Kony 2012

I thought I would make a post about Kony 2012, considering that it is all over the internet anyway. First I should point out that I have not seen the movie. The reason for this is that I feel no need to watch a documentary about child abuse. I have read a bit on the subject, however, and I thought I would provide you readers with some extra perspectives on this documentary. Mainly because when we are done discussing how important it is to assist children in need, we should consider what ruthless powers might exploit such good will. If that was the last thing on your mind, then you are indeed setting yourself up for quite a lot of surprises as we approach the end of fossil fuels.

According to this article Uganda recently proclaimed itself as en route to becoming an oil producer, with commercial production having begun in 2009. If this does not make any bells ring, we should just leave the subject there. If it does, however, then we should explore what kind of message the movie is attempting to send.

If you believe the following interview to be anything remotely related to the state of these affairs, then perhaps there is more to this motivational documentary than meets the eye. I would argue against being a conspiracy theorist, but I'll just let the words military intervention linger here.

Next up is this personal point brought up by a young woman claiming to be from Uganda herself with relatively regular visits. While she obviuosly has not studied this matter intently, I do think it might be interesting to note that if she is speaking the truth, then Kony is indeed not the subject of daily discussions in the homes of Uganda.

UPDATE: I also stumbled across this article which certainly lays into this documentary in a very rough way. I thought I should provide it in case you like the more theory-based approaches.

Iran

Currently government officials from major power holders have been meeting in Israel to debate the future of the situation in the Middle East. Not the Afghan-Iraq war, but the recent public announcement by Israel stating that they are considering removing their status of neutrality and attacking Iran. This would be absolutely devastating for any chance of recovery in the Middle East.

Unfortunately I have not read and understood nearly enough to fully comment on this, but I can appreciate the need to relate in some way, so I will direct you towards more resourceful commentary.

A brief overview is given by Peter Joseph after his recent trip to Israel here.

The full lecture he mentions having given can be reviewed here.

Piracy

The hot topic of january certainly has been piracy. No less than three bills, SOPA PIPA and ACTA, have been discussed in order to further combat piracy. You may recall the Pirate Bay trial of 2009 and 2010. The case was appealed twice and in 2012 the supreme court in Sweden will provide a response.

The point brought forth by the defense lawyer is applicable as a general idea of why file sharing should be completely legal. It is no different than producing cars that can drive faster than the speed limit, he says. I would then start comparing that to owning a gun and other non-sense like that, but I am sure you got the point.

What is relevant to this blog is to discuss is how piracy can been understood. Obviously it can be stealing. But it has other facets to it as well. Socially it is an expression that consumers want easier access. Whether this means cheaper, completely for free, without the hassle of getting physical copies or whatever else we certainly do not know at this point. It is, however, obvious that these could be issues that made piracy so prevalent in the first place.

Regarding whether pirates are thieves you have to step outside the traditional mindset for a second to fully grasp the situation. This author agrees that stealing something physically is quite different from copying something digitally accessible. Certainly something can be said for the fact that the copy right owner may have been deprived of some income had his legal property not been copied. He may have. He probably has to some extent. But is the extent as vast as the expanded exposure his work recieved? And is that not a relevant question?

You have to remember that the entertainment industry (which holds the majority of complaints towards piracy) is more interested in keeping their produce solely for paying costumers, than they are in promoting their subjects, the artists that actually create the expressions the industry is profiting from. This means that if the industry gets to earn x amount of dollars on a product with a 0% piracy rate, that is more interesting for them than to earn x amount of dollars on the same product with a 50% piracy rate. In essense they want to fence down their work, because they see the pirates also as potential costumers, so what they want is for pirates to stop pirating and start spending money instead.
Again it is of no interest to achieve the possibly massive exposure that free file sharing can offer for the work of the artists. What is interesting is to earn as much money as possible.

I doubt they expect piracy rates to completely convert into paying costumers, but even if one pirate is turned (or discouraged through increasingly tougher regulations) then it is a win for the share holders expecting bigger turn outs.

Not only is this greed socially offensive on multiple levels it is also directly harmful. Just like the Pirate Bay regular people are being made an example of by the twisting of the legal system which is extremely toxic. It may function as an immediate detergent, but just as when you bring the millitary into another country to fight a war, you may win it in a couple of weeks, but you will have your work cut out for you with the uprisings your transgrassion will spark.

A final point that I will make is that you should consider that piracy rates far exceed what is possibly consumable, both economically but also in simple human life. The sea of content available is simply too vast. And quite a lot of that content is of medium and lower quality. Probably the majority of the content. Artists are not all Van Goghs, and a lot of them would be stretching it calling themselves artists in the first place. So in this world of currency drains I can certainly see the logic in the consumer crowd moving away from traditional patterns of purchase towards more egoistic ones. It makes perfect sense that as soon as technology arose to offer deliverance from wrongful purchases, in this time when wrongful purchases could be among the most prevalent, people starting utilising this tool to avoid disappointment.
A lot more could be said on this part of the discussion, but I will leave it here and we can discuss the issue of boredom and entertainment another time.

Also, this post will most likely be used to vault off into another post outlining an alternative system based on access rather than ownership, but since that will take some effort to piece together it might not be the subsequent one.

Economic Globalisation

Yesterdays piece on ACTA came with a comparison between the European Union and the United States. I would be unfit to furter that comparison and try to argue in political terms how alike these two unions are starting to become, but I do find it interesting to keep watching from the side lines and see what the next moves by these players will be.

Perhaps David Rovics can lighten the mood a bit with his satirical take on the similarities.



It should be clear to everyone that the east is rising to compete with the west globally, and soon the super power status will be shared, and in turn handed over. To whom is a good question. Many say China looking at their enormous growth rates. But these people often only look at numbers. Numbers that their government is responsible for, but that overlook gaping holes in their society. Some would argue that they are creating a bubble economy much greater than ours by building without respect for what their population can afford. By keeping the machines building homes and roads running you can create a sense of growth that looks good enough on paper.

That issue is again not dissimilar from what we experienced closer to home with our own bubble. What is interesting, however, is to look at how people percieve this economic breakdown. Some start swallowing apocalyptic stories, some throw their hands up before their eyes and again some try to argue for rewinding the system to a prior state.

To me it is obvious that none of those perceptions will bring us anywhere. There is only one way and that is forward. We can change direction, but the relatively docile part of history where Europe went almost without war during the past 60 years, is over. We chose to join the wave of globalism.

The hidden warfare of today is economic warfare. Nation states are trying their best to stay afloat, and when resourceful enough they also try and acrue more for themselves. They join alligiances and trade unions to benefit from the increasingly expanding amount of transactions going on in the world today, but they all do it to try and bring more riches home. A game that was much more physical and bound by the resources supplied by nature before we had paper money, gigantic oil tankers, air planes, derivate trades etc.

Just remember one thing. The situation is actually quite simple. No matter what these politicians and game players tell you, the situation really is simple. They do not see it, but the world of today is turning around one question: How to distribute the wealth nature has for us?

Most people still believe that money is the way to go. That politics is the way to go. That democracy is the way to go. But what do these institutions bring in a world where we are at a tipping point now where we can actually automate more sectors of society than what is applicable economically due to job losses? They seek to be the glue holding it all together on moral grounds. They argue and argue and argue away with symbolism and morale, but refuse to look at how far science has taken our potential.

This is fear. Fear of a tomorrow different from today. Because today is calculable, today is marketable and today is comprehendable. So by spreading this irrational fear to the public, they succeed in holding on to their power, because now everyone else is afraid of tomorrow as well. And if we are not, Hollywood can always be invested in to produce another horrifying post-apocalyptic vision of what the world would be like without government.

You might think that was a silly remark, but just try and talk to people about what is possible to automate in society and they will immidiately draw upon the illusion of knowledge they believe to have yielded from movies such as Terminator or i-Robot. This is standard psychology. They have to keep reminding the public that this process of moving into the future is dangerous, or they might just start wishing/voting/acting for it to happen.

V For Revolution

Another great movie from the Wachowski brothers, also holding a great deal of social commentary beneath the initial layers of visually well made action, is the movie V For Vendetta. This movie is certainly one of my favorites, and it achieves such status with me because of how it propels an alternate perspective on these increasingly harsher measures being taken in the time of crisis. All in the name of seizing control of the issue before it gets out of hand.

While I can sympathise with the inherit logic in such a sentence that is it for the good of the people and the good of society, it simply fails to roll out in such a fashion in quite a few attempts. As we have discussed prior terrorism is not just some random idea brown people start thinking about out of nowhere. It takes a big spark to motivate such violence. Most of them have witnessed horrible things to get to where they needed to be to make such drastic moves.
To be clear I am not condoning any act of terrorism, but I will certainly be the one to argue for the understanding of the core nature of it. The media portrays it as close to being the number one issue for any contemporary society.


So to spread it out even thinner one could theorise that terrorism can be diluted and "fought" in this manner, by reducing the amount and size of the measures being taken to prevent it. Perhaps the resistance movements would have been less prevalent if the germans had been more civil in occupied territories during the war? Inhumanity can easily stir violence where otherwise there was no basis for it.


Something else to think about is also the fact that too many people are labelled terrorists when they are no such thing. The rebels in Iraq for instance might consist somewhat of organized terror cells still fighting for Al Qaeda or Saddams memory or whatever, but would you not even consider that some of them just fight the occupation because of the endless stream of unfortunate events the millitary has been involved in ever since the beginning of this pitiful war?


And with that I think I will let V talk to you all about the very possible future of our society, assuming no measures are taken to remove this inconsistent fear that makes us grip the hands of any who endows to save us. He is talking to you about you and it is relevant for you because you are the one who will bring yourself in this situation.

War

The atrocities of war are getting to a point now where it is about time the western world dawns upon the fact that this "war on terror" has to stop.

You might as well call it a war for terror, seeing what the outcome is. The establishment is attempting to loot and pillage poorer nations rich on oil. If this was ever a humanitarian project, why would you fly right over Sierra Leone and Somalia to get to Iraq and Afghanistan (and to make Iran start sweating in the middle).

Released this monday is a letter by a member of the US Army, who has witnessed first hand the ugly face of war. You can read the relatively short but important letter here as well as watch the documentary made about this soldier just below the transcript.


I could draw this back to prior points made about how public opinion is shaped through advertising and similar tools of manipulation, but I believe you should be quite capable of making that connection yourself.
For something has certainly shifted, since we are now generally capable of shutting this information out, even though it has been a reoccuring element in the independant press ever since the war began, when we would sit no longer than 60 years ago and scoff at the nazis and their doings. If you regard that as a stretch of a comparison, please return here after you have read the short letter I have linked to above. When you carve a hand-cuffed mans skin off his face, you must descend into the same category as we used to reserve for the nazis. Where else would we put such inhumane people?


If you know the story of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you will recall that one of them is named War. And war is indeed a corner stone in the international degeneration of society, if not in the end of the world. Loosely interpreted you might say its a part of the end of the world as we know it.


Please take part in spreading the grim message that is reality. There are others trying their best to make you think about pop star shows and soda drinks instead, so your help is needed.