 1 is that China and India have come out arguing that Obama’s proposed 2020 emissions reduction (namely, to get US emissions back to 1990 levels by that date – more details here) is insufficient. He Jiankun, a Chinese delegate, was quoted in Reuters as saying that “It’s more ambitious than President Bush but it is not enough to achieve the urgent, long-term goal of greenhouse gas reductions”.
Given that the IPCC says that stabilising at 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent (the maximum level on which we still have a better than even chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees C) probably requires developed countries to reduce their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, you can see where the Chinese and the Indians are coming from.
But as David pointed out when he and I were debating this a couple of weeks ago, the US’s emissions have gone through the roof under Bush: even the very modest target proposed by Obama is going to be a massive stretch for them. Expect this one to run and run.
Item 2: Brazil is reportedly sidling up to per capita convergence as the formula for sharing out a global emissions budget, at least if you believe this report in Business Green yesterday, which says:
Brazil reportedly put the finishing touches to proposals apparently based on the contraction and convergence principle that would see countries agree to per-capita emission reduction targets. Under the proposals, emission targets would be set on a per-head-of population basis, meaning that developing economies with low-carbon emissions per capita such as China would face less-demanding targets, while those countries with the highest level of emissions per person would have to deliver the deepest cuts.
Fascinating if true, but they don’t cite their source, so I’m regarding as tentative until I hear it from another source or two.
Item 3, meanwhile, is that in a workshop on “shared visions” for the future on Tuesday, China made some tentative steps towards setting out its stall on how it would want an emissions budget to be shared out. This is very interesting, as China’s the most important of the handful of developing countries for whom straight per capita convergence wouldn’t be advantageous – as its per capita emissions have (just in the last few months) gone over the global average per capita level, meaning that even immediate convergence at equal per capita shares to the atmosphere would leave them with no surplus permits to sell. What then is China proposing? The Worldwatch Institute wrote it up like this:
China, citing the equity language of Article 3, mentioned the need for eventual “global per-capita emissions convergence” – the idea that, at some point in the future, all countries in the world should have similar per-capita emissions as a matter of climate equity. But this concept did not pick up momentum, at least not in the workshop.
That had me sitting bolt upright in my chair and reaching for the phone to ask people in Poznan if it was really true. The answer back: not quite. In fact, what China seems to have been proposing is a system of per capita convergence in cumulative emissions – i.e. taking into account historical responsibility for past emissions, as well as current emissions – which would clearly be much more advantageous to it, given how much later China industrialised than (say) Britain (for whom historical responsibility based allocations of emissions permits would be rather, ahem, challenging).
But the real significance here is less the specific formula that China proposed (more details needed – if you were in the workshop, please drop me an email), and more the fact that China may now be starting to engage in a conversation about the formula that might be used to share out a global emissions budget. Up to now, discussion of stabilisation targets for greenhouse gas levels in the air has been off the table – in large part due to Chinese unwillingness to talk about how the emission budget implied would then be shared out. If that’s changing, then the future just got a little more hopeful.
by Leo Horn Phathanothai | Dec 2, 2008 | Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development
With my wedding in Bangkok fast approaching, I have been watching the events unfolding there closely and with trepidation. I am dismayed at the blinkered and naïve reporting and commentary in the mainstream Western press about the situation in Thailand (I refer in particular to The FT, The Economist, The Washington Post etc). The political impasse is described in clichés, as a battle of virtuous rural masses versus power-possessive urban elites, of progressives and democrats versus royalists, militarists and other hideous elements of the ‘ancien regime’. I’ve no doubt that the current events signify a failure of democracy in Thailand. It is indeed that very failure that the protesters are decrying, with resort to ever more desperate tactics.
A recent blog by the FT’s Gideon Rachman – whose pieces I frequently enjoy reading – typifies the mainstream view, which is shallow and simplistic both in its account of the situation and in its interpretation of democracy (see article here). According to Mr. Rachman (who by the way likes clichés):
“The urban middle-classes are rising up and demanding that democracy be rescinded.
Do not be fooled by the fact that the group occupying the airport call themselves the “People’s Alliance for Democracy“. Their intent is clearly anti-democratic. They have just brought down an elected government.”
In this vein, the anti-government movement (known as the People’s Alliance for Democracy, or PAD) has been widely condemned on the basis that it unlawfully rejects a government that was voted in through the ballot and thus has prima facie democratic legitimacy. It seems to be a straightforward case of foul play on the part of the urban elites, who directly challenge the people’s choice. Or is it?
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by David Steven | Nov 29, 2008 | North America
George Bush – he liberated the downtrodden, helped the sick and gave succour to the old. Yes, those are the fond thoughts the 43rd President hopes we’ll have for him:
I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn’t going to sacrifice those values; that I was a President that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them. I surrounded myself with good people. I carefully considered the advice of smart, capable people and made tough decisions.
I’d like to be a President (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace; that focused on individuals rather than process; that rallied people to serve their neighbor; that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package; that came to Washington, D.C., with a set of political statements and worked as hard as I possibly could to do what I told the American people I would do.
(Photo under a cc license from icbulk.)
Update: The National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson is lapping this up. Yes sir, Bush has done mighty fine:
We will come, through the Obama prism, to see that Bush’s sins were largely the absence of rhetorical skills, unfortunate shoot ’em braggadocio in 2003-4, the federal response to Katrina, and a certain administration haughtiness about the problems in Iraq between 2002-6, but not most of his policies that included prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, AIDs relief in Africa, the removal of two odious regimes, and consensual governments in their places, a framework at home to stop 9/11-type terrorism, and good working partnerships with key allies abroad such as Britain, Germany, France, Italy, India, et al, and a pragmatism in handling rivals like Russia and China.
In short, given all that, Obama’s victory (predicated on painting Bush as a Hoover/Nixon redux), more so even than perhaps a John McCain’s, may do more for Bush’s reputation that anyone ever imagined. And the Mumbai mess (over there, not here) will only empasize all this, as an array of old 9/11-era experts who used to warn us about radical Islam, then, in the subsequent respite at home, screamed that Bush fabricated a war against terror against bogeymen, and now in their third manifestation are paraded once more out to warn us about?—why, yes, radical Islam!
