A million things.
You may have seen the item posted last tuesday. One should never post drunk. One should also check that thing done early in the morning with a slight hangover (that is deleting said item) worked. Oops. Is not that I don't stand by some of the things I said. But it wasn't measured. And it was very reactionary. Oh well. If you didn't see it - good.
Anyway, first things first - tuesday was an rather extra-ordinary day. A. and I had to go and visit the midwife in the afternoon. So I escaped from work and we walked up to the clinic in the sunshine - when we got there the midwife couldn't find the heartbeat and decided we should go for a scan. Not overly concerned (Sproglet had been kicking on the way to the clinic) we leapt in a taxi and up to the hospital.
In the waiting room the radio was on. Than announcer says: "Two planes have hit the World Trade Center" and on comes Richard Marx. That can't possibly be true I thought - unsure of what I was listening to I left it at that.
In the scan - all was well - and I discovered that we are having a Boy. Wow. I will never get over scans - seeing sproglet fidgeting about in there. Mental. Anyway sproglet now has a name: "Milo Macfarlane Williamson". Cool uh?
As you can imagine the rest of the day was spent in a mixture of joy and stunned shock. The only source of info in the office was a radio tuned for some reason to some talk sports program. Talk sports presenters are not the people to do this kind of reporting - they where getting very over excited. At one point one of them actually said to the other "You are suffering the stress of reporting a story of this magnitude to the nation". It was very surreal - if the show had been presented as a satire there would have been a lot of complaints.
Its very hard to relate to the events of tuesday. I (like everyone else) have seen millions of skyscrapers explode and planes crash - films are full of this kind of thing. New York has been the seen of thousands of disasters - from crashing asteroids to giant dragons (Godzilla). As the week has gone on though the human stories have come to the fore - at this level of scale its easier to be touched. A number of times watching CNN (which A. has watched for nearly a solid week) I have found tears in my eyes unexpectedly.
On one level its hard to find sympathy for the whole world being effected like this :- thousands of people die in conflicts every day - killed for other peoples causes or victims of stupid unthinking hatred. Yet of course it doesn't happen to us: safe in our rich western world. With our areoplanes and office blocks and television. That it should come to this before we turn round and say: "How can this happen?".
Its intriguing to watch Bush react - he is a president I didn't want and his policies on science and IT are very wrong in my opinion. And yet I find my self recluctantly admiring him - listening to him reasuring preparing for what sounds like a measured and sensible response. Of course there will be the a direct attack on Afganistan - how could there be anything less? I don't condone it but I find it hard to see how an act like this could not be followed by direct action to show it will not be tolerated. Bush sounds though like he means more - a cleaning up and a tightening of world security. I wonder if it can be done and if Bush is capable of doing it. With the prevelant world mood - considerably more stability is probably an acheivable goal. So of course is an horrific world war. Time will only tell.
One of the things will happen will be a dramatic erosion of our civil liberties - the electronic spying programs (Carnivore etc.) will all now be accepted calmly. Again only time will tell if this is a price worth paying.
Of course life doesn't really stop and at work the release is nearly ready. This release has been a little mundane (although very important) - the next has a lot more meat to it so should be more fun.
There are lots more things but I think that is all for now. I can feel my creative juices rising strongly again - not sure whether its the impending move (this flat is not good for creative work - I have done very little here), fatherhood or the changing world. No matter which - watch this space. Things are
afoot.
We begin to live.....
in interesting times.
Posted by Mark at September 16, 2001 11:43 PMNot sure if I agree with you about the dramatic erosion of civil liberties via electronic spying.
Sure, there are CCTV cameras everywhere, mobile calls can be intercepted (apart from actual terrorists who encrypt theirs – shame that), phones can be tapped, and e-mails read by employers or the state. We are on display to anyone who wants to look at us.
But in the abstract, does it matter? You know the old hippy saying; “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, does it really happen?” (I think it’s a hippy saying as only the terminally wet or stoned could come up with it) If the surveillance is covert, and we don’t know whether or not it’s happening, does it really happen?
If we define freedom as the freedom to do anything that doesn’t stop anyone else’s freedom, does spying restrict our freedom? Is there such a thing as freedom to spy?
Don’t get me wrong, I do have misgivings about the keeping of files of “Secrets,” not least that the people responsible for holding confidences are frequently incapable of doing so. I don’t think it’s in the human nature to keep confidences, unless there is power from doing so, like holding a chip in a poker game. Everyone seems to need to unburden themselves, to break down the isolation that secrets create. You’ve only got to have a drink with a policeman to find this out.
The obvious danger of having files on people is through the misuse of information held, to harm people. I’m sure this must happen, but it’s hard to guess at the extent. I don’t know how many people the security services employ, but would guess that each collator of info could only keep tabs on about 20 people. I’d imagine the number of files must be thousands rather than millions. It’s not quite Big Brother. Of course, software looking out for words such as bomb, jihad etc would help, except that I’d imagine that all the crazy boys and their crazy toys will have code words; it makes it a proper club if you have secret codes and passwords, eg “The poodle has eaten the bidet etc etc.”
Maybe its ironic that one of our fundamental freedoms, a free press, has, in its tabloid format in particular, the potential to harm people through the leaking of “secrets,” by breaches of the rehabilitation of offenders act, prejudicing the outcome of trials, incitement of lynch law and racial hatred.
Privacy, freedom of information, public interest and national security are linked like some bizarre four ended tug of war, pull on one end and the three other ends get pulled through the dirt. I’d love to think that there’s an easy answer here, but I guess we strike the best balance we can. IMHO, spying software doesn’t turn the UK into a police state.
So where does that leave us? Making our moves I guess, smiling for the camera. Hoping we don’t become collateral damage in the information age.
Posted by: Jeff at September 17, 2001 10:41 PMOne of the more interesting perspectives on a police state I've read - the freedom to spy? Actually, I agree with the bulk of this. Despite the opinions of the most idiotically optimistic of left-wing nutters, we can't have it both ways. If we want safety, we have to allow the measures to protect us to be in put in place. Yes, those measures are open to abuse beyond the function we create them for, and this will obviously happen at some point. I reckon you just have to take that on board as a downside of information gathering. Information and intelligence are the only useful tools for the avoidance of terrorist activity, unfortunately. You can't stop them if you don't know what they're doing. You can't know what they're doing unless you TRY TO FIND OUT. And because you don't know who these people are most of the time, you can't narrow down the list of people to intrude upon very far at all. All hideously simple stuff.
Posted by: Richard Wright at September 27, 2001 03:10 PM