Archiv der Kategorie: oddly enough

Iraq, oddly enough, USA

The Most Disgusting Porn Spam Ever

I just received the most disgusting spam mail I ever saw. It read

“Iraqi Whores. People attacked in their homes and savagely raped at gunpoint. Footage smuggled out of Iraq by the troops who did it. Sexually deviant soldiers run wild. CNN would not play that footage.”

In all likelihood, this never happened. CNN would not play the tape, but they would certainly grill anyone who tried to cover that up. Certainly this is an advantage of embedding journalists with military units. If there had been embedded journalists in Eastern Europe in 1945, the Red Army’s soldiers would in all likelihood not have gang-raped two million women.

So if people invest money to shoot a film in which actors disguised as soldiers rape actresses disguised as Iraqi civilians there must be a) demand for this kind of material and they must b) have decided that the dollars they will earn are sufficient to bribe their conscience.

I am all for capitalism. And I have no ideological problems with pornography. But this is just disgusting.

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Iraq, oddly enough

And The Winner Could Be…

George W. Bush and Tony Blair – that is, if the Nobel Peace Price committee actually follows the advice of

“Jan Simonsen, formerly from the Progress Party, (now an independent MP), [who] have proposed George W. Bush and Tony Blair as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize, following the successful war on Iraq”

as Bjorn Staerk tells us today. While he realizes that giving the two politicians the price would infringe its fundamental idea, he argues that this has become a practice in recent years anyway – just why did Jimmy Carter in 2002? And he continues –

“[s]o, why not use it to send a different signal alltogether? Why not use it to send the signal that the efforts Bush and Blair have made – against the high-pitched protests of the ‘world’ – were appreciated by at least some of us? Why not balance the usual message that talk solves everything with the often proved idea that force is a good second resort?”

Well, I would say that being appreciated by some implies that their policy has been rejected by many, which is usually not the way to win a world-wide competition. But Bjorn’s second argument is quite interesting, in my opinion. In general as well as, I think, in the case at hand.

Making peace sometimes does require violence. Even the staunchest opponents of last months war in Iraq accepted that – so yes, why not award a Nobel Peace Prce to someone who employed violence for the greater good of mankind? I have no objections to this in general. In fact, could such a case be made one day, I would happily support it. Why not give it to the international troops that forcefully ensure peace around Kabul, help the Afghan government trying to negotiate with the warlords out in the country and thus aid in ending a decade old civil war?

But as far as Iraq is concerned I am not at all with Bjorn. Certainly not for the time being. Should the project of a “Middle Eastern Pax Americana” turn out to foster modernizsation instead of ethnic conflict and religious fundamentalism in the region – and, yes, to a certain extent this also applies to the fundamentalist factions of the Israeli society – I would be willing to give the credit to those who pursued it, even though they had to trick their own people by exaggerating the risk posed by a specific regime, and even though they had been closely affiliated to private enterprises that benefit significantly from the military action they pursued.

But let’s face it: It is far too early to tell. Maybe in 15 years we will be able to tell if this war was not just one useful in geo-strategic terms, but also one worthy of a Nobel Peace Price.

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oddly enough

I-loo.com

I rarely just quote things. But this time, there is really nothing to add to this item from the Guardian’s Informer newsletter…

“It’s not a joke,” a Microsoft spokesperson assured AFP. But it certainly sounds like one. According to Voila.fr [link in French], the software giant is launching the I-Loo – a portable toilet with an adjustable plasma screen, a wireless keyboard and an internet connection. It will, the site says, consign the piles of newspapers traditionally found in the corners of bathrooms to the bin.

“The internet is so much a part of everyday life that offering people the chance to surf in toilets is a natural step,” a marketing director told AFP. “It’s fascinating to think that the smallest room could be an way in to the enormous virtual world.”

Outdoor summer festivals such as Glastonbury will probably be the testing grounds for the invention. Whether the queues outside the notoriously smelly Portaloos will grow any longer remains to be seen.

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oddly enough, USA

Of course, No One Will Have To Burn Books…

when suppoedly indecent material cannot even be sold at first place. Today, the NYTimes reports that Wal-Mart is banning 3 men’s magazines (Maxim, FHM, and Stuff, of which I have never heard) because of the allegedly offensive nature of their cover designs.

According to the NYTimes

“[t]he decision to stop selling the so-called lads’ magazines is the latest in a series of moves by the company to limit distribution of entertainment products it judges too racy for its shoppers.The company has refused to sell CD’s that carry warning labels about explicit lyrics; instead, Wal-Mart Stores sell sanitized versions of albums.”

So this is what “lad’s magazines” might look on Wal*Mart shelves in the future should they too decide to honor Wal*Mart’s decision and market power with a special edition –

FHM cover, 'Wal*Mart edition'

Of course, Wal*Mart Stores, Inc., is a private entity and therefore, technically, no legal constitutional issues are at stake in instances like these. But that does not make things easier at all, as Nadine Strossen, a professor of constitutional law at New York Law School and the president of the American Civil Liberties Union explaines to the NYTimes –

“[w]hen you have a store that in many parts of the country has a dominant position, so that if you can’t buy a magazine at Wal-Mart, you can’t buy it at all … [i]t has literally the same practical effect in many communities as outright government censorship.”

If that were indeed the case, then the sheer market power of retail gatekeepers like Wal*Mart may make it necessary to rebalance their – and their shareholders’ – discretion with respect to other people’s ability to exercise their rights –

“[t]he Timothy Plan, a mutual funds management firm that invests in companies based in part on whether the companies share its values, has been pressing Wal-Mart to pull women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour from checkout lanes and put them back into the magazine rack. Arthur Ally, president of the Timothy Plan, said that he saw magazines like Maxim and FHM as ‘a level worse. It is soft-core pornography,’ he said. ‘It’s very addictive and leads to harder stuff.'”

Speech can only be free if it can be heard. And “censorship”, legal and/or de-facto always starts by prohibiting something not too many people won’t object to. The shifting of acceptance boundaries is what makes this process so dangerous.

But Wal-Mart’s decision may not prove to become a cultural disaster. Maybe, their decision will even foster digital literacy in those regions where the retailler does indeed possess the power to prevent people from buying the magazine of their choice.

For in the internet, there will always be a free shelf.

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German Politics, oddly enough, quicklink

I’m frightened.

Fair enough, all this is probably even more speculative than the much debated question how long the US will stay in Iraq. Now that a lot of people believe that Joschka Fischer will go to Brussels next year to become the first ‘European Foreign Minister’ once the Constitution will be ratified, the establishment of his party is already vulturing for his current job.

According to SPIEGEL ONLINE, even the current Minister for environmental affairs, Juergen Trittin, is interested in the top-job in the German foreign ministery. Even though his most notable foray into foreign affairs was rather successful (he managed to get the Kyoto treaty through against W’s opposition), I cannot possibly imagine “Juergen-can-deposit-Trittin” as Germany’s top ambassador. No way. Never.

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oddly enough, US Politics

Who likes Iceman?

This time Maureen Dowd got it wrong. W’s campaign video shooting on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln just off the Californian cost may be provoking comparisons to ‘Maverick’, the protagonist of Don Simpson’s and Jerry Bruckheimer’s 1985 hit-film TopGun – but it’s dead wrong.

‘Maverick’ is a good cowboy, not a bad one. He’s the bearer of the good America of my youth. He’s the mustang that roams and runs wild in Marlboro country. He’s disregarding the rules until he learns that, sometimes, they do make sense. He loses a friend, then faith, he lives at the edge of despair, but he grows and returns as a wiser man. And, hey, he gets the girl.

We may be not be flying F-14s on a daily basis, but I am pretty sure most of us aspire to be some kind of ‘Maverick’, ‘the best of the best’, in whatever we do.

The screenplay for TopGun II, ‘the Washinton connection’, that Maureen Dowd is proposing today, would not survive any producer’s scrutiny for more than five minutes. No one would want to see a film in which the dull and rational Iceman would become the bearer of truth. Of course, W’s PR people know that, and that’s why they made him play ‘Maverick’.

But he’s not. Or, let’s say – should W indeed be Maverick, we would be only 20 minutes into the film. And I am pretty sure that Ms Dowd is not favoring another seventy minutes of a W presidency, including the question which horrible incident would make W lose faith and self confidence.

Let’s just hope we’ll never know who would have to play ‘Goose’ in the sequel…

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Iraq, oddly enough, quicklink, US Politics

Saddam Hussein, MBA.

This is good. Condoleeza Rice has presented a new rationale for the current lack of Iraqi WMDs – while admitting that

“Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program is less clear-cut, and probably more difficult to establish, than the White House portrayed before the war”,

she readily explained why that should have been expected anyway – Saddam knew about “Just-In- Time” manufacturing – “Just-in-time assembly” and “just-in-time inventory”. Now really. But speaking of management buzzwords, I guess one could make a real case for Saddam excelling in “global sourcing”… (from the Autralian f2-netowork via Tom Tomorrow).

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