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Friday, October 12, 2001
Gonzodotted 
| | Chris Locke's Gonzo Marketing, due to hit the streets any day now, gets a rave on Slashdot from a contributor who is none other than Saltire's own Steve MacLaughlin. To the degree that the thread stays off-drift, it looks like most of the responding Slashdotters agree. Which is more than they did for Cluetrain, as I recall. |
| | Haven't had a chance to go through the whole thread yet, but somebody should observe that this is indeed a perfect example of gonzo marketing at work on all fronts. |
Don't eat while you read this
| | Terror isn't only something that is done to people. It's also what makes people to do terrible, terrifying things. I was one of the Taliban's torturers: I crucified people is the brief story of Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, an accountant who committed hideous atrocities as a member of the Taliban secret police and finally as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the Taliban's leader. The story is apocolyptic, right out of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or the more familiar Apocalypse Now, with Osama bin Laden playing Col. Kurtz. Consider this narrative, which begins with a profile of Omar: |
| | "He's medium height, slightly fat, with an artificial green eye which doesn't move, and he would sit on a bed issuing instructions and giving people dollars from a tin trunk," said Mr Hassani. "He doesn't say much, which is just as well as he's a very stupid man. He knows only how to write his name `Omar' and sign it. |
| | "It is the first time in Afghanistan's history that the lower classes are governing and by force. There are no educated people in this administration - they are all totally backward and illiterate. |
| | "They have no idea of the history of the country and although they call themselves mullahs they have no idea of Islam. Nowhere does it say men must have beards or women cannot be educated; in fact, the Koran says people must seek education." |
| | He became convinced that the Taliban were not really in control. "We laughed when we heard the Americans asking Mullah Omar to hand over Osama bin Laden," he said. "The Americans are crazy. It is Osama bin Laden who can hand over Mullah Omar - not the other way round." |
| | While stationed in Kandahar, he often saw bin Laden in a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers all with darkened windows and festooned with radio antennae. "They would whizz through the town, seven or eight cars at a time. His guards were all Arabs and very tall people, or Sudanese with curly hair." |
| | He was also on guard once when bin Laden joined Mullah Omar for a bird shoot on his estate. "They seemed to get on well," he said. "They would go fishing together, too - with hand grenades." |
| | This time, however, we don't seem to be sending a Willard up the river to "terminate the Colonel's command." But when it's over, if it ever is, how do we save this hell from itself? |
Yo
| | Dr. Weinberger's latest JOHO is out. It includes, among its rare visual jewells, a bumper sticker (right) with this explanation: |
| | Despite the fact that I have throughout my life viewed myself fundamentally as a peacenik,  I find I have no compunction about our government hunting down and killing terrorists. They're trying to kill me and my kids. But I don't want a tit for tat attack, because the tat will mean more attacks on Americans. And I can't accept killing civilians and their kids as a tactic. Hunt down terrorists? Absolutely. Bomb population centers? No, we're better than that. And that leads me, at last, to my bumpersticker, the one that I would proudly put on the back of my car. It says two words... |
Other voices
| | With CNN and the other news services in full drone mode on war coverage, I've been looking elsewhere for facts and wisdom. |
| | The Times of India has a remarkable column titled Revenge as Duty, by Chaturvedi Badrinath, which inveighs against its own title, based on Hindu teachings and stories. Trough the lament of Yudhishthira, the Mahabharata teaches that no victory in war is ever a complete victory and turns into defeat in one way or another, Badrinath says. The lesson: |
| | Through this story of the endless cycle of hurt-revenge-another hurt-another revenge, being enacted everywhere, at the very time these lines are being written, the Mahabharata is saying: |
| | Hatred and the spirit of revenge are the weapons that destroy the world. |
| | The power of physical weapons is increased beyond description by the power of anger and hatred and revenge breathed into them. |
| | Even a piece of straw becomes a weapon of greatest force when touched with great hatred and the greater resolve to revenge. |
| | Once fired, the weapons of hatred and revenge cannot be withdrawn ‹ except by those who have the greater power of self-control, forgiveness and reconciliation. |
| | Therefore, the physical weapons of most destructive power shall never be in the hands of those with no control over their mind and over their judgment even less. |
| | No matter how great the danger to you, never use the weapons of ultimate force, especially never over human lives. |
| | Not that such pacifism has a hold on any government. India itself has nuclear weapons. [Later: since I wrote this, Eric Norlin, South Asian scholar, adds this caveat: |
| | .The Gita culminates in a battle. And the "moral" of the story *isn't* that War should be avoided. Rather, that the illusionary veil of reality should be seen through -- that War, in its illusary (word?) state -- is no different than love, peace or death. As such, all things should be approaced with a sense of Universal detachment |
| | Of course, God is on everybody's side when they go to war. "This is a fight against evil," President Bush said yesterday. In Leave God out of It, from the London Observer, Cristina Odone informs us of three items I hadn't known: |
| | In 1954 the words 'one nation under God' were added to the pledge of allegiance with which every child begins their school day. In 1955, Congress mandated the use of 'In God we trust' on all currency; a year later those words became the official national motto. |
| | There's nothing Christian about nuking Afghan civilians, nor spying on American students; just as there is nothing Muslim about hijacking planes and flying them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. |
World Domination, starting with paradise
So far, not bad
| | Installing OS X (10.1) went smoothly yesterday. Sure enough, the networking problems were gone: DHCP works, where it didn't with 10.0.4. So does iTunes and the DVD player. I had forgotten that this machine was even capable of playing DVDs. I stuck in Blade Runner and had a hard time not watching it. Amazing movie. |
| | Anyway, I'm trying right now to listen to some radio using Real (which I despise, but nearly all the public radio stations use it). I see that Real doesn't offer a free player for any Mac OS upwards of 8.5, but that they do have one for UNIX. So I'm wondering: shouldn't Darwin be able to use this, being a UNIX? Anybody using Real on Darwin? |
| | (Unrelated: Mozilla on the G4 on OS X just downloaded the whole 6.6Mb the Real Player in, like, 3 seconds over our cable hookup.) |
| | I just listened to KCRW, WUNC and KQED for a bit on RealPlayer, then quit out of it when the phone rang. Now I have a Netscape Quality Feedback Agent showing up for the first time, becaue Mozilla has apparently crashed. |
| | I guess Mozilla uses this system. I hated it years ago when I was a heavy Netscape user and the browser crashed constantly. I used to answer "What were you doing when Communicator failed?" with "Increasing my certainty that no human being ever reads these feedback reports." For awhile I asked somebody to write back and say they had read the report. Nobody ever did. |
| | But Mozilla is different, hopefully. I just wish they'd Mozillize the reporting system. |
Blogrocking
| | Nice to read on Judith's blog that my compliments yesterday had her running around the room. |
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