Feb. 21st, 2011

rfmcdonald: (photo)
The "CN" in "CN Tower" once referred to its builder and owner, the Canadian National Railway. The ownership has gone, but the name remains, so too the tracks separating it from the main body of the city.

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  • Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton wrestles with the maddening Phoenix light rail system.

  • blogTO was the first to report that the Green Room, a locally famous bar/club/restaurant in the Annex closed down for health reasons, is open again.

  • Daniel Drezner wonders why Middle Eastern dictators are so bad with presenting themselves in mass media.

  • Extraordinary Observations' Rob Pitingolo makes the observation that with cars or bikes, travelling an urban landscape becomes much more full with detail.

  • Far Outliers quotes a recent passage by the problematic V.S. Naipaul from his recent book on Africa, describing a Coloured woman's effort to develop a positive identity as something other than "Other."

  • James Nicoll wonders how you would cook triffids. Like greens, the consensus seems to be.

  • Language Log links to an analysis of Said Gadaffi's recent speech that looks at the (largely absent) claimed Libyan traits of his attempt folksy speech to the people.

  • Lawyers, Guns and Money's Scott Erik Kaufman reviews Alison Bechdel's classic Fun Home as a reverse of Maus, in that the understanding of the parent can be achieved through narrative.

  • Registan revisits the perennial problem of balancing human rights against national interests in American foreign policy, this time in Uzbekistan.

  • Steve Munro documents the confusion and despair operating in the Toronto area's transit coordinators.

  • At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin suggests that the Internet has led libertarianism become a viable ideology for well-socialized young people.

  • The Yorkshire Ranter takes a look at the peculiar mechanics behind Egypt's recent Internet shutdown.

rfmcdonald: (Default)
The protests in Libya are going to be revolutionary indeed. Will the Great Leader meet justice, rude or otherwise? I can't speculate, although the expected analogies with Romania in the late 1980s strike me as promising too much for him: Ceausescu was at least appreciated by Western powers as an autonomous power within the Soviet bloc, making things easier during the Cold War in a certain pleasant unexpected sense, but Muammar Gadaffi's post-2003 transformation just brought him up to the bare minimum expected of a responsible state.

Last night Toronto time, his son Saif al-Islam delivered a live speech to the Libyan people. Besides demonstrating the failed flirtation with Libyan dialect noted earlier and the typical contempt felt for the subjected people by the dictator, one element that came out during the live-tweeted speech was an emphasis on Libya's fragility and divisibility.

We have arrested tens of Arabs and Africans, poor people, millions were spent on them to use them by millionaire businessmen. There are people who want to establish a countries in parts of Libya to rule, Like the Islamic Emirate. One person said he is the Emir of Islamic Emirate of Darna. The Arabic Media is manipulating these events. This Arabic media is owned by Arabs who are distorting the facts but also our media failed to cover the events.

[. . .]

It is no lie that the protesters are in control of the streets now. Libya is not Tunis or Egypt. Libya is different, if there was disturbance it will split to several states. It was three states before 60 years. Libya are Tribes not like Egypt. There are no political parties, it is made of tribes. Everyone knows each other. We will have a civil war like in 1936. American Oil Companies played a big part in unifying Libya. Who will manage this oil? How will we divide this oil amongst us? Who will spend on our hospitals? All this oil will be burnt by the Baltagiya (Thugs) they will burn it. There are no people there. 3/4s of our people live in the East in Benghazi, there is no oil there, who will spend on them? Your children will not go to schools or universities. There will be chaos, we will have to leave Libya if we can't share oil. Everyone wants to become a Sheikh and an Emir, we are not Egypt or Tunisia so we are in front of a major challenge.

[. . .]

Before we let weapons come between us, from tomorrow, in 48 hours, we will call or a new conference for new laws. We will call for new media laws, civil rights, lift the stupid punishments, we will have a constitution. Even the Leader Gaddafi said he wants a constitution. We can even have autonomous rule, with limited central govt powers.

[. . .]

What is happening in Bayda and Benghazi is very sad. How do you who live in Benghazi, will you visit Tripoli with a visa? The country will be divided like North and South Korea we will see each other through a fence.

[. . .]

In any case, I have spoken to you, we uncovered cells from Egypt and Tunisia and Arabs. The Libyans who live in Europe and USA, their children go to school and they want you to fight. They are comfortable. They then want to come and rule us and Libya. They want us to kill each other then come, like in Iraq. The Tunisians and Egyptians who are here also have weapons, they want to divide Libya and take over the country.


Gadaffi is self-serving. There does seem to be something there, though. I just know not how much.

I've followed Libya intermittently here--it's been of interest to me mainly as an exemplar of a fragile state, a polity that blames pediatric HIV/AIDS epidemics on evil nurses instead of bad infectious-disease protocols, one that depends on oil to cement together the country. Unlike Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, with their long histories of statehood within coherent and enduring boundaries (and, in the first two countries, imperialist efforts beyond those frontiers), and unlike an Algeria that gained additional coherence under French colonial rule, the very entity "Libya" was a late formation, as the dominant province of Tripolitania in the west was fused with Cyrenaica in the east on the Egyptian border and Saharan Fezzan in the southwest to form modern Libya in 1934.

Ottoman_Provinces_Of_Present_day_Libyapng


As Ahmida noted in his The making of modern Libya, Libya was a very plural society, with the two main areas of habitable land on the northern coast being widely separated by the Gulf of Sirte into two separate societies, each with its own strong linkages extending beyond modern Libya.

One has to keep in mind that prior to the colonial period and the colonial conquest in 1911, strict borders were nonexistent, as were local ties to just one state. The tribes of western Tripolitania and southern Tunisia had strong confederations and were tied to the larger Muslim community of the Maghreb and the Sahara. The state of Awlad Muhammad in Fezzan was linked to the Lake Chad region for trade and the recruitment of soldiers. It also formed a strategic refuge from the Ottoman state in time of war. Equally important to note are the strong socioeconomic ties between the tribes of Cyrenaica and western Egypt. Cyrenaican tribes viewed western Egyptian cities and the desert as both sanctuaries to escape wars and as markets for agropastoral products (12).


When Libya gained its independence, it was established as a federation of three equal regions, perhaps to counter-balance the weight of a Tripolitania that has always been home to two-thirds of the country's population and seems to hold most of Libya's oil. Interestingly, the Senussi religious order that briefly held the monarchy of independent Libya until Gadaffi's 1969 revolution was based in Cyrenaica. The consolidation of power in Tripoli hasn't helped the region. I wonder if the Gadaffi regime's incessant efforts to unify with another Arab country, at least one other, maybe even Malta, might have been an effort to continue the process of state-aggregation.

What does the origin of the protests, and their concentration in Cyrenaica, mean? Italian foreign minister and DEBKAfile alike seem to imply that this revolt might be separatist, but given the cravenly self-serving nature of the Berlusconi government's foreign policy in relationship to Libya and DEBKAfile's bias, I'm not inclined to believe this. Similarly, a division of Libya into Egyptian and Tunisian spheres of influence seems profoundly unlikely, and not only because of the disinterest of Libya's neighbours.

But what does it mean? I don't know; I can only speculate. This informed blog post goes into more detail about the background of regional issues in Libya, but comes to the same conclusion.

You?
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The Global Sociology Blog linked to this graphic by David Andrew Johnson contrasting and comparing the demographics of Facebook and Twitter users.



"Quite a bit of similarities in demographics. Of course, Twitter users update their status more often because that is the point of the whole thing, hence more mobile users as it is easier to do update Twitter on mobiles than to update." Twitter users might not update as much, but the ones who do update fairly frequently--this makes sense, since Facebook might be a less dynamic, less rapidly changing platform than Twitter, more of a stationary place where existing relationships are maintained than Twitter's high-speed hashtagged zaniness.
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My previous post noting some of the online activities of the six hundred million or so belonging to Facebook and Twitter may look a bit surreal followed by Verne Kopytoff's New York Times article "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter", but the surreality is intended.

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.


As Kopytoff notes later in the essay, what's going on isn't the disappearance of blogging as its partial co-option into a growing ecology of Internet-based writing communities which still including blogs, the classical blog simply no longer dominating as it once did thanks to the development of more precise social networking systems--micro-blogs, as they're commonly called--requiring less commitment.

A number of news and commentary sites started as blogs before growing into mini-media empires, like The Huffington Post or Silicon Alley Insider, that are virtually indistinguishable from more traditional news sources.

Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. Twitter, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters, also contributed to the upheaval.

No longer did Internet users need a blog to connect with the world. They could instead post quick updates to complain about the weather, link to articles that infuriated them, comment on news events, share photos or promote some cause — all the things a blog was intended to do.

Indeed, small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said.

“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”

The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.


You think?

And then, as Matt Mullenweg noted, however blogging might no longer be the first online communications modality of choice, it's still growing.

[A]s soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging, the stats show all the major blogging services growing — even Blogger whose global “unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million,” meaning it grew about 6 Foursquares last year alone. (In the same timeframe WordPress.com grew about 80 million uniques according to Quantcast.)

Blogging has legs — it’s been growing now for more than a decade, but it’s not a “new thing” anymore. Underneath the data in the article there’s an interesting super-trend that the Times misses: people of all ages are becoming more and more comfortable publishing online. If you’re reading this blog you probably know the thrill of posting and getting feedback is addictive, and once you have a taste of that it’s hard to go back. You rode a bike before you drove a car, and both opened up your horizons in a way you hadn’t imagined before. That’s why blogging just won’t quit no matter how many times it’s declared dead.



Meanwhile, all this activty with blogs and microblogs and all kinds of blog-like services has created an online community where very large numbers of people are writing for public audiences of varying sizes.

Fourteen percent of online adults are making some effort to write regularly in public! That remains a phenomenal fact; if you’d predicted it a decade ago, as only a handful of visionaries did, you’d have been dismissed as a nut (or maybe a “cyber-utopian”).

So the actual story — which, to be fair, the Times’ article mostly hews to (it’s the headline and lead that skew it more sensationally) — is that blogging keeps growing, but it’s losing popularity among teens.

Social networking is changing blogging. [. . .] More of us are using Facebook and Twitter for casual sharing and personal updates. That has helped clarify the place of blogging as the medium for personal writing of a more substantial nature. Keeping a blog is more work than posting to Facebook and Twitter. So I wouldn’t be surprised if, long-term, the percentage of the population blogging plateaus or even declines.

Maybe we’ll end up with roughly ten percent of the online population (Pew’s consistent finding) keeping a blog. As the online population becomes closer to universal, that is an extraordinary thing: One in ten people writing in public.
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While revolution rages in Libya and we fear for our future, we should pay attention to writer and researcher Steven Pinker in this TED speech when he argues--convincingly--that we humans are far more peaceful than at any point in our past history, that much better reporting and a much lower tolerance for cruelty make us more sensitive, and that the modern state works so well in removing the need for individual violence and one-upsmanship.



Here's the transcript.

Go, read my post and the transcript, and watch the speech.
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I've a post up at Demography Matters making note of some interesting population issues re: Libya, everything from Italian colonization to transit migration to Europe to the hiring of mercenaries.

Go, read.
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