Gain entertainment from politics. Source your bitterness in the real world... and laugh at it. Life of Riley is a collection of political satires written by Dave Riley.
Tinkering will continue as it is made as user friendly as we can manage.
How you engineer a platform like this for a political party's everyday ab hoc usage is still a learning curve and no doubt mentoring newbies trough their wiki journey and dealing with wiki spam will be all part of your standard wiki work week.
Instead.. Wiki is a piece of software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser.Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.(ref)
PS:But now hear this! I don't want to edit another document by emailing drafts back and forth so that I have no notion whatsoever what draft is the last/latest one.
We've blogged on occasion about Web 2.0 platforms -- or if that's too esoterical for you : about doing stuff online rather than offline. This is an example -- this blog you are reading.
While a lot of the time my empirical investigations of these platforms come to naught. I nonetheless become more savvy as time goes on with what's on offer and what may be each platform's likely political application.
On the top of my list of preferences has to be blogs and blogging. And soon after comes a lot of the new multimedia platforms I use which integrate with blogging so easily: YouTube, Blip TV, Flickr, Picasa,Flickr, etc. such that they have been for me, an extension of blogging.
But as the song asks, Is that all there is? Given that so many start-ups had been trying to grab a web market niche with new bells and whistles platforms these last five years it is a challenge to sift through all the latest on offer, such that you can get dazzled by the offerings. I'm sure I'm thought of as being something like a child in candy shop and my enthusiasms may seem impulsive and maybe over the top.
No matter -- I value the chase and the hunt. 'Tis a hobby.
In the Socialist Alliance there's a gradual, albeit hesitant, take up of blogging which I think will bear greater fruit over the next year as skills increase. Once comrades have learnt how to open an account and write their comments inside edit windows then such a skilling up (exactly the same as running an email program) raises the prospect of other online options. Especially once the logic of WYSIWYG editing sinks in -- What You See Is What You Get is seen for what it is.
The SA has begun a fragmented journey into exploring wikis and the Socialist Alliance Wikiis a national version of an exercise that is also being harnessed in some localities. We use wikis to file share and to collectively edit documents,. such as policy statements(eg)and charters (eg).
There's a lot to be said for this approach in a country as big as Australia and with a membership as geographically spread and separate as the Alliance's. Comrades are nonetheless still frightened of wikis and don't 'get it' yet.
There's also a knee jerk bias which presumes that such activities should be left up to specialists or nerds -- and really it's too time consuming to relate to.
In the case of wikis -- that attitude is not shared in schools, corporations, community clubs, non profits, and the like who have taken to wikis big time. Wikis may have been around since Ward Cunningham invented them in 1994 with the working title WikiWikiWeb (wiki means quick in Hawaiian) but it has taken until the last 2 years for wikis to really take off.
And this brings me back to the here and now challenge that wikis offers us in way of utility.
While blogs, in my view, are reach out and communication tools with a generic organising potential, wikis are collaborative tools with as much collaboration available as you want to share or participate in . This prospect hasn't dawned within the left at all which seems still caught up in egroup discussions as the primary exchange platform ( supplementing email) and individual two way email exchanges. The left's use of email has skyrocketed such that your ordinary everyday activist is drowning in egroup generated emails as though this is the apex of access and participation.
We reached overload some time back.
Nonetheless it is almost Utopian to think that we can then shift to a motley array of other platforms to take up the slack and get our left business back online and on track. The take up, for the moment, is not confident enough for that.
Can wikis fill the niche?
So the question for me is: can wikis fill this niche? Can they deliver what we can make darn good use of?
I think they can.
I've been exploring a lot of platforms in cloud land. and I guess the most interesting option that I thought suited the habits of political organizing was Google Docs.
Google Docs is a free, Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users.
But Google Docs is cumbersome to use compared to a wiki like a wikispaces wiki.Some wikis are harder to use than others but Wikispaces (and I've been using Wikispaces for almost 4 years now) is, if anything, getting easier and more user friendly.
With a pitch aimed at the US school system, wikispaces are as self evident as a walk down Sesame Street and they offer a kick arse free account. I like it so much that I've had a $50/year paying account one for 2 years.
After playing around with Google Docs for over a year and using them for the odd bit of collaborative organising , without much enthusiasm being fostered on my part, it has struck me that I'm greatly under using the resources on offer at Wikispaces. So I'm going to now focus on wikis as the main game and key challenge in Web 2.0 land. Google Docs may offer a lot of appealing bits and pieces, but the platform is so cumbersome to use. Cloud Computing may make sense but if the Google Gorilla is to control our access then its going to a warped exercise.
So the main game has to be to prove -- or at least explore much more aggressively-- the utility of a wiki. For my part, I'm now tweaking my existence by converting a wiki into my own personal wiki.
Methinks: The element I'm looking for is a wiki that can help pull together all my various web engagements such that they're on the same page (as it were) -- the same web locale -- that was both accessible to others as well as considerate of my own personal and not so public activities. While Wikispaces has enough of the widget option to pull a lot of what I want together for more general political use, I'd want to customize the permissions for each page. For that level of managemnt I'd need to advance to their "Super" plan which is $US20/month.For general political purposes that would be the best option.As a sponatneous use of wrds I've begun to call this aspect of wikis, "hubbing" (as in hub -- the central part of a wheel.)
File sharing via wikis is beginning to occur more often in my left milieu. While collaborative text editing has begun I think if we can make it de rigueur standard operating procedure then we can free ourselves up from the brutalizing tooing and froing that is fostered by any number of ab hoc editorial committees. Nonetheless, the left understandably is still being held hostage to hard copy and the containment paradigm of the printed A4 half A4, brochure or broadsheet...and the constraints of the pdf file which is not editable, and so seldom viewable,online.
As for other matters.
We'd discussed web conferencing here before and the consequence of that seem to be that Skype -- which now offers an extended room option (to 20 online at one time) with a swathe of add ons -- is way ahead of other more complicated options like DimDim.Skype also offers excellent audio quality as any good podcaster knows (Skype is the basis of many interviews done on LatinRadical).
If you need to catch up with wikis and want to find out more about the platform, you can start by checking out the information available on wikis on The Activist Toolkit(which is itself a wiki)
By Peter Boyle [Thanks to Alex Bainbridge for doing the photoart. The actual Liberal billboard can be seen here]
In his notorious Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler explained the political device of the big lie:
“...in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously...”
If Liberal federal opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull wasn't consciously taking Hitler's political advice when he unveiled his party's new mobile political billboard blaming Labor for building up a $315 billion debt through “reckless spending”, he was acting on a similar political instinct. The big truth that Turnbull's big lie seeks to obliterate is that the $315 billion debt is just part of the social cost being forced on the Australian public to bail out capitalism from a crisis that follows decades of greedy speculation and social and environmental vandalism.
Since the late 1970s in Australia, both Labor and Liberal governments alike have been culpable in feeding capitalism's profit frenzy by pursuing a common neoliberal economic and political agenda. The culmination of this frenzy of greed and speculation is the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. And now the public is being forced to pay.
Despite all the spin about economic recovery, 21,900 full-time jobs went in just the month to June, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Meanwhile, ordinary families are being hit with bigger bills for childcare, rent, health, water and electricity.
Around the world, many trillions of dollars of pain is being inflicted on ordinary people to pay for unbridled capitalist profiteering.
At a time like this, capitalist politics becomes increasingly a campaign to shift the blame away from the system itself. Scapegoats are set up. And given Australia's racist history, it is not surprising that underbelly of capitalist politics today is the targeting of racial minorities. Mass SMS messages inciting violence against Indians, Lebanese and Muslims sweep through the most recession-hit suburbs of the big cities – sometimes with bloody consequences. Sly racist tracts work their way into email inboxes.
Small neo-Nazi groups are fanning racial hatred against immigrant communities and are trying to regroup and relaunch themselves as an electoral force under the name “Australia First”. These far-right goons have taken heart from the rise the the electoral support for anti-immigrant parties in Europe and they seek to capitalise on the deepening recession.
With such menacing developments afoot, a publication like Green Left Weekly, which is committed to exposing the big lies that permeate capitalist politics, is essential. Please make a donation today to the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund at: Greenleft, Commonwealth Bank, BSB 062-006, Account No. 00901992. You can also post a cheque or money order to PO Box 515, Broadway NSW 2007 or phone in a donation through on the toll-free line at 1800 634 206 (within Australia).
The Tamil community of Sydney resolved to move beyond mourning to relaunch the national liberation struggle for Tamil Eelam in a rally titled "Tamil Uprising".
Grahame Russel, human rights lawyer is in Honduras getting the real story out. The military coup, backed by the oligarchy and elite business community, has been universally condemned, but unlike Tehran the huge houtpouring of popular repudiation of the coup masters and the military, doesn't seem to be making the headlines in mainstream media.
Grahame was present last Sunday when the President of Honduras tried to fly in to return to his country after being bundled out of his residence last week by the military and put on a flight to Costa Rica. Somewhere between one hundred thousand and two hudnred thousand demonstrators turned up at the airport to see the Presidential plane land. Two were shot by the military and another four wounded. After the military placed trucks on the runway and fired shots at the plane after a low pass over the runway the landing was aborted. He will try again on Wednesday (Thursday Australian time). The Honduran people are mobilised, the biggest outpouring of popular power in this country since the 1950s. Honduras is diplomatically isolated, although the US is slow to take decisive action.
Anyone who has shot video or recorded audio at a street demonstration appreciates mobility.
I've been experimenting with ways to carry my shooting rig around with me so that I can also hook it up to a recorder. I also wanted to run a microphone to the MiniDV camera -- a Canon MD 120.
Since I had a HiMD recorder-- Sony MD Walkman MZ NH 700 -- with plug in power microphones to go with it I wanted to integrate the two systems. I also had learnt that if I'm on an "assignment" I needed to record much more audio than I'd videod. I wanted a system which would enable me to keep the audio recording running while I selectively shot video . I also wanted better audio quality than the inbuilt microphone that came with the camera.
And since I podcast audio and videoblog in effect I wanted to get the best out of two separate mediums.
I had previously hung all this rig from bags and pouches on my person and it proved very cumbersome and hard to monitor and manipulate -- such as turning either device on or off. But I had been using the Ultrapod monopod for some time and loved it. The Ultrapod is a small, lightweight, folding camera tripod with adjustable ball & socket head and Velcro securing strap.
(I've also been using small camera tripods to support my microphones.)
So with a bit of Velcro strapping, I combined the lot-- Voila!
By rights -- and I've yet to confirm this -- the audio that runs from the HiMD should also be automatically gained before it is taken in as audio on the video as I run the HiMD audio out into the microphone in for the Video camera.
Recently a discussion has surfaced about whether population control schemes could feature in the policy aims of the Australian Climate Change movement.
Simon Butler is an analyst and contributor to Green Left Weekly who argues that the proponents of population control schemes completely miss the underlying causes of climate change.
Julia started by asking Simon about the history of such schemes and the lessons we can learn about their previous implementations.
This talk was broadcast on Radio Adelaide on the 10th of June.
BRISBANE: Fifteen hundred trade unionists and their supporters marched through the streets of Brisbane on July 3 to oppose the sell off of Queensland public assets. The protest had been called by the Electrical Trades Union and later was supported by the Queensland Council of Unions.Addressing the rally were speakers from the QCU, AFULE, ASU and the Rail Tram and Bus Union.
Mick Carr from the Maritime Union of Australia told the rally that there was no upside for a one off fixing of the debt by selling off public assets. Peter Simpson , state secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, said that his union wont be putting one cent into the ALP coffers at the next election if this legislation is still on the books.
He said it was time to put a line in the sand.
David Matters from the Rail Tram and Bus Union told everyone that his union, with community support, had won their fight against the prisatisation of the Brisbane City Council bus service in the 1990s.To applause he said, that it was time to put Anna Bligh under the control of working people.
But the surprize from among the speakers came from ALP state president and Australian Manufacturing Workers Union Secretary, Andrew Dettmar, who said that his union will not be supporting any politician at the next state election unless they make a no privatsation pledge.
The rally was followed by a march to state parliament .
When Rupert Murdoch’s Australian published a racist attack (see here) on Green Left Weekly and particularly its Arabic-language supplement, The Flame, I rang its editor, Soubhi Iskander, with the news.
“Peter, this proves we are doing something good”, he chuckled. This is a sentiment echoed by many readers and supporters of Green Left Weekly. If the Australian lashes out at us in this way we must be an effective voice of dissent. It goes for us because, as the slanderous July 1 article, “A willing ally to Hamas's hatred” by Ilan Grapel explains, we are “Australia's best-known radical-left newspaper”.
As the blogsite “Murdoch’s Propagandists” , explains:
“Murdoch has a massive news and media organisation that is able to reach into every living room throughout the entire Western world – and beyond. Much of its so-called ‘news’ content is carefully designed to induce a particular bias toward a view that would be favourable to the view represented by the Murdoch propagandists. “Murdoch has a long history of championing Israeli Zionists and their neoconservative supporters around the world providing them with a platform from which to present their propaganda. “The vast majority of Murdoch’s editorial staff are hard right pro-Zionist individuals who ensure that very little gets through to their audience that is not favourable to their cause.”
Of course it is a David and Goliath type battle to take on opponents like the Murdoch empire. This year, even with the global recession, Murdoch’s News Corp declared a US$2.72 billion profit (compared with $2.69 billion) last year. Murdoch’s new second-in-command, Chase Carey, has been promised $US43.1 million in his first year alone, including $US10 million in cash just for signing on to the job.
Carey won’t have to worry about copping pain from the asset writedowns and restructuring costs that may flow from the meltdown of capitalism’s decades of speculative bubble blowing because his bonus depends on earnings-per-share gains excluding such charges. That’s what you get paid for systematically telling lies on a global scale for big business!
Meanwhile Green Left Weekly gets by with an annual Fighting Fund appeal for A$250,000. A lot of hard work by our supporters goes into raising this each year. Fund raising dinners, jumble sales, etc, are organised as well as the collection of donations. Through this sort of activity we have managed to raise $112,307 so far this year. If you can help us raise the rest, please make a donation today to our fighting fund at: Greenleft, Commonwealth Bank, BSB 062-006, Account No. 00901992. Otherwise, you can send a cheque or money order to PO Box 515, Broadway NSW 2007 or phone in a donation through on the toll-free line at 1800 634 206 (within Australia).
On tonights Union Show we look at the ambo’s campaign for longer rest breaks and better pay, which we covered a year ago and we look back over the campaign to find that the state government and Amublance Victoria have not moved forward.
This is even after a leaked email last week from management states that their position is not sustainable.
We also take a look at one of Melbourne’s most progressive radio stations – 3CR and we drop in on the Solidarity Breakfast team of Lisa Farrance and Dan Archer.
Lisa and Dan have a chat about the 3CR, the program and the importance of supporting a true alternative and independant media voice in the face of unrelenting conservative media bias.
While the Greens here aren't so sparky anyway what concerns me is that Drew may not be able to deliver labour to enrich the community campaign.
This was different in NSW I gather but here that's a problem for the rest of us. And that's important I think when we pick through the various examples of alternative partying -- that at least in Qld -- without a Greens member on the parly benches there's not much substance to what the Greens can do as a party (although individual Greens do stuff of course)
And as we negotiate our way through the terrors of climate change I think there's a real challenge for the greens project internationally to deliver more than what they have so far.
In that sense I miss the ideological engagement that existed in their milieu in the nineties and this in stead has defaulted to a sort of argument which runs: "Look at the polls. We're the only real alternative to Labor because that's what the polls say."
And many on the left have played up to that in a sort of depressed state of resignation.
The complication is, as we saw, that in the lead up to the last federal elections, the ACTU et al allowed their ranks to vote Greens (and SA etc for that matter)but this hasn't been followed up by a stronger class allegiance by the Greens. 18 months on The Greens are way away from any campaign orientation to key working class and trade union issues,.. They voted for Gillard ABCC Lite of course...but I didn't see the Greens actually challenging the ABCC in real street or on the grass time.
What is at stake however, I guess, is the possibility of some trade union forays into trade union election campaign mode with Trade Union candidates but with perhaps sharp preference flows. In a sense this was the template offered by No2EU and Arthur Scargill.
When you look at it there's precious little room left for the trade unions to manoevre and for example , here the ETU has left the ALP Left but not the ALP and they are getting abused up hill and down dale while the left that rolled over for Bligh tries to cover its dirty deeds.
In contrast, the meeting last Tuesday was a showcase of unity. Amazing it was. Everyone was saying in effect the same thing: ETU, SA, David Matters, the Greens...and when the audience started up the only argument the far left groupuscules offered were complaints about no strike being a spontaneous response.
But you see, that's all they were: complaints. Where's the DIY?
Its' in situations like this you realize how friggin marginal the socialist left(and Greens too) is because while some 84% of Qlders are on side our resources have to be more than a few selected complaints or abstract options.
You also realize that even the ETU is isolated -- cynically and brutally isolated by the Laborist gang -- and that despite that, we're all in this fight together. And the ETU has stood its ground! Amazingly it has not relented on its commitment to fight these sells offs.
As for the ALP ranks -- "not happy Anna!". So there are wild cards perhaps. As for any everyday passer by -- I've heard it, and the state government is abused and maligned in terms that to my sweet ears are shocking.
Afterthought: The irony is that the way forward is self evident but no one can see it for the trees. If the Socialist Alliance can bring together such a platform for such a discussion then there exists right there the sort of alliance building that's imperative to do...and the fact is that the SA is, for the moment, the only facilitator that can do it and is unconditionally willing to.
So all the hype and posturing you get about party options and the horrors of the polling day choices is "dealt with" not with angst and maybes but in the real time struggle of coming together. That's a lesson the left has not learnt and so far, in its little enclaves and tribal allegiances, has proven totally incapable of learning.
Some 2,500 workers, urban poor and students march in Jakarta today against the neoliberalism. PRD/Papernas comrades organised this. You can read about it in Green Left Weekly soon. Here are some pics: Made with Slideshow Embed Tool
Video of a meeting organised by the Socialist Alliance to discuss a community response to the privatization of public assets by the Bligh state Labor government -- Brisbane, Qld Australia.
THE Green Left Weekly is probably Australia's best-known radical-left newspaper. While nominally independent, it is affiliated with the Socialist Alliance party and its youth movement Resistance! Like most radical socialist groups, it invariably aligns with the anti-Israel movement.
For some time it has been apparent that an unholy alliance is growing between extreme left-wing groups and Arab and Islamic extremists, despite completely different visions for society. This alliance has been on show in much of the anti-war movement in Britain and other places. For instance, Britain's "Respect" party is basically an alliance of radical Muslims and old hard-line Marxists such as former Labour MP George Galloway. Galloway was pro-Saddam Hussein before the 2003 Iraq war. Today, he works for the Iranian government mouthpiece television station, Press TV.
But what isn't widely known is that the Green Left Weekly is openly promoting extremism among Arabic speakers in Australia through a monthly Arabic-language insert called The Flame (read issues here). This support is not limited to Green Left Weekly's own far-left agenda. It supports terrorist groups and promotes violence as the solution to the existence of the "Zionist state."
You would think GLW's declared pursuit of the advancement of "anti-racist, feminist, student, trade union, environment, gay and lesbian, civil liberties" would rule out the promotion of radical Islamist groups such as Hamas, which are deeply hostile to all the above.
Yet alongside content promoting the PFLP, a tiny left-wing and currently marginal Palestinian terror group, Hamas is also promoted by GLW as a positive model of "resistance"; that is to say, terrorism. Those killed as a result of the violence Hamas sparks are "martyrs", terminology Flame shares with Hamas. Further, the terminology of the Flame is openly hostile to the more moderate governments of the region and repeatedly demands all-out war on the "Zionist entity".
The January edition of the Flame was devoted to the conflict in Gaza. The cover page is a compilation of statements from various communist parties in the Arab world. Predictably, the communiques incited its Arabic readers with imagery of "slaughter," and a "waterfall of Palestinian blood washing the streets". More surprisingly, there are implicit calls for other Arab states to expand the Gaza war.
In "Hunt of a people", the paper refers to the 1982 Lebanon war, indignant "Arab capitals stood watching, exactly as is happening now."
The paper targets American-allied Arab governments for their moderation in the war, which it terms "collusion". The front-page article from the Iraqi Communist Party rebukes the Saudi government, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, which it disparagingly dubs the "Oslo Authority". The Mubarak government is condemned for being "a loyal accomplice to Israel and the Oslo Authority in their attempt to shut Hamas out". It also accuses the Saudi monarchy of having covert dealings with "the Zionists" stretching back decades. Any non-violent interaction with Israel, whether actual or imagined, is scorned.
In the March edition the Flame was aghast at Egypt for co-operating with the US against Hamas. Its expose was titled "Egypt uses American soldiers to prevent weapons smuggling to the resistance!" In the Arabic, "the resistance" is euphemism for terrorist violence and for Hamas itself.
Another article, "A return to principles is necessary after the Israeli aggression", is more virulent. An illustration shows a Palestinian imprisoned behind barbed wire shaped as a partial Jewish star. The article condemns those calling the Gaza war a victory for the "resistance", given the large proportion of "martyrs" from the Palestinian people in comparison to the "slim" number killed among "soldiers of the Israeli occupation army". The rest of the article is critical of the Palestinian factions for their internecine fight.
It criticises Hamas for abandoning its traditional position as the "resistance" against "the enemy" to fight the PA and calls for a "united Palestinian resistance" which will "return the benefit to the Palestinian people". It is clear that this unity will not negotiate peace with Israel, with the paper stating "this unity in battle must not fall into the trap of dialogue that the decrepit Arab regimes of the region are producing." The Flame defines Israel as "the enemy" and demands violent "resistance" while pouring scorn on negotiations or dialogue, It praises the assassination of a "Zionist minister" as "courageous."
The radical anti-Israel stance of Green Left Weekly is no secret. However, the message it pitches to the Arabic-speaking community of Australia is far more inflammatory.
Unbeknown to its English readers, it supports terrorist groups such as Hamas whose goal is to create a state where there would be no place for the gays, lesbians, feminists and trade unionists who read the English-language edition of the paper.
Ilan Grapel is a researcher with the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.
About
Apropos of the comments here on wikis (see Wikis as political organising tools) , the Socialist Alliance Wiki has had a bit of a overhaul and is now all fresh and sprightly.
We've blogged on occasion about
By Peter Boyle
