You Can't Make Mistakes

Hi guys,

I just wanted to let our families and close friends know that we are alright in case you had caught the news and were worried about us.

There were widespread protest demonstrations in Cairo yesterday and in about 10 other cities as well. They have continued tonight, but on a smaller scale. There was a good deal of violence at one point late in the evening yesterday when the police finally decided to clear out the occupied areas. Tear-gas, water cannons and rubber bullets were all used. There were no live rounds fired. There have been several deaths and in Cairo about 250 people were injured and are now hospitalized. This could well be the beginning of something huge here, not unlike what happened in Tunisia. There are reports of rumors coming in that the son of the President (and his perceived successor) has left the country and is presently in London. It is rumored that the First Lady has also left. These reports have been vehemently denied by the American Embassy and should probably be considered unlikely to have actually occurred.

It will be interesting to watch how the situation progresses, but it will be unlikely to cause any problems for us. This seems so far to be a primarily secular popular revolt instead of one lead by the Muslim Brotherhood or other politico-religious groups. It is unclear where exactly the organization is coming from though. The protesters are regular, working-class people seeking governmental reform and measures to relieve the grinding poverty that Egypt is experiencing.

Social media sites and some news sites are being blocked variously throughout the country. Twitter confirmed earlier that they were in fact blocked yesterday. People are using external proxies in order to circumvent the internet blockades and communicate with each other. This will likely lead to stronger measures undertaken to control the flow of information both to news outlets and to those involved in the demonstrations. There are rumors that mobile phone service is being cut off for known activists. There were reports last evening that mobile services were cut off in Tahrir Square in central Cairo.

We are quite safe at present in Maadi (a southern suburb/district of Cairo). The part of the city we live in is far from the action, and the likelihood of anything happening in this particular suburb/district is low considering that it is inhabited primarily by wealthier folks and expatriates. Regardless, we’re keeping our eyes and ears open and making only leaving the house when absolutely necessary. Some of our more foolhardy friends are headed downtown regularly to scope out what is happening. They are brave, but perhaps a little foolish. It is understandable though. This is an exciting time here.

I am paying pretty close attention to what is happening and I will keep all of you informed in the case that the situation changes, possibly necessitating our evacuation. In that extremely unlikely scenario, our plan is to catch whatever flight is available to somewhere in Europe and then regroup and figure out what to do next. We will be extremely grateful to our friends in the EU if they will be willing to take in refugees at such a time as it becomes a necessity.

A DISCLAIMER: None of the information contained in this letter is original research or journalism. All of this has been gleaned from online news sources over the last two days. This is a letter to friends and family who are concerned about my safety and the safety of my friends in Cairo. I have been told that the international news reports on the situation here are confusing and convoluted. This digest is meant to clarify the situation for my loved ones back home. Please do not regard this as some sort of news report, which it is not.

Love, JM

“Let us call ourselves radicals, let us pick up the mantle of the great Progressives, let us be petit-bourgeois anarchists, but please let us not be “liberals” any longer, who have confirmed themselves as callow wankers who cringe and waffle if only the bullies will leave them alone.”

- Michael Fountain, science-fiction author and teacher

My dear friend Mike Fountain wrote the above this morning. I found it quite moving. You can read the rest of the post here: http://michaelfountain.blogspot.com/2010/09/democrats-deserve-to-lose.html.

Please check out the new satire in the May edition of Intuition:

Disrael: A new solution to an old problem brings hope

Daemons: Tech-wars against evil in the intertoobs ramp up

Also, if anyone out there would like chance to write satire for Intuition, please contact me for further details.

Enjoy.

The February issue of Intuition is out and I have two new articles in it.

Satire: What it is and how to write it

A meeting of minds

“A series of pipes.”

My dad has been hosting his origami site at Geocities for the past several years. I spoke to him yesterday about acquiring a domain name and self hosting the site as Geocities—presently owned and operated by Yahoo—will close its electronic doors very soon. He will move from there to a self-hosted site with its own independent address, which is inherently better because of greater control over the back-end of things. He rightly said that this was a good thing anyway, because this is how we keep these things—websites, the Internet—alive. This started me thinking about the Internet and how different a place it is from when I first started using it over a decade ago.

Thinking about Geocities in particular made me a bit reminiscent about all of the one-off, special interest sites that sprang up in the late 1990s. Usenet aside, you could find almost any information—be it quality or not—in single column pages with colored text and often over a bright—sometimes obnoxious—background. In those days, the big Internet companies had sites that were complex, multi-column affairs with boxes and ads, but the real Internet was the domain of the people writing whatever they wanted in center-aligned pages.

It was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist. Or really into Wicca.

Searching the Internet in the 90s was fantastic and weird. Democracy at its finest. All things change with time, some for worse some for better. There are reasonable arguments in either direction for the changes evident in the Internet over the last decade and a half. For some applications, the Internet has made life easier, obviously. Communication is fantastic. I live in Egypt and communicate with friends readily all over the world in an inexpensive and effective way. This is due to greater ubiquity of broadband Internet coverage in Egypt and elsewhere.

Websites have also become easier to create and maintain. I use WordPress to generate this site and have been for several years. The first version of the site, however, was written in PHP by yours truly. It was an exercise in basics which has made working with and customizing WordPress much easier for me in subsequent years. That said, it is really easy now to have a site that looks more or less professional, and everyone does. The downside is that now everything on the Internet seems to be a blog and sites grow stagnant as soon as the writer gets a book deal—which seems inevitable for many upstart bloggers these days.

The information which used to be so readily available on the Internet is now relegated to the All Thing¹ of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great tool as a first-reference: it democratizes basic reference, particularly for those who already have experience with traditional encyclopedias. It also contains vastly more information on a much wider variety of topics than do traditional encyclopedias. That said, it is still only a first reference, and the “peer-review” to which the information is subjected to is conducted by experts and non-experts alike.

My brother and I grew up with a set—two actually—of encyclopedia in the house. It was a great first- or quick-reference for almost anything that we wondered about or were writing about for school. As I got older and learned more about doing research, the references and bibliography proved perfect guides to more and deeper information on a given topic. That was how it was done.

The Internet changed all that. I cannot count the times that I heard college professors tell students that they had to use books and journal articles rather than online references. I was always confused. Did college students really not know how to use a library? It turns out that, no, they did—and do—not. Library usage seems to be, more and more, a thing of the past. The library at my present University is not expanding its collection very rapidly because they are exploring electronic alternatives—none of which work very well.

We used to go to the library with my mom almost every weekend. We had library cards by the time we were six or seven years old. I was—and am still—an avid reader because of this level of access to books. I am like a ship without a rudder—or more aptly, a ship without water—when I have no access to a library. This is not to say that I do not now primarily access academic journals via the Internet while conducting research. I do. It is easier, and saves me the time of sifting through stacks of journals in the basement in order to photocopy endless pages from them. This is an improvement.

Additionally, Google Books and the Internet Archive are becoming ever more useful resources for finding out-of-print and public-domain works written before the current copyright cutoff. They do not, however, replace the public or research library. Instances of false information being reported elsewhere in the media based on a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source are a good argument for returning to more rigorous forms of research on the part of journalists and academics alike.

Also, the above-mentioned one-off specialist sites seem to be going by the wayside as the Internet evolves into an archive of photoshopped pictures of cats and funny/stupid things. It used to be the case that the top of the search engine output would be a number of websites with a vast amount of—potentially questionable—data on almost any topic.

Now, on the other hand, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for almost anything that you can search for. That is unless you are accustomed to advance searching and particularly adept at using keywords. Most of the students who I help at the reference desk are not. They typically begin their research by going to Google and typing their topic or a full sentence (e.g. – “Mongolia” or “why is there domestic violence in the middle east?.” These are two recent examples of searches which students were having trouble with). To get to much of the real information that is available on the Internet these days you have to sift through hundreds of entries in blogs or advertisements. Monetizing the Internet proves to be primarily a tool for obfuscating it rather than improving user-as-content-generator experience.

This is one of the primary reasons that I am an advocate of net-neutrality and online rights—including, but not limited to, file-sharing, digitized books, and un-filtered/un-traffic-shaped Internet service, not to mention open-source/open-licensing. The Internet has the potential to be a tool for posterity, and indeed it is already serving us in this manner to some degree. It has the potential to be so much more. The moment that corporate interests became more important than the needs of Internet users, the system broke. It will limp though, but it will not recover fully and become the repository of information that it should be until corporate money-making interests are set aside.

This will not happen anytime soon, and indeed, Yahoo’s decision to discontinue Geocities in order to promote their new web-hosting platform—which is pay to play—is a step in the wrong direction. The Internet is not about closing things down in order that they might not be in conflict with business interests: it is about information being freely and readily available the world over and even beyond. This used to be a purpose of libraries as well.

It seems, however, that we have lost sight of this, lulled into contented complacence by cute pictures of talking cats and repositories of awkward family photos. This does not bode well at all. It will eventually change, though. Economies and finance online are not, and never have been stable. The one thing that is stable at this stage is the ability of one computer to connect to another. As long as we have that, when the corporate hegemony Internet collapses, we will simply start over, one node at a time.

Until then, if anyone needs me I’ll be reading online comics and looking at pictures of sandwiches.

———
¹ A reference to the progeny of the blogosphere presented in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Endymion.

Here’s to your inevitable political downfall!

I read this article about the respective public spectacles over Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin and it got me thinking about the spectacle that became Sarah Palin last autumn during the American presidential elections and her present attention-grabbing efforts. Her untimely resignation from the Alaska gubernatorial seat should be another nail in her political coffin, but apparently she is up in the polls with republicans. This does nothing to inspire confidence in her ability to lead—particularly considering that she has just stepped out of such a position in a fit of overly-self-confident irresponsibility. The GOP has backed some horrifying failures of late and continues in its ability to conflate “conservatism” with bigotry and fiscal liberality.

Perhaps this is the strangled choking death rattle of the GOP at last.

Somehow I doubt it, but it would be nice to think so.

This maneuver on Palin’s part is little more than her present attempt to get herself back in the spotlight of national political fame—and scrutiny. It turns out that the old marketing folk-wisdom approach—that both praise and criticism have equal value, as long as they turn heads—works as a strategy for political advancement in the United States now. Last autumn, Palin was roasted over and over again by critics, political rivals and comedians. Rather than taking any criticism seriously—and, though dismissive, it was serious—she soldiered on bravely, in the eyes of her supporters. The rest of thought that she did so foolishly. I often felt pity for her. She was placed in the public eye by the GOP essentially unprepared and then made a spectacle of. At the time, it seemed as though this was something that was being inflicted upon her. Now, however, her spectacular displays of incompetence and lack of judgment have proven to be self-motivated.

It is unfortunate for conservatives, particularly for women, to have to even give any thought to this rambling, silly woman as a viable candidate for anything, let alone the Presidency. It is also remarkable that the conservatives who support her, just as they supported President Bush, seem to do so uncritically, praising when she says something they agree with, ignoring the malapropisms and blaming her critics for their “meanness.” I say that it is remarkable because it demonstrates precisely the way that the American political machine has come to operate. Substance and form no longer matter, having been replaced by sentimentality and dogged devotion—probably driven by a desire not to be seen as backing a failure, fool, or asshole.

Perhaps this does represent the death rattle of the GOP after all. The Republicans would do well to leave some of their failures and garbage along the side of the road. If they don’t, they are likely looking at a series of very disappointing years before they figure out a way to turn the apathy and indecision of the Democrats against them again. So, here is to you Sarah, may you be taken out with the rest of the political celebrity trash. God help you until then. You’re going to need it.

Update:
10. July 2009 14:48

In case you needed another argument why we should let her go quietly into the night: here it is.

Nothing gets in or out.

I had to go to the American Embassy in Cairo this morning. My passport still has five years left before it expires, but all of my visa pages have been used up. This is not necessarily from traveling a lot—traveling between EU countries now requires no passport control—but from living long-term in a country that has very arbitrary and haphazard immigration and border control. My passport is chock full of Egyptian visas.

Here is how it works: you can get a temporary—tourist—visa to enter the country from your local Egyptian consulate or embassy. Or, you pay the visa fee and get the stamp when you enter the country at the airport. Either way, this takes one page of your passport. Upon landing, you get an arrival stamp (one-quarter of a page). If you leave and come back you get an exit stamp and another incoming stamp (half page). If you apply for a resident visa through a sponsor, such as the university, you will use up another page.

If you apply for a long-term tourist visa—which is what most people do whether they are working/attending university here or not—this takes yet another page. From the last calendar year, I have four tourist visas (4 pages), one multi-entry endorsement (1/2 page), two full-time student/resident visas (2 pages), and about six exit/entry stamps (1 1/2 pages). That is a total of nine out of the sixteen-odd visa pages in my passport gone. My most recent resident visa has expired and I have two weeks to get a tourist visa for the summer in order to fill the gap before the University will sponsor me for another visa. The Mogamma will not place another visa in my passport becasue I am out of pages.

It was time to have pages added to the ol’ passport. So, I checked the embassy hours online: 8am until 11am, every Sunday through Thursday except for holidays and the last Tuesday of every month.

Confused yet? Just hang on.

So, this morning, I dragged myself out of bed and staggered downstairs to catch a cab downtown. I arrived near the embassy and walked, looking for the entrance. The American Embassy in Cairo appears to be a tribute to the concrete fortress-style architecture of the American 1970s. Here is a picture, which I do not own the rights to, but gets the point across. I would have taken my own picture but likely this would have ended in my being arrested and beaten. What you will not see in that picture is the 5 meter high wall that surrounds the triangular tower in the middle of an triangular city block. I didn’t know which of the three streets the main entrance was on, so I just picked a side and started walking.

It was the wrong side.

There are three or four doors in the two-kilometer long embassy wall, labeled cryptically. I just kept walking and walking and finally asked one of the many Egyptian National Security guys standing outside the walls where the entrance was. He gave me directions. By this point I am already worried that I will not have enough time to get inside, wait in line and submit my paperwork. I am also a little put off by how—not—inviting the embassy building itself is.

A few weeks prior to this, I was invited by one of the committee members at the BCA to the Queen’s Birthday Party at the British Embassy. It was a giant cocktail party for the Queen. Bagpipes, drinks, food, ice-cream, hundreds and hundreds of diplomats. It was pretty cool. The party was held in the garden at the embassy residence: a very lovely, very comfortable setting. Grand British architectural style, but quite modern. Apparently, before the construction of the Nile Corniche road, the garden had extended all the way to the river. Lovely. The American Embassy is the opposite of this. While the British seemed to say, “Come in. Have a drink,” the Americans seemed to be saying, “Please leave now, or we might beat you.”

I finally found the entrance and a man pointed me to the left door as he was pointing couples of people to the door on the right. I noticed an AUC professor who I often see in the library in the line ahead of me. Once inside the security chamber—for lack of a better term—I was relieved of my mobile phone and my identification. I had been warned about this by a friend who had told me to take a book, but nothing electronic. After reassembling my person, I was told that to get to the American Citizen Services section I would need to go right then right again, left, up the stairs outside, through the doors, right, then down the stairs inside and then left. There were no signs. I noticed the visa section for Egyptians trying to get entry visas on my left before the stairs and the doors and things. It was outside. At 10am the temperature was already 30C (86F). No better way to say “please come to our country” than “please sit in this horrifyingly hot place and wait forever for the privilege.”

Even once inside, the place screamed “Go away! You do not belong here!” The ceiling was 50 meters above and there were rows of identical windows. The room was triangular. I was standing below ground in the center of the triangular tower. I took a number from a machine, which was tiny, unlabeled and on a shelf practically at eye-level so that you would have to search the entire high-ceilinged chamber before finding it. Then I waited. There were 30 people ahead of me. This took the better part of the hour.

Once my number was called, the rest was relatively painless. I submitted my passport and application and was then instructed to take a blue form to the cashier, even though there is no charge for additional pages being added to a passport. I was told that I needed to get a “no-charge” receipt from the cashier. I rolled my eyes. The woman on the other side of the bullet-proof glass did not blink and pointed in the direction of the cashier.

And that was it. I was told to come back the next morning and my passport would be ready. Relatively painless. I just wonder what goes on inside the embassy that requires that level of fortress-like security and obfuscation. We—Americans—really are crazed when it comes to security theater. We just can’t get enough. So, tomorrow morning I will get up and repeat the process before work, or just wait until Wednesday when I can go to the Mogamma as well—an experience which I will also write about, I’m sure.

Liberation Theology for the 21st Century

I caught this article from the Christian Science monitor this morning on the trepidation of Arab states over reacting to the current situation in Iran. They cited the “voice of a disenfranchised [Iranian] people” as the mechanism for the current political and social unrest and that this is the biggest political crisis facing Iran since the 1979 revolution.*

I have been reading a great deal of late about the 1979 Iranian revolution and have begun to understand that the socially and economically disenfranchised in 1970s Iran were not actually active participants in the revolution, nor did they derive any particular benefit from it. Neither the poor nor the merchant class were particularly involved in the rise of the Khomeini movement. It was a revolution apparently driven by an increasingly religiously motivated middle-class and the urban intellectual class which drove the development of an opposition to the Shah. That there was little involvement on the part of the rural poor is quite surprising considering that the themes employed in the revolutionary rhetoric on the part of Khomeini and his supporters was seemingly socialism wrapped up in Islamic topoi or terminology.

In other words, the revolutionaries of 1970s Iran employed a specifically crafted rhetorical framework based on sort of liberation theology in order to galvanize certain parts of the population and pulled support from the most unlikely sectors of Iranian society, all the while setting the stage for continuing the disenfranchisement of the already disenfranchised. Many of the secular intellectual socialists and Marxists went up against the wall when Khomeini’s revolutionaries seized control, many succumbed to the pressure being exerted around them and conformed to the newly political and religiously-mapped social environment around them.

It would seem that all of the seeds of disenfranchisement sewn by the 1979 revolution are now coming to fruition. The intellectual class is no longer happy to be subjugated, the poor are fighting back, not in line with the religious elite who are waiving the liberation-theology around—still, and again—but against them. In 1979 it was that same—then very young—urban middle class who were becoming more religious who built the revolutionary movement. They made Kohmeini into a a figurehead, and he tacitly accepted the role allowing them to drive the revolution forward.

The funny—or maybe “horrifying” is a better word—thing about revolutions, and revolutionaries, is that they cease to function as a revolution the moment they are no longer the opposition. That is unless there is a political mechanism established at the same time for limiting the authority of the revolutionary leaders. This was never the case in Iran. Indeed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had to die before his position as the leader of the revolution—and therefore the Iranian government after the revolution—would be questioned. After his death he was replaced by another revolutionary leader who had become entrenched in the “new” political system in Iran in the 1980s.

Now that “revolution” is being called into question, mostly because it is no longer a revolution. Just as Castro’s revolution lost its meaning the moment that he took power in Cuba and Che Guevarra—the real revolutionary—went on his way, as is the preferred role of the true revolutionary. How to ensure then that the revolutionaries live up to the ideals of the revolution and not their own desires for power? How to keep the bitterness of their previous disenfranchisement from their policy and administration and marginalizing those that they once sought to free from disenfranchisement?

I am loathe to cite the American political system as a standard for post-revolutionary political development—and indeed it has its problems, not least of which is the unabashed power-squabbles of our present party-system—but it worked. When the first Americans called for the revolutionary leaders to retain their power, they stepped aside and had an election. The established a set of rules, the interpretation of which has changed over time, but which are still the rules, nonetheless. Those rules, for better or for worse, continue to keep the political system as fair as we can make it. There is still power-grabbing.

There is still lying, cheating, and stealing. Indeed, more than a few of us have been concerned that the administrative regime of President Bush and his cronies would have a deep effect on the way business was done after they left office. It seems, though, that this is not the case. We shall see, but it seems that we are moving back to normal after years of opacity and circumvention of the Constitution to protect the interests of the few at all possible costs.

Perhaps another revolution in Iran is what is called for. Perhaps not. Perhaps the present regime is learning something from the political strife that is now boiling throughout Iran. Likely not. If there is another revolution, it cannot continue as normal. It has to live up to the ideals which galvanize and excite it in the first place rather than simply serving the interests of those who do the exciting.

Khomeini’s liberation theology still applies in Iran, possibly now more than it did before. The present regime had better hope that the people never get their hands on copies of his book, Islamic Government as they would find themselves out the door in very short order. The principles which are outlined therein are a far sight more fair and reasonable than those under which the present regime operates.

For more information about the Iranian political system and the 1979 revolution, I suggest the following:

• Islam and Revolution: Writing and Declarations of Imam Khomeini by Hamid Algar.
• Khomenism: Essays on the Islamic Republic by Evrand Abrahamian.
• The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran by Said Amir Ajromand.
• Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Or for the more visually inclined, the film version.

———

* In solidarity with that voice, the background of this blog is now a picture of Naqsh-e Jahan Square in breathtaking Isfahan.

God Damned Right It’s Time

Well, if you haven’t voted already, since there seemed to be a great trend toward voting early or absentee—likely because Americans are leaving the United States like rats from a burning ship: it’s time.

The Economist finally published their endorsement for a U.S. Presidential candidate this week. I will let you guess who they chose. Or, you can read it for yourself.

I have to say that, in all honesty, I was thrilled to read it. I think that they made the right decision, so now maybe you all can make the right decision. Jeff and I voted via absentee write-in ballots, which don’t even get counted unless there is some electoral problem—which wouldn’t shock me in the least. So, if you haven’t planned on voting, or if you feel like you are too busy, or some other thing: please go and cast your vote for Barack Obama on our behalf. If you can’t vote for Obama, then Bob Barr is a good second choice.

Anyway, those are my two cents on the matter. I don’t have a whole lot of words for you right now as most of my words are being given to my papers and coursework. But I will say that I would greatly appreciate if you went and did your part and set the ball in motion for the United States to right itself a little bit. I’ll thank God one way or another when this is over, but I hope that it is thanks that I will be able to come back to the United States someday because it is the place that I remember, rather than having to stay away from it because increasingly resembles places that I would never want to go.

Thank you.

Yah, I couldn’t believe it either.

I read this article this morning in which it is reported that former Bush administration crony Karl Rove indicates that he believes the current presidential candidates go too far in their negative ads.

I had to sniff my coffee to make sure that I hadn’t accidentally make myself a steaming cup of moonshine this morning.

Karl Rove taking a moral stand? The lack of morals exhibited by Mr. Rove during his time as a simpering toady for President Bush indicate the following possibilities:

1. Mr. Rove is in fact an android and never had the “Morals” switch flipped, so is therefore unable to exhibit moral behavior.
2. Mr. Rove suffered an accident as a child in which he had to choose between selling his soul to the devil or watching a loved one die. He watched the loved one die and then ate their soul before the devil could get to it. All the while he thumbed his nose at that dull-witted, not-too-quick-on-the-evil-draw devil.
3. Karl Rove is from another planet where the very human-like inhabitants have no use for morals because when one of them dies they are just replaced by an identical avatar which grows up out of the liquefied remains of their corpse.

In any of those cases, it must also be the case that now, Mr.—too-little-too-late—Rove is attempting to appear more human by criticizing others for being rotten bastards to one another.

The effect is unsettling. Now where is that moonshine…