> Advance Patrol is yet another band who has decided to release its new album El Futuro via The Pirate Bay – for free, fully legal. Click here to download. Also visit their web where you can listen before download and if you like it, give these guys a few dollars at their paypal adress. I haven’t even heard the album yet, but I still contribute with 100 SEK to support their cause. This way the money ends up where they belong – with the artists!
Cool thing is that Advance Patrol, who was unknowingly being used against The Pirate Bay in the trial, this time own the music themselves, meaning they can do whatever they want with it.
The hiphop group known as Advance Patrol will release its new album on The Pirate Bay today. They will do so to spread their music to as many as possible, and at the same time discredit the prosecution against The Pirate Bay, a prosecution where Advanced Patrol has been used as a scapegoat in the circus around the court proceedings. – We never asked to be plaintiffs in this case, Gonza from Advance Patrol explains, they used us as scapegoats in a fight in which we don’t wish to participate. We refuse to be used in a war against our fans. – You cannot legislate away file sharing, Gonza says. Those who fileshares our music are also those who appreciate it the most. They are my friends, and friendship is something to be valued highly. That’s why we’re giving away El Futuro to the internet, to our friends. Press release
I promised myself not to vote anymore, but promises are made to be broken, so… Here’s why I vote for The Pirate Party in the European Parliament elections 2009.
I think a statement need to be made. Things need to change, because this doesn’t have to be a game for the elite anylonger.
So, piracy then… No, it’s not about being able to snatch whatever you want off the internet. It’s about the society we’re facing, not even in a distant future, but now, right now, where corrupt judges who know virtually nothing about the internet violate civil rights, where FRA rule, where IPRED is a fact, where ordinary companies have become extraordinary cops, where freedom is at stake – pretty much because the people in power don’t understand what’s going on. These people are more interested in profit than human rights.
You think this ”freedom” talk is exaggerated? Look at France and their recently adopted HADOPI law. You think The Pirate Bay trial was legit? Then let’s make all post offices responsible for providing the infrastructure for illegal sharing of drugs, weapons et cetera, and sue the shit out of them.
Yes, The Pirate Party is a silly name. And they look silly as well, and their logo is childish. But why care about looks? Most people don’t even know what The Pirate Party is all about. Just to pick an example: I bet 90% of the Swedish population thinks that The Pirate Party wants to abolish copyright law. Not true.
Usually I’d be a Green Party/Left Party kinda guy, even though I detest party politics, as well as the obsolete left/right scale (check the results of my political tests here). But regarding these specific issues, The Green Party and The Left Party are not as well equipped as The Pirate Party, even though they – on the surface – have pretty much the same opinions regarding these issues. The problem is that The Green/Left Party have about a billion other issues to deal with, hence they won’t have a billionth of the time (that The Pirate Party has) to deal with what I believe to be the most important question of today – civil rights. The more issues you have to deal with, the less energy is put into each and everyone of them. That’s why The Pirate Party ought to be so much stronger than The Green Party and The Left Party altogether – regarding these specific issues.
Because The Pirate Party is pretty much only interested in integrity and civil/human rights. That’s their strenght. They’re acting childish and stupid when it comes to other issues, but here they rule. ”If you don’t believe that civil rights is the most important political issue right now, then don’t vote for us.” That’s a direct quote from the leader of the pack, Rick Falkvinge.
I’m not sure how much power they will have if they get elected, but my vote is cast with hope so that these issues are constantly being dealt with by people who know what they’re talking about.
And if you still think it’s all about downloading files off the internet… Nigga, please!
You’ve all been reading about President Obama trying to block previously unpublished photos from Abu Ghraib (Why? Because the pictures would “further inflame anti-American opinion” and endanger U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan). Well, Obomba, this is the age of the Internet where you cannot silence the opposition anylonger. Here are some of the 60 unpublished photos of US troops abusing prisoners in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. There are loads more photos, still unpublished, and there are thousands of documents regarding torture yet to be released. We haven’t seen the worst yet.
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of Nazi concentration camp doctors following World War II were like a joke. Because of that, after the trial, the judges, concerned that there had been no clear guidelines available to them on which to base their condemnation of these defendants, made up rules of their own to be used in future similar trials. These rules were to be hailed pretty much globally as the golden rules regarding experimentation on human subjects, and this set of ethic principles were collectively named The Nuremberg Code. ”The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential, and the person involved should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any elements of force, fraud, deceit, duress…” This says pretty much why The Nuremberg Trial was a joke. However, the Code was ignored by many. One of those who violated the Code was Henry Murray.
”Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems by serving as a subject in a series of experiments or taking a number of tests (average about 2 hours a week) through the academic year (at the current College rate per hour)?”. This was the invitation to a group of Harvard students who had enrolled in a popular psychology course in the fall of 1959. Around seventy students volunteered and twenty-two were picked by the researchers. What the invitation failed to say was that the experiments would last not one, but three academic years. It did not reveal that the students would be decieved. Nor did it provide information about the purpose or possible effects.
At the time when Kaczynski decided to participate in the experiments, Murray was a giant figure in the world of psychology. His Explorations in Personality (1938) is considered a classic by many, and the Thematic Apperception Test, TAT, developed by Murray and colleague Christiana Morgan, became widely used by psychologists all over the world. Also, during World War II, while working for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA), Murray helped develop a system for testing the capacity of recruits for clandestine warfare, which is widely used by government and business today. He was of course a great influence on his students. However, he was very intolerant to criticism. Many claim that’s why he feared to publish his work. He took everything personally, and couldn’t keep his feelings and science apart. This was the essence of these experiments: Murray’s research lacked the objective controls that the scientific method demanded.
Also, Murray was a complex character. For instance, he led a double life, which might shed some light on his experiments that I’ll discuss further on. He constantly masked a life bordering on the bizarre, probably as a result of his childhood (classic stuff: he felt rejected by his hypercritical mother and tormented by his dominant older sister) and was angry, narcissistic, sexually ambivalent, repressed… Ina May Greer, Murray’s longtime assistant said he was full of “anger, frustration, aggression, hostility, need to punish, need to explode, need to let go of all the controls of society and live out whatever mood was there, whatever instinct or impulse was there… This was stronger in him than in most people.”
In the summer he spent six weeks with Josephine Rantoul, his wife, and then six weeks with Christiana Morgan, his colleague and mistress. When together, the lovers explored the limits of their sexuality. They gave themselves pet names, where he was ”Mansol” and she was ”Wona”. Morgan wrote in her diary that ”our life was in the whip – the black whip that hurt”. In other words, they submitted themselves to extreme sadomasochism and role play which they called ”Walpurgis evenings” (Chase discusses this in more detail in his book, check here for the use of Walpurgis Night in popular culture). According to Ina, Murray was a man who needed to be in total control, but also to be capable of exploding – and he exploded in violence when making love to Christiana. Their affair lasted over forty years.
Long addicted to amphetamines, Murray was introduced to LSD in 1959 by Timothy Leary, then a young professor in his department, who would soon become infamous as the advocate of psychedelic drug research (”Turn on, tune in, drop out” was his most famous catch phrase). One former colleague said that Murray ”took amphetamines and got himself whipped up to the point where he could work, and then he worked feverishly for as long as he could at a stretch and knocked himself out, and then he had to take sedatives to sleep”. Both Murray and Morgan were on a weird combination of sedative and pepper-up pills. For more on LSD in (extremely vague) connection to the Unabomber, check out the (not so good) movie The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet.
And Murray was the guy that Kaczinsky was up against. Kaczynski, a man with clearly defined goals and focus, somewhat of a genius, who was worried about the future of civilization, who had absolute faith in reason and who had great intellectual interests, where to meet Henry Murray, one of the world’s most prominent psychologists, whose science was an extension of his private turbulent life. Darkness descends.
Why are the most advanced civilizations also the most barbaric? It seems like the more human beings advance, the greater their crimes. In my mind, clearly inspired by Oswald Spengler as I am, the level of advancement in civilizations today is of no good. We have reached the peak and the further we advance, the more we destroy. This is definitely the age of decline, and technology is what increases our capacity for mayhem. In the 20th century we were even forced to invent new words to be able to deal with the madness: ”concentration camps”, ”genocide”, ”gulag”, ”ethnic cleansing”, ”collateral damage”, ”carpet bombing”… In the modern age progress equals destruction. Spengler wrote: ”This machine-technics will end with the Faustian civilization and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten – our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon”.
Social philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford writes in The Conduct of Life (1951) that ”we have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where the feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end”. Theodore Kaczynski, who arrived at Harvard in September 1958 (at the age of 16), read this, and a whole lot of other books that were part of the courses he took in expository writing, German literature, deductive and inductive logic, Western literature and philosophy, and the history of science. Harvard’s social environment at the time was clearly dominated by the ideas of the relativity of morals and the irrationality of religion. Here, at Harvard, is where the Unabomber got most of his ideas from.
When reading about the Unabomber at Harvard everybody seems to focus on his outsider attitude, that he kept to himself and never spoke to people he met in the hallway. What people seem to forget is that this is pretty normal behaviour, especially at Harvard at the time, where being labelled a ”loner” was like having a badge of honor. Dealing with highly complex mathematics there was little time for socializing. Kaczynski did not stand out. Everybody who’s been studying at a university (or just left the house, for that matter) knows you don’t just stop for a chat when meeting people. You do that with people you know, otherwise you just keep walking. The same thing goes for the ideas of the Unabomber. Any sane person would think like him, only any sane person wouldn’t execute those ideas to that extent, in such a brutal way. And again, Ted did not stand out. Alston Chase writes in his book Harvard and the Unabomber: ”Another one of my classmates was expelled for dropping a bomb off the Anderson Bridge into the Charles River, setting off an explosion that shook windows throughout Cambridge. After leaving college, he was recruited by the CIA, which employed his incendiary talents during the succesful, agency-sponsored 1954 putsch in Guatemala…”.
So, again we come to the conclusion that Theodore Kaczynski was pretty much like everybody else. What made him snap, then? As Alston Chase writes, and what seems highly probable: it was The Experiment that took Ted over the edge. More about that in Part Eleven.
> Mass media – the drug of the nation. Alongside the politicians, this is where we find the world’s greatest hypocrites. For 2 742 days mass media in Sweden was completely silent regarding the Dawit Isaak case. Now, all of a sudden, the four largest daily newspapers got together in a bombastic Free Dawit campaign, and I can’t help but shake my head in dismay. Why now? Why just the daily papers? And where’s their commitment the other days of the year? Shame on you, filthy swine. Dawit Isaak has been the case in alternative press and blogs since day one.
And talking about swine: What about mass media and the swine flu? And the corporations feeding off our fear and the mad money they make? How many people have died so far? Compare that to the number of people living in each country. And then check back on Africa: How many children die there everyday due to starvation? Some kind of answer: Think of it as 12 jumbo jets full of children that crash each day. And yet there’s only a massive wall of silence regarding these people. Misanthropy accelerates… for each grave.
But then again, maybe this guy is the reason we don’t care. ;)
>I just discovered Juan Cole and his excellent blog Informed Comment. Read an interview with Cole here, where he talks about his new book Engaging the Muslim World, and check out his speech in the video below (what I write in this article is pretty much what he says in his first part of the video).
In his book he calls for a different kind of relationship between the United States and the Muslim majority states than what we’ve been seeing in recent years. The US, from the point of view of the Muslim world (and pretty much the whole wide world), has been acting aggressively in the region. It’s quite obvious that US policy is not a force for stability.
A lot of US policy is made on poor information, poor perception and poor judgement about the Muslim world, and you see this everyday when people are discussing Muslim issues. Even when people you thought was intellectually aware of some of the things going on in the world, you get these prejudiced comments that just reeks of fear and ignorance. Check the commentary discussions here (in Swedish) for an excellent example.
Juan Cole clearly admits that there’s a lot to be done when it comes to equal rights, gender segregation and so forth in the Muslim world, but the real question to start with is this: ”How shall these problems be adressed?” The idea that the United States can liberate Muslim women by force of arms, which has been openly and frankly stated by US military officers and so forth, is bizarre. Cole says: ”I grew up on army bases and I love the US military, but it is not liberated with regard to views of women. The idea that they’re going to liberate women is a little bit…unlikely”. To say the least.
An interesting Bin Laden quote: ”If I hated the Western way of life I would have hit Sweden”.
The fundamentalists do not hate the US way of life. They hate the American policy, and the specific policies they don’t like is Israel-Palestine, Iraq and to some extent the Afghanistan war. It’s hard not to blame them for hating that. Too bad they are forced to violence to get their point across.
Cole is confident that the US withdrawal from Iraq will be welcomed by the Muslim world and bring new opportunities for repairing US’ relationship with those countries. However, something must be done about Palestine. We haven’t seen much there at all. People are waiting to see practical steps.
Gaza is a humanitarian disaster, and it is the result of deliberate policy. Also, it’s an obvious warcrime going on over there. They are starving Palestine’s children to get a political result, which is just sickening. And now the Israelis have plans for 75 000 new housing units in the West Bank, and Hillary Clinton says: ”We’re gonna restart the peace process”. How the hell can you have a peace process when there’s land theft going on in front of everybody’s eyes? The right wing government forming in Israel right now has clearly rejected the whole idea of giving back the West Bank. That issue will continue to fester and it will continue to cause terrorism.
Cole says that Israeli policy is digging its own grave and soon must suffer sanctions from Europe. Its economy is dependent on its relationship (economic, technological and diplomatic) with Europe and Israel simply cannot ignore sanctions. The problem is that it’s not happening.
Fact is that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are stateless. Cole says: ”The minimum necessity for a dignified life in the contemporary world is citizenship in a state. Without citizenship, without a state, an individual has no real rights. You can see this, because Palestinian property is being taken at will everyday. It’s unacceptable that 3,5 million people in the West Bank and Gaza should be without citizenship, nor that refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere remain that way. And you know, it’s ironic because in 1938-39 Hitler stripped the Jews in Czechoslovakia from citizenship and they became stateless. And at the same time in 1939 the British government called for restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. And there was an uproar that you now have 100 000 newly stateless Jews and the British are not letting them go to the one place where they could get papers. So statelessness was a human rights issue in 1938-39. Statelessness should be a human rights issue today”.
