FOLKS OUT THERE HAVE A "DISTASTE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND CULTURAL VALUES"
Edward S. Herman
One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible. Editorializing on the recent attacks ("The National Defense," Sept. 12), the New York Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War and consequent "resurgent of ethnic hatreds," but that the United States and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by their own actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and pressing Russian "reform"; positively encouraging Slovenian and Croatian exit from Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and without dealing with the problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized.
The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious fanaticism...the anger among those left behind by globalization," and the "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values" among the global dispossessed. The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in the dark.
Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating "nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses" and threatening to respond to "an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses," as fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose contents were never found to be "news fit to print." In connection with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.
During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States.
The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.
Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in "methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation).
The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas-- uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy.
All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions--perhaps even billions--of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are unprepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire.
http://www.zmag.org/hermancalam.htm
[Edward Herman is an economist and media analyst. He is professor emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books, including The Myth of the Liberal Media. He is author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent, one of the most important books on the media ever written.]
Details are pretty murky, but it looks like both services will emphasize streaming, and will also offer "tethered downloads" which expire once you stop paying subscription fees. These downloads will only be playable on portable players that support whatever DRM scheme the services use. The services will have fairly complete backcatalogs but may hold back some current singles.
Just read it in the Wall Street Journal:
"Metricom Inc., the struggling operator of Ricochet, one of the largest networks offering wireless Internet access in major cities across the nation, plans to discontinue its service ahead of a proposed auction of all its assets. [...]"
Re: "If Metrocom had done its own internet service and received double the revenue I believe that would presently be on its way to profitability."
Actually they were a direct ISP for their original narrowband service but switched to a reseller model for the 128K service.
I think there is still some innovation out there. I just discovered echo.com which has this interesting web-based IM client/streaming audio thing, kind of like Launchcast but you can listen together with other people. It has a buddy list where you can see what your friends are listening to and join in listening with them if a song you like comes on. It's not music on demand, but you can rate the music and it seems to be doing a pretty good job of picking up on my tastes. Also one of the coolest uses of Flash I've seen. Unfortunately doesn't run on Linux (not sure why, since Flash and RealPlayer both work on Linux), but works fine in VMWare.
Anyway, I was suprised I'd never heard about this until a friend told me about it. Kind of gives me some hope that the labels haven't completely crushed any hope for little guys doing something interesting.
The RIAA is also suing Launch over their Launchcast service. Launchcast is a personalized radio service that learns your preferences over time through song ratings, allowing you to (theoretically) tailor the service to your tastes. It's a streaming audio only service, no file sharing involved. I think this is actually a more aggressive move than the suit against Aimster.
"JSockets® is a general purpose 'firewall tunneling' product used to deliver Java applets and business objects from the application server to the general Internet. It provides full-duplex communication support and allows a client to listen for connections from other JSockets clients. Essentially, we have rewritten TCP/IP to run over HTTP."
I think maybe you're confused. ArsDigita isn't a site, they're a consulting firm along the line of Organic, Scient, Razorfish, etc. Maybe you're thinking of Ars Technica?
Well said. Here's my pet peeve about the P2P hype - companies that don't really fit the definition of P2P riding the bandwagon in order to get coverage in the industry press, for example distributed computing companies like Popular Power riding the P2P bandwagon. What the hell is "P2P" about distributed.net/SETI@home-style distributed computing? Peers never communicate, the only communication is with a central server.
I think these companies are soon going to experience "Marimba Syndrome" - if you recall, Marimba rode the push wave of '97 until it became painfully apparent that the push emporer had no clothes, then they tried to distance themselves from it as quickly as possible and never really recovered.
AP report has a different spin
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 12 -- A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the music-swapping service Napster must stop trading in copyrighted material and may be held liable for "vicarious copyright infringement" when it fails to patrol its system.
NAPSTER MUST PREVENT users from gaining access to potentially infringing content on its search index, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said, a ruling that Napster officials have said could force them to shut down the service.
In its ruling -- which Napster officials have said could force them to shut down the service -- the appeals court says the company has to keep users from gaining access to content that could potentially infringe on copyrights."
You've just described a CD jukebox. Typically these have one or more SCSI drives plus a SCSI changer device (a robot arm). You can get a Linux driver for the robot arm here.
I doubt this is it - in this case, price probably would be a concern and 20 boxes would be overkill. I'm sure he's trying to build an encoding system for a commercial Internet radio service or other type of online music service.
In reading your column, I notice that you often make spectacular predictions based on a bit of inside news that you have. I've also noticed that in many (perhaps most) cases these predictions fizzle. A couple of examples (from my somewhat fuzzy memory):
A story about how the Microsoft trial was going to be ended by a patent on active content in web pages (or something like that) that was granted to some obscure company.
A story about Motorola continuing to clone Macs without MacOS, but instead using the Mac emulator from ARDI.
If I had time to look through your archives I know I could find many more examples. The pattern seems to be that you drop a bombshell, then you say "when this blows up and the rest of the press catches on, remember that you read it here first!", and the next week when nothing has happened you move onto the next bombshell. My question: what's up with that?
I hope this question doesn't sound too confrontational. I enjoy reading your column, I've just learned to treat it as entertainment rather than information.
And the word after "paranoia" is probably "time". Also, I think it's "devious", not "diffuse". Here's the full corrected translation:
"So you've shut off your cookies, blocked those banner ads, and installed JunkBuster. Feeling secure in your anonymity? Well, Martin Paul at Linuxcare Australia knows a way they can still track you while you surf: By using the HTTP cache-control. It's far more devious than cookies, and more difficult to block too. His article, the Meantime Exploit, will give you a description and a demonstration." It's a bonus. Martin's writing is funny and clear. Welcome to Standard Paranoia Time.
Your comment implies that he is a clueless exec with no tech savvy. Actually, he started out as a software engineer with Sun. I work with a few ex-Sun people who knew him, and they all say he was damn good, although he was really arrogant.
He was also responsible (in some sense) for Java. He was going to leave Sun for NeXT, and McNealy asked him to write a letter telling him what was wrong with Sun. This led to the FirstPerson "skunkworks" project that eventually spawned Java. Here's a good article about it.
This isn't Internet telephony, but it could help you cut down your regular long distance bill. IDT is offering 5 cents per minute all day for interstate calls in the US, with a $3.95 monthly fee. If you're interested their number is:
888-802-0082
I just switched to this plan. They announced it last week, and they seem to be overwhelmed with calls, but you can leave a message and they'll call you back (took about 2 days for me).
Actually, Excite didn't "cover" this, Siemens & SuSE released a joint press release over BusinessWire, and Excite just passed it along, as they probably do with everything that comes over BusinessWire.
Maybe it's interesting that Siemens would consider a kernel patch significant enough to warrant a press release, although this doesn't seem surprising to me. It's a pretty significant new feature.
There's a scene in Animal House where a few people get stoned and discuss this theory.
There's a hilarious parody of this in Revenge of the Nerds 2. Again a bunch of people are getting stoned. The nerds are spouting some theories along the lines of WOBAD, and then Ogre (stereotypical "dumb jock") says "what if C-A-T really spelled DOG?"
Upside Today: Was Fullerton ever at Lawrence Livermore, or did they just develop it independently?
Petroff: He made a presentation to an audience that included almost a dozen Livermore people. Within several days they started working on a similar kind of thing, trying to come up with this technology. Livermore's credibility has been tremendously undermined [because of this] and it is becoming less of an issue. But for a long time, there were many people who knew about the Fullerton technology, but they were concerned about investing because Livermore might come in and sue them.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the link: http://www.zmag.org/ansarycalam.htm
FOLKS OUT THERE HAVE A "DISTASTE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND CULTURAL VALUES"
Edward S. Herman
One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes. The media have long been calling for the Japanese and Germans to admit guilt, apologize, and pay reparations. But the idea that this country has committed huge crimes, and that current events such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks may be rooted in responses to those crimes, is close to inadmissible. Editorializing on the recent attacks ("The National Defense," Sept. 12), the New York Times does give a bit of weight to the end of the Cold War and consequent "resurgent of ethnic hatreds," but that the United States and other NATO powers contributed to that resurgence by their own actions (e.g., helping dismantle the Soviet Union and pressing Russian "reform"; positively encouraging Slovenian and Croatian exit from Yugoslavia and the breakup of that state, and without dealing with the problem of stranded minorities, etc.) is completely unrecognized.
The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious fanaticism...the anger among those left behind by globalization," and the "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values" among the global dispossessed. The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in the dark.
Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating "nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses" and threatening to respond to "an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses," as fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose contents were never found to be "news fit to print." In connection with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.
During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States.
The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.
Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in "methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation).
The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas-- uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy.
All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions--perhaps even billions--of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are unprepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire.
http://www.zmag.org/hermancalam.htm
[Edward Herman is an economist and media analyst. He is professor emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books, including The Myth of the Liberal Media. He is author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent, one of the most important books on the media ever written.]
Details are pretty murky, but it looks like both services will emphasize streaming, and will also offer "tethered downloads" which expire once you stop paying subscription fees. These downloads will only be playable on portable players that support whatever DRM scheme the services use. The services will have fairly complete backcatalogs but may hold back some current singles.
Just read it in the Wall Street Journal: "Metricom Inc., the struggling operator of Ricochet, one of the largest networks offering wireless Internet access in major cities across the nation, plans to discontinue its service ahead of a proposed auction of all its assets. [...]"
Re: "If Metrocom had done its own internet service and received double the revenue I believe that would presently be on its way to profitability." Actually they were a direct ISP for their original narrowband service but switched to a reseller model for the 128K service.
Anyway, I was suprised I'd never heard about this until a friend told me about it. Kind of gives me some hope that the labels haven't completely crushed any hope for little guys doing something interesting.
The RIAA is also suing Launch over their Launchcast service. Launchcast is a personalized radio service that learns your preferences over time through song ratings, allowing you to (theoretically) tailor the service to your tastes. It's a streaming audio only service, no file sharing involved. I think this is actually a more aggressive move than the suit against Aimster.
"JSockets® is a general purpose 'firewall tunneling' product used to deliver Java applets and business objects from the application server to the general Internet. It provides full-duplex communication support and allows a client to listen for connections from other JSockets clients. Essentially, we have rewritten TCP/IP to run over HTTP."
I think maybe you're confused. ArsDigita isn't a site, they're a consulting firm along the line of Organic, Scient, Razorfish, etc. Maybe you're thinking of Ars Technica?
I think these companies are soon going to experience "Marimba Syndrome" - if you recall, Marimba rode the push wave of '97 until it became painfully apparent that the push emporer had no clothes, then they tried to distance themselves from it as quickly as possible and never really recovered.
AP report has a different spin ASSOCIATED PRESS SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 12 -- A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the music-swapping service Napster must stop trading in copyrighted material and may be held liable for "vicarious copyright infringement" when it fails to patrol its system. NAPSTER MUST PREVENT users from gaining access to potentially infringing content on its search index, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said, a ruling that Napster officials have said could force them to shut down the service. In its ruling -- which Napster officials have said could force them to shut down the service -- the appeals court says the company has to keep users from gaining access to content that could potentially infringe on copyrights."
You've just described a CD jukebox. Typically these have one or more SCSI drives plus a SCSI changer device (a robot arm). You can get a Linux driver for the robot arm here.
I doubt this is it - in this case, price probably would be a concern and 20 boxes would be overkill. I'm sure he's trying to build an encoding system for a commercial Internet radio service or other type of online music service.
Cogent Communications
- A story about how the Microsoft trial was going to be ended by a patent on active content in web pages (or something like that) that was granted to some obscure company.
- A story about Motorola continuing to clone Macs without MacOS, but instead using the Mac emulator from ARDI.
If I had time to look through your archives I know I could find many more examples. The pattern seems to be that you drop a bombshell, then you say "when this blows up and the rest of the press catches on, remember that you read it here first!", and the next week when nothing has happened you move onto the next bombshell. My question: what's up with that?I hope this question doesn't sound too confrontational. I enjoy reading your column, I've just learned to treat it as entertainment rather than information.
"So you've shut off your cookies, blocked those banner ads, and installed JunkBuster. Feeling secure in your anonymity? Well, Martin Paul at Linuxcare Australia knows a way they can still track you while you surf: By using the HTTP cache-control. It's far more devious than cookies, and more difficult to block too. His article, the Meantime Exploit, will give you a description and a demonstration." It's a bonus. Martin's writing is funny and clear. Welcome to Standard Paranoia Time.
Actually, Naughton is an author. He's written a couple of Java books. He was a software engineer on the original Java team at Sun.
He was also responsible (in some sense) for Java. He was going to leave Sun for NeXT, and McNealy asked him to write a letter telling him what was wrong with Sun. This led to the FirstPerson "skunkworks" project that eventually spawned Java. Here's a good article about it.
By the way, it's 3.5 cents per minute if you use IDT as your ISP. That would be cheaper than bigzoo.com. I have DSL, so I didn't do this.
888-802-0082
I just switched to this plan. They announced it last week, and they seem to be overwhelmed with calls, but you can leave a message and they'll call you back (took about 2 days for me).
Here's a Wired News story with more information.
Maybe it's interesting that Siemens would consider a kernel patch significant enough to warrant a press release, although this doesn't seem surprising to me. It's a pretty significant new feature.
There's a hilarious parody of this in Revenge of the Nerds 2. Again a bunch of people are getting stoned. The nerds are spouting some theories along the lines of WOBAD, and then Ogre (stereotypical "dumb jock") says "what if C-A-T really spelled DOG?"
Interview with the CEO of Time Domain from Upside.
Upside Today: Was Fullerton ever at Lawrence Livermore, or did they just develop it independently?
Petroff: He made a presentation to an audience that included almost a dozen Livermore people. Within several days they started working on a similar kind of thing, trying to come up with this technology. Livermore's credibility has been tremendously undermined [because of this] and it is becoming less of an issue. But for a long time, there were many people who knew about the Fullerton technology, but they were concerned about investing because Livermore might come in and sue them.
Anyone else distrubed by the thought of "hand-held radar that police can use to see inside a room before bursting in"?