WEEK OF THE WEEK (... ?)

RANT OF THE WEEK (or "Word Crimes")

As if in response to my previous post, today I'm listening to an American podcast (internet radio) in which a major topic of discussion is dealing with cyber-bullying; and of course that means revisiting the Apple-celebrity-nudes-leak-scandal (aka The Fappening). Okay; fair enough.

Me at the office a month ago. Dressed like Spider-Man, obviously.

What surprised me, was that the consensus opinion amongst the hosts was that stealing* the photos was a sex crime, and that anyone who looked at the photos was complicit in said sex crime. One bloke, who's a fucking university professor, said it was like how people who looked at child porn were complicit in the same sex crime as the person who abused the child.

I trust you'll tell me if I'm wrong on this one, but this whole premise just seems utterly fucked to me.

Firstly, possession of child porn isn't a sex crime. Filming yourself having sex with a child is a sex crime; possessing a copy of that film is a crime of, well, possession. I'm not defending anything here; what I'm saying is that some loathsome cunt who wanks off to horrifying pictures he finds on the internet is committing a completely different type of crime to the loathsome cunt who produced those pictures in the first place. It's like if someone bashes you, and while you're unconscious, some unrelated party steals your handbag. Yes, the thief is still a cunt, but he's not responsible for or complicit in the bashing -- whether you'd like him to be or not.

And let's not forget, nobody was actually abused, sexually or otherwise, in the production of these particular pickies. I'm sure the celebrities involved feel legitimately violated, but that's not a good reason to start arbitrarily expanding the definition of words. Under this new concept, if a pick-pocket lifts your mobile phone and it happens to have some candid photos on it, you may as well just label them a rapist, because it's basically the same as if they'd sexually assaulted you, right?

-- And another thing, cyber-bullying does not count as violence against women. Again, I'm not saying it's a good thing, but violence has a specific meaning that does not include typing nasty shit on a computer; nor should anyone be attempting to broaden the definition to include such things. Just call it what it is instead of playing with words to manipulate people's emotions.* --

... fucking hell; here's why this bugs me so much:

I don't know if it was weeks or months ago now (time just seems like a blur these days), but a little while ago, I heard a clip of British PM David Cameron saying that anyone who watched or shared ISIS beheading videos was complicit in an act of terrorism. ... the fuck?

Actually, I've noticed that in The States too, they seem to have started a process of gradually reclassifying regular crimes as acts of domestic terrorism. I guess once you label someone a terrorist, it's easier to justify killing them without any sort of due process.

And speaking of The US, remember with both the Manning and Snowden leaks, how in America there was debate about whether or not publishing or reporting on the documents was itself an act of treason? With the Manning case in particular, do you remember when Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Attorney General What's-His-Face said that Assange was a criminal, and spoke about revoking his citizenship, when he hadn't even been charged with anything? (Fuck, I lost a lot of respect for Gillard that day)

Words have to have meanings, and those meanings have to fucking well mean something. And just because something grubby happened that involved some pictures of tits, doesn't make it a fucking sex crime. I can understand why politicians try to get away with this type of bullshit, but when whole swathes of the media and supposed "public intellectuals" start arbitrarily broadening definitions to suit themselves, and nobody in the crowd says hold up, what the fuck are you doing? ... well, I don't know where the fuck it leads*, but I can't imagine it's anywhere good. So, um, fuck the lot of 'em. Cunts.

*Maybe the best example of where it leads is how now we all just blithely talk about intellectual property violations as stealing. Why? Because "stealing" sounds so much more egregious than "copying" doesn't it? But that's exactly what it is. You can't actually steal a fucking idea. We have a word that means the exact thing we're talking about, but we've been collectively trained to use a different word that means something else, because it has a stronger negative connotation.

I welcome all comments calling me a fuckwit on this.

VIDEOS OF THE WEEK (or "Isn't It All A Little Bit Bullshit?")

I listened to two ABC docos this week. Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, and The Making of Modern Australia Part 1: The Child. While I wouldn't rate either as "must watch", they were both pretty decent. However, as I listened to the first, I kind of became overwhelmed with a sense that skewed the way I listened to the second.

Basically, in the Monkey Grip doco, there's a bunch of older people talking about how the book perfectly captured the lives of a generation of Australians, and younger people talking about how it's this wonderful snapshot of Australian history, etc, etc. What only gets lightly touched on by Noni Hazelhurst towards the end is that it's really a snapshot of a specific group of people living in a specific part of Melbourne. And while I'm sure it reflected the lives of many people across Australia, I'm equally sure it didn't reflect the lives of many many more. So while, yes, for the people of that time and place, it was their whole world, it certainly wasn't the whole world.

At least there's one nude celebrity on the internet that I recognise.

Most people don't leave behind artifacts. They don't write books, or articles, or blogs, or probably anything really. And even of that small group that does, most of it just gets washed away by time. And then we take whatever's left and hold it up as defining examples of an era -- and it's just kind of bullshit, isn't it?
It's the same general problem I have with surveys and certain scientific studies. Isn't it true that you're only ever testing the kinds of people who are willing to participate? That your scope is limited to a subset of people who have a particular behavioural inclination? Of course, we'll never know the degree of the bias, because you literally can't test outside that group; but shouldn't you at least keep that in mind when looking at the results? 

How would you write a book that tells the story of "this generation of Australian"? (I guess you'd probably write something about fucking Facebook and mobile phones.) But look at Australia today, and how broad the culture is, and the variety and nuance and all that sort of crap. Look at the arguments, and differences in ideals, and lifestyles, and how different people living in different circles view things in completely different ways. (Hell, I guess everybody sees things at least a little differently, don't they?). But how much of that gets reflected in literature and media that anyone's going to look at a hundred years hence. Still, no doubt in a hundred years, people will be looking at the books and articles and other bits and pieces that have survived and are considered "historically significant", and they'll mold those tiny remnants into a canonical view of what things were really like, probably while chucking around word like revolution and zeitgeist -- and it'll all be a little bullshit, won't it?

I should say that I'm not in any way criticising works like Monkey Grip; I'm criticising the way they're sometimes presented in a historical context that's broader than what it maybe should be. I guess I'm just bitching about broadness today.

So, how about something on a lighter note?  

MUSIC OF THE WEEK (or "This Week In 1987")

I like to listen to non-lyrical music when I'm doing things that require a degree of concentration; and in more recent years, I've found myself listening to more and more electronic shit. This has in turn led to me listening to more and more non-non-lyrical electronic shit when I'm doing things that don't require so much concentration. 

 One of the acts that I've discovered and taken a shine to is Koobra - a DJ/musician from Helsinki Finland. He first came to my attention when I saw this promo video for a Nokia phone and got curious about the very 80s sounding song they'd used.

Anyway, it looks like he's partnered up with the mysterious "Joanna" again to produce this thing.
Maybe it's just because I've done video production work in the past, but I find this clip fascinating. The description on YouTube credits Pablo Films, which is also based in Helsinki and lists Nokia (formerly Finish) as a client; and there is some overlap with the names credited for the Nokia video.

To be honest, I think I'm mainly just impressed with how cheap it all looks. A camera, a couple of lights, a smoke machine, a fan, a dolly, a building, a paddock, a couple of stock shots, some makeup and a black sheet to drape over the singer and blow around with the fan. And yet it complements the song so beautifully. If it wasn't obviously shot on high-def digital video, this could easily be something plucked directly from the 1980s.

I don't know if the retro thing is big in Finland, but if they filmed this over a weekend for a modest price (as I'd like to imagine they did), then my hat is off to this lot.

What can I say, I appreciate economic and efficient creativity.

WINDOWS OF THE WEEK (or "What the Fuck Happened to 9?")

I don't know if you know this or not, but Microsoft has put out a free work-in-progress version of the upcoming Windows 10. You can read about and join the "Insider Program" here, or just skip all that bullshit and download it here.

While I don't care for Windows in general, It's not something I can really avoid, and I'd say this version is at least not looking too bad. While I definitely would NOT install this demo on my main computer, if you've got some hardware you're not using or know what a virtual machine is, it might be worth checking out. Depending on how they play their cards, this one might end up being the next XP (ie: everywhere for ages); so why not get a handle on it now, ay?

Now with LIVE TILES