- The Ancient Hippie
- Retired from 10 years in the Canadian Navy, and 28 years in the Canadian Diplomatic Service, with postings in Beijing, Mexico City, Sri Lanka, Romania, Abu Dhabi, Guyana, Ireland, Trinidad, and, last but not least, India.
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Monday, 28 June 2010
One Protester's View of the G20 Weekend
Thanks to Green Thumb, a member of the CAPP FB group.
Quote
My friend and I had planned to attend the G420 parade and peacefully demonstrate, unfortunately we were late arriving and the GO train stopped running to Union Station and we had to get off at Danforth, take the subway, then walk south to the protest area. While doing this a few unmarked SUV's raced into an intersection, blocked it off very forcefully yelling at people that they cannot walk down the street, I believe it was North of the protests on Yonge. We took a right turn and saw more police down the street and went down an alley which was unguarded. We were in! We walked around for awhile looking at some of the broken windows commenting how sad it was that people would be so violent and completely unproductive.
Unquote.
Quote
My friend and I had planned to attend the G420 parade and peacefully demonstrate, unfortunately we were late arriving and the GO train stopped running to Union Station and we had to get off at Danforth, take the subway, then walk south to the protest area. While doing this a few unmarked SUV's raced into an intersection, blocked it off very forcefully yelling at people that they cannot walk down the street, I believe it was North of the protests on Yonge. We took a right turn and saw more police down the street and went down an alley which was unguarded. We were in! We walked around for awhile looking at some of the broken windows commenting how sad it was that people would be so violent and completely unproductive.
Eventually, we found a march which we joined up with, it was a mixture of groups including CAW, first nations and water rights. We marched peacefully chanting for some time until the riot police in full gear stepped out into the street and stopped us. We chanted let us through for some time and then a parade ended up on the other side of the street too also facing another line of police. After an hour, maybe less, all four sides of the intersection had a protest group blocked by police. The police then went about bullying people and splitting the group by use of riot police. I cannot stress enough everything here was entirely peaceful, probably 15,000 people.
After that I went for dinner at a friends downtown apartment and watched on TV. We saw what was occurring on Queen street and made sure to avoid that type of violence. We found another protest parade who was holding a sit in and had been surrounded by riot police, blocking in the sitters. Crowds started forming chanting "let them out, let them out" which the riot police eventually did and everyone started to march and chant. We managed to get down by the fence where we had a very small demonstration then continued to march. We marched over to the Novotel Hotel, where the French delegation and possibly a German delegate were staying. We sat down right in front of the hotel and began a demonstration. After 5-10 minutes riot police showed up in front of us and demanded we move. We told them this was a peaceful sitdown protest and nobody would be leaving. After some negotiations and many threats on the part of the riot police, who were all dressed up in gas masks and all, it was agreed that if everyone in the crowd gave the peace sign the riot line would step aside and allow us to continue to march. Unfortunately this was just a trick to keep everyone there, in the time it took us to get everyone to give the peace sign at the same time another police line formed behind us trapping us. The lines then began charging forward and grabbing people. They eventually arrested everyone, 200-300 peaceful protesters, including 2 reporters, 1 for the National Post and an independent one. The NP reported received some facial damage, a cut or a black eye, there were so many people who were injured I forget which was on who.
So now begins the saga and the G20 Detention Center which I have named the G20 Torture center. When I arrived the entire bus of innocents I was with were placed in a holding cage which did have a bathroom and we were provided with water, at this point everything was OK. As the night went on the place got busier and busier and the conditions got worse and worse. Up to processing everything was O.K. they were very unorganized keeping tracked of everyones personal belongings though. Once through processing things took a hard U-turn to torture town. In the area I was in 6 people forced to sit a 6 foot by 9 foot concrete slab covered in an 8 foot high cage. Every person got 2 square feet, not even close to enough room to sleep, therefore we were deprived of sleep and forced to sit in incredibly uncomfortable positions, I believe this is called torture.
In addition to the basic conditions bathrooms were hard to come by the same as water, both you had to beg the guards for. Then the guards would laugh and snicker and eventually take you to the bathroom, water you had to wait for the set times for it to be handed out. Then you would get a very small sytrofoam cup (of all things), and only 1. In addition, there was no access to lawyers or the telephone. I argued for 20 hours before I was allowed to speak on the phone to tell my family I was OK and not dead. I had been told 1 minute before going to the phone that they were being used then a different officer took me, one I had built a relationship with over the course of his shift and had been asking to use the phone the entire time, so he relented. There were about 15 phones and nobody was on any of them. I was told they didn't have enough guards to allow people to use the phones. I doubt I need to point out by access to a phone is a Charter Right and cannot be denied.
Now I will talk about the guards personally, some were extremely nice people and I felt bad that the ISU would put them into such a position, but others seemed to revel in torturing the protesters, one officer dressed in riot gear told me and I quote "I enjoy bashing the heads of protesters." But please keep in mind many of the guards were extremely nice and treated me and the other protesters with the most respect possible, and it was returned for the most part.
After speaking to a lawyer I was released a couple hours later since they were nearing the 24 hour limit of holding me without charge, I would point out they told me all day they were waiting for paperwork to release me which is total bullshit. Coincidentally everyones paperwork arrives nearly 24 hours after they were arrested, bullshit. When I left I was pleasantly surprised by a waiting group of protesters whom cheered and gave me some proper food. The food in the torture center was a piece of processed cheese on a bun, nothing else, no nutrition at all.
My friend was also arrested and was placed in a holding cell with 40 people zip tied for 24 hours, with a 15 year old kid. I haven't had a chance to talk to him much to get his story but he said he is going to write it up so I will share that as well.
Unquote.
Saturday, 26 June 2010
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Non Confidence - V's at Parliament Hill, Ottawa
Tigana Too, protest artist extraordinaire, designed this apt and poignant poster.
Monday, 7 June 2010
Does the Internet Make You Smarter?
Excellent article about people like you and me.
* The Wall Street Journal
* THE SATURDAY ESSAY
* JUNE 4, 2010
Does the Internet Make You Smarter?
By CLAY SHIRKY
Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media.
Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.
1.8 billion Estimated number of Internet users world-wide
But of course, that's what always happens. Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.
As Gutenberg's press spread through Europe, the Bible was translated into local languages, enabling direct encounters with the text; this was accompanied by a flood of contemporary literature, most of it mediocre. Vulgar versions of the Bible and distracting secular writings fueled religious unrest and civic confusion, leading to claims that the printing press, if not controlled, would lead to chaos and the dismemberment of European intellectual life.
Journal Community
These claims were, of course, correct. Print fueled the Protestant Reformation, which did indeed destroy the Church's pan-European hold on intellectual life. What the 16th-century foes of print didn't imagine—couldn't imagine—was what followed: We built new norms around newly abundant and contemporary literature. Novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of these innovations were created during the collapse of the scribal system, and all had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range and output of society.
To take a famous example, the essential insight of the scientific revolution was peer review, the idea that science was a collaborative effort that included the feedback and participation of others. Peer review was a cultural institution that took the printing press for granted as a means of distributing research quickly and widely, but added the kind of cultural constraints that made it valuable.
We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.
Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources.
34.5 hours Time an average American spends watching television per week
Similarly, open source software, created without managerial control of the workers or ownership of the product, has been critical to the spread of the Web. Searches for everything from supernovae to prime numbers now happen as giant, distributed efforts. Ushahidi, the Kenyan crisis mapping tool invented in 2008, now aggregates citizen reports about crises the world over. PatientsLikeMe, a website designed to accelerate medical research by getting patients to publicly share their health information, has assembled a larger group of sufferers of Lou Gehrig's disease than any pharmaceutical agency in history, by appealing to the shared sense of seeking medical progress.
Of course, not everything people care about is a high-minded project. Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly. Today we have The World's Funniest Home Videos running 24/7 on YouTube, while the potentially world-changing uses of cognitive surplus are still early and special cases.
That always happens too. In the history of print, we got erotic novels 100 years before we got scientific journals, and complaints about distraction have been rampant; no less a beneficiary of the printing press than Martin Luther complained, "The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing." Edgar Allan Poe, writing during another surge in publishing, concluded, "The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information."
The response to distraction, then as now, was social structure. Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.
The cognitive effects are measurable: We're turning into shallow thinkers, says Nicholas Carr.
The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we'll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet's abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.
First, the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching "Diff'rent Strokes" than reading Proust, prior to the Internet's spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.
The present is, as noted, characterized by lots of throwaway cultural artifacts, but the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away. This issue isn't whether there's lots of dumb stuff online—there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.
The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.
It is tempting to want PatientsLikeMe without the dumb videos, just as we might want scientific journals without the erotic novels, but that's not how media works. Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.
—Clay Shirky's latest book is "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age."
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
* The Wall Street Journal
* THE SATURDAY ESSAY
* JUNE 4, 2010
Does the Internet Make You Smarter?
By CLAY SHIRKY
Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media.
Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.
1.8 billion Estimated number of Internet users world-wide
But of course, that's what always happens. Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.
As Gutenberg's press spread through Europe, the Bible was translated into local languages, enabling direct encounters with the text; this was accompanied by a flood of contemporary literature, most of it mediocre. Vulgar versions of the Bible and distracting secular writings fueled religious unrest and civic confusion, leading to claims that the printing press, if not controlled, would lead to chaos and the dismemberment of European intellectual life.
Journal Community
These claims were, of course, correct. Print fueled the Protestant Reformation, which did indeed destroy the Church's pan-European hold on intellectual life. What the 16th-century foes of print didn't imagine—couldn't imagine—was what followed: We built new norms around newly abundant and contemporary literature. Novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of these innovations were created during the collapse of the scribal system, and all had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range and output of society.
To take a famous example, the essential insight of the scientific revolution was peer review, the idea that science was a collaborative effort that included the feedback and participation of others. Peer review was a cultural institution that took the printing press for granted as a means of distributing research quickly and widely, but added the kind of cultural constraints that made it valuable.
We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.
Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources.
34.5 hours Time an average American spends watching television per week
Similarly, open source software, created without managerial control of the workers or ownership of the product, has been critical to the spread of the Web. Searches for everything from supernovae to prime numbers now happen as giant, distributed efforts. Ushahidi, the Kenyan crisis mapping tool invented in 2008, now aggregates citizen reports about crises the world over. PatientsLikeMe, a website designed to accelerate medical research by getting patients to publicly share their health information, has assembled a larger group of sufferers of Lou Gehrig's disease than any pharmaceutical agency in history, by appealing to the shared sense of seeking medical progress.
Of course, not everything people care about is a high-minded project. Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly. Today we have The World's Funniest Home Videos running 24/7 on YouTube, while the potentially world-changing uses of cognitive surplus are still early and special cases.
That always happens too. In the history of print, we got erotic novels 100 years before we got scientific journals, and complaints about distraction have been rampant; no less a beneficiary of the printing press than Martin Luther complained, "The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing." Edgar Allan Poe, writing during another surge in publishing, concluded, "The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information."
The response to distraction, then as now, was social structure. Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.
The cognitive effects are measurable: We're turning into shallow thinkers, says Nicholas Carr.
The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we'll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet's abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.
First, the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching "Diff'rent Strokes" than reading Proust, prior to the Internet's spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.
The present is, as noted, characterized by lots of throwaway cultural artifacts, but the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away. This issue isn't whether there's lots of dumb stuff online—there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.
The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.
It is tempting to want PatientsLikeMe without the dumb videos, just as we might want scientific journals without the erotic novels, but that's not how media works. Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.
—Clay Shirky's latest book is "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age."
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Friday, 4 June 2010
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The Ancient Hippie
Natraj dances with us all.