some sick puppy is trying to cash in. I was going to leave the previous post on its own on this page for a few days, but I think it's important that people are warned about this email scam. Spread the word.

posted @ 9:34 PM -

I've just had an email from a Muslim friend living in Britain informing me that her brother, his fiancée and friends were attacked in the street this week in some sort of twisted reprisal. She is now afraid to leave the house.

And we have the gall to claim the moral high ground.

posted @ 9:00 PM -

two very cool science & technology articles from BBC News - a hominid fossil find in South Africa older than any previous finds in the region, and some interesting ideas about learning from bacterial self-organisation to make electronic devices 'co-operate' better.

posted @ 11:35 AM -

on to lighter things. I'm off to Amsterdam tomorrow. We'll be celebrating the end of Dave's batchelorhood, and I do mean celebrating - I don't go in for this "commiserations on your loss of freedom" nonsense.

posted @ 11:05 AM -

it takes a while to make sense of this article, but it's worth a read

posted @ 11:03 AM -

more reactions to crazy events of last few days, just to give a flavour of a range of opinions:

Jerry Pournelle ranting about how we must retaliate by levelling many cities. Retaliate for the massacre of innocents my massacring more innocents? Need I say more?

The London Evening Standard's article about how, no matter what the justice of the situation may be, the US must be pragmatic in how it retaliates to avoid a catastrophic escalation of horror. Maybe they are right, maybe they are paranoid, I don't know.

Many news sources, having first said that it was impossible for anyone other than a trained pilot to direct an airborne jet to a particular target, later realised that actually in clear weather (which there was) taking off and landing are the only really hard bits about flying. Since then they have latched on to how easy it is to get realistic and detailed flight simulators. This article from the Daily Mail is not the most hysterical I have seen, but it is what I have to hand a I type. I have already heard calls to take such software off the market, just like when protests turned to riots in the City of London last year the papers went mad about how people used email and mobile phones to organise themselves.

Adequacy satirises the whole knee-jerk reaction and use of events to forward particular political goals phenomenon.

posted @ 10:53 AM -

The world has changed, and I am still afraid of what may happen. It's not the threat of war any more - some sort of war does seem likely, though it may be astrange war more akin to Bond films than anything we've seen in reality. I am less worried about this because no-one has taken any hugely rash actions yet, making me think that whatever revenge is taken probably will be well thought out and well justified to the rest of the world. There has also been an unprecedented show of unity behind America, with Russia and China pledging their assistance in strong terms, which means that any potential action is far less likely to have catastrophic side effects. I am afraid because of the more subtle way the world has changed.

Americans no longer feel invulnerable. In itself this could be the one positive consequence of what has happened, bringing a sharper sense of reality to US foreign policy.
Articles about this:

• Salon - a US news & comment website


• much more cynical comment from yearzero

The trouble is having had this change of self-image brought upon them in such a horrific way will make many people far harder headed. Anybody with vaguely right-wing, statist or anti-libertarian views will see this as cause to remove any restrictions on police and secret service powers. The fact that intelligence did not predict or prevent these things from happening will be seen as justification. In more immediate terms there are many individuals so angry that they want to take revenge on other (presumably innocent) individuals because they see them as part of "the enemy". Muslims in the West are scared, particularly Arabs in America. Indians are also scared, and rightly - there is no obvious visual cue that tells a potential vigilante "don't attack him he's an Indian Hindu, not a Pakistani Muslim".
Relevant sites:

• Salon (again) about over the top reactions from ordinary Americans


• an extremist Hindu site


• an extremist Jewish movement

I'm including the bottom 2 to make various points:

1. extremism exists in every culture; I hope a couple of examples that caught my eye today make this clear


2. both sites are similar in some ways - they immediately decided who was guilty before any evidence had been released by the FBI


3. they are both making the dangerous generalisation that "Muslims" are responsible, seemingly oblivious to the way these generalisations damage the groups they represent as well


4. they have both dehumanised the Muslims of the world as a faceless enemy


5. they both sound like each other (no surprise - they support each other) and just like sites which demonise Jews or Hindus, in an ironic way underlining just how all peoples are much the same

Meanwhile here are a couple more links about the actual events:

• a very well written personal account from someone who narrowly escaped


• the aftermath viewed from space

I won't be linking to any more of these pages; I also probably won't be reading any more of them, because it's simply too powerful. This cartoon expresses my feelings better than I can.

posted @ 6:12 PM -

just heard that people on the aircraft that hit the World Trade Center were told to phone relatives on their mobiles. The hijackers had knives. The passengers knew what was about to happen to them. Somehow this brings the whole thing closer to home - it means more than the numbers of anonymous people that I had been thinking of so far.

I do believe that the world is a good place, and I do believe that most people are good, but sometimes this simple faith is challenged....

posted @ 8:27 AM -

interesting article about how the web has been used in peoples' individual responses to yesterday's events

posted @ 5:48 AM -

an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind

posted @ 5:36 AM -

Well. I woke up today and my world hasn't changed. There is something odd about watching what feels like a totally cataclysmic event one day and waking up the next day with 4 walls still around me, a roof over my head, relatively petty tasks still waiting to be done. I'm still worried about consequences, but it all feels more remote now.

On the other hand hearing people talk about the financial consequences does feel a bit sick. I know it's important, I know it's actually the only direct way that this will touch most peoples' lives worldwide, including mine, but I still feel nauseous when I hear talk (as on Newsnight last night) of how Americans feeling under attack will affect consumer confidence. There is a probable 4 figure death toll here - I don't want to hear about financial markets and consumer confidence just now.

Meanwhile I am deeply disturbed by the way the western world seems to have already decided who is behind this. I can see the link to the Middle East, I can see the link to Osama Bin Laden, but it's time to remember that these assumptions have been wrong before. Spearhead said it better than I can:
Yes I remember the time in Oklahoma
you tried to blame an Arab
but the whitey was the bomber....

posted @ 5:21 AM -

anyway, I can now finally get to the thing I originally sat down to write about - the World Trade Center(sic) bombing. I'm not going to recount events, because you must know by now, and I doubt I will forget this day in a hurry. I have a few things to say about it though, mainly along the lines of why I am scared.

• My cousin lives and works in Manhattan. I have heard from her, and know that she's OK, but this took a while after first seeing the news, and the whole family were worried for some time


• What happens next? I live somewhere that is irrelevant in the grand scale of things - terrorists with the resources and determination to get the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are not going to bother with Brighton. The thing is that people are talking about Pearl Harbor(sic again). Pearl Harbor brought America into a huge war, and what will happen this time? No-one knows, and I am tempted to dismiss this as melodrama, but then a large number of Jews stayed in Germany in the 1930s thinking what was about to happen couldn't possibly....

In case you don't know what happened, or in case I do forget one day, here are some links:

• Financial Times report


• the Economist's more considered report


• BBC online coverage


• some photographs and video stills of the events


• a broad, random selection of individuals' reactions via Blogger


• The Capital Times' message board for readers' reactions to events

I hope these all stay online when this is no longer news....

posted @ 4:54 PM -

having had my attention drawn to the nefarious ways of the BNP, I had a look at their website. I also found a highly amusing article about whose side they are taking in the Tory leadership battle and why. What I found hilarious about it is that just the other day I was reading a satirical article (on The Brains Trust) about how the BNP is distancing itself from the extremism of the Conservative Party. The serious article has a couple of echoes of this story in it....

posted @ 4:36 PM -

beaucoup bad shit

I can't imagine anyone could be reading this and not know what's happened in the USA today, so I won't actually start with that, but go back to something I was reading just before the radio mentioned aircraft hitting buildings.

First of all I had read a report from the BBC about how the BNP have changed their strategy. They no longer wish to portray themselves as anti-immigration (though they do support "assisting voluntary repatriation" for those immigrants who choose to go back where they came from perhaps because repeated attacks made them uncomfortable?), but instead as specifically against those "extremists" who are guilty of anti-white racism. While I can only support attacks on racism, whether it is anti-white or anti-others, the BNP blow their cover by being obsessed with muslims. First of all they have been approaching Hindus & Sikhs to try to form an alliance against islamic extremism - divide and conquer anyone? What really worries me though is the subtext - most critics of Zionism are really criticism all Jews (though clearly there are people who are anti-Zionist without being anti-semitic), and it strikes me that the BNP are really talking about all muslims when they say "muslim extremists".

posted @ 3:51 PM -

FREE EDUCATION PICKET

Wednesday 3^rd of October at 1pm outside the Brighton Centre.

Go there. It's important.

posted @ 8:27 AM -

I'm off to Amsterdam next weekend. This has actually been planned quite far in advance, but I only booked my flights last week, and suddenly over the last couple of days mildly looking forward to it has turned into actually being excited.

It's for a stag weekend, which should be a laugh but also reminds me of a somewhat scary fact - my friends are starting to get married.....

posted @ 1:50 PM -

minor technical difficulties

Having proudly trumpeted the addition a few days ago of a service that lets readers comment on my posts, it now seems to be broken. If you see "Discuss comments so far]", it is an error. There should be a number in there, and as long as it's not showing, it's a symptom that the whole thing is broken.

I don't have the time or inclination to investigate right now, and I have a feeling it might be the service itself that's broken rather than my pages, but I'll check it out soon.

posted @ 6:41 AM -