Twitter’s silent majority

The Wall Street Journal has an article “Report: 44% of Twitter Accounts Have Never Sent a Tweet” whose comment stream is particularly vile, though some of the remarks are valid.

Without solid statistics, articles like that can only speculate about the story behind the story. Are people “quietly reading” other people’s tweets or are they simply not spending time there? Does an absence of tweets indicate a lack of engagement?

I’m not one of the 44%, having sent thousands of tweets, while every so often wiping the slate clean to start afresh. I actively read Twitter: it’s an excellent source of news and views, and more effective than other news feeds as a discovery engine, for personalities and stories.

Though my tweet stream has a “high signal to noise” ratio, with many interesting links and retweets, its number of followers remains consistently low. I mainly follow people with high authority in a given subject and if they, like me, want to keep their tweet stream fairly manageable, it’s better for them to stick to primary, high value sources. It’s true that they could keep Twitter manageable by assigning followers to lists, for selective reading, but in that case I could imagine being shoved on to a list named “Fans” or “Uncategorized”. That’s the kind of dishonest behavior that caused me to abandon FriendFeed, once I cottoned on to it.

Unlike the 44%, I re-tweet constantly. I like to keep a record of what I’ve been reading and want to draw further attention to some of these tweets and links. Favoriting tweets would work too, but would be less effective in spreading the word.

Just as there is no reason for celebrities and top influencers to follow my tweet stream, ordinary folks too would be better advised to stay with primary sources in a given field.

Twitter therefore allows the celebs to flourish, and lets everyone else feel resentful if they choose to be. In which case they can head over to the Wall Street Journal to leave their peeved comments.

Words for Garden

The word “bustan”, meaning usually an orchard or garden, is used by various Jewish-Palestinian organizations because it is known both in Arabic and Hebrew, and because it has pleasant associations in both cultures.

Interestingly, the word apparently comes from Persian. Bu- means fragrance. -stan means “place”. My source for this is the website www.iranica.com, which also mentions that Armenian has a word, burastan, which derives from it. The same source says that Bustan is a word only in New Persian, which goes back only as far as 800 BC. Since it somehow got into Hebrew and Arabic, I would have expected it to have arrived earlier.

The word –stan, i-stan, meaning “place” is familiar to everyone, since it appears in the names of numerous central Asian countries. It’s from an ancient Indo-European root, cognate to the Sanskrit sthaa, sthaana, etc., and the English word stand (source: Monier Williams Sanskrit-English dictionary).

The same iranica.com article also mentions various other words for garden. The word baag, an older Persian word, also means garden, but is more strictly a “lot” or “piece” of land. It derives from an Avestan word for “share”, just as in Hebrew, the word helka or lot, comes from the root helek or share. Baagh became a common word for garden in Urdu, Hindi and other languages.

Gardens seem to have been very central to Persian culture, for yet another of their garden words conquered the world: paridaiza (in Old Persian, originally from Avestan), from which the English word paradise, the Arabic word ferdaws, the Greek word parádeisos, and the Hebrew word pardes, are all derived. The word means literally an enclosed place (i.e. with walls around it). A longer explanation is to be found at balashon.com, which explores Hebrew etymology.

The English word garden expresses a very similar concept to paridaiza, in that it too means an enclosed space. It is cognate not only with another English word yard, French jardin, German garten, Latin hortus (cf. horticulture), but also with words meaning fortifications, like the Slavic grad, the old German gard (source: Wikipedia).

The usual Hebrew words for garden, gan, gina, come from the same root as lehagen: to defend or protect. So again, that’s the same concept as paridaiza and garden.

Across conflicts

I’m sorry nowadays that I didn’t see more of Pakistan, when I was there in the 1970s. I took the train up from Zahedan in southern Iran, through Baluchistan to Quetta, where I broke the journey for a night, before continuing to Lahore and the Wagah border. It would have been interesting to see Waziristan and Chitral, back in those safer times.

Now, when I read a book about Pakistan it is with the knowledge that I’ll probably never set foot there again. Partly because I have too many connections with Israel, partly because visa applications to India come with pointed questions about visits to Pakistan and a few other countries.

But Pakistan interests me none the less, and when I heard about a new novel by Fatima Bhutto, I pre-ordered it. Though only finished it now. It’s a fairly slim volume, but extremely well-conceived and written. It tells the story of three brothers and two women residents of the town of Mir Ali, in northern Waziristan. The storyline takes place in the space of a morning before Eid, though with many flashbacks to earlier times. It appears at the start to be a fairly routine morning for the brothers, with the one exception that they have decided to pray in different mosques, for reasons of safety. But gradually we are brought into a story of love and betrayal, desperate acts and crude compromises. Painful questions that hang over this fiercely independent border town are expressed and work themselves out through the lives of the characters.

There’s much in Mir Ali that resembles Palestine, or many another area of the world that deals with occupation, and the difficult decisions it spreads before the occupied. Whereas the menfolk, realizing the impossibility of their goals, falter, only the two women in the story preserve their bravery and self-respect, even if grief, horror and broken promises have made them crazy. It’s a sad tale, a hopeless reflection. Mir Ali may have been exploited and abused by outsiders, but ultimately what unravels its proud independent spirit is the desire for riches from outside: for cellphones, consumer goods, business deals and foreign study. The alternative to being co-opted is to match the enemy in ruthlessness and inhumanity. Either way, the battle is lost. Only the green pine-fragrant forests surrounding the town, themselves rustling with cells of violent jihadists, offer any intimation of integrity.

Gnu Social

I had a pleasant discovery today: Gnu Social . It had been around for a couple of years, but it turns out that last summer, Evan Prodromou, the developer of Status.Net, “donated all of his work to the Free Software Foundation, so we merged the existing project with StatusNet and another project called FreeSocial. And here we are.”

The result certainly looks a lot better than it did before, and there seems to be a small web of independent networks using the Status.Net/Gnu Social framework; one of which I joined. The system works in such a way that you can join one network and subscribe to users of another. Their tweets, or whatever these are called on Gnu Social (on the Status.Net network Identi.ca they used to be called dents) appear in one’s timeline (if however they call that).

It’s a pleasant discovery because by turning these tools over to a community, and decentralizing authority, there is a greater chance that they will take root, and that the network will grow. The mode of operations now resembles, to a greater degree, the network that they are trying to create. Evan Promodou, or Mike MacGirvin at Friendica , or the team that started Diaspora, have all done and continue to do impressive work. But I feel a greater degree of confidence now that there’s a social networking project is in the hands of the Free Software Foundation.

A couple of years ago, there was another effort to create a niche social network: ZSocial. It was a project of Znet, a quite influential American “community of people committed to social change”. They began with a great deal of ambition and created something that in many ways looked quite impressive. But today I found an interesting critique of these efforts: “Realizing How Zsocial lacks the Participatory model” by Stephen Mahood at Cyberunions. Basically he says that the development model behind Zsocial did not seem to match the participatory democratic governance model that the group espouses. Furthermore, Michael Albert, the man behind the effort, disregarded all other existing work that was being done on federated social networks – such as Status.Net and Friendica – and, working with a couple of developers, tried to reinvent the wheel.

On top of this, Albert presented the work of ZSocial as a kind of make-or-break effort for his organization, as if the future of ZCommunications depended on it: ”

ZSocial, as a source of revenue – is our last plausible avenue for preserving ZCom as is, or improving it. If ZSocial doesn’t attract a substantial membership, we will have to drastically cut Z operations…

Subscription fees were set at $3 per month, and they began to recruit members. But evidently there were problems – comments in the same article speak about problems as basic as not being able to log in:

“Login has been broken since the day they launched, despite what must now amount to hundreds of bug reports only on this one issue. For a little while I was getting responses to bug reports rapidly, and they seemed to be working on the problems, but the responses stopped coming after a few days. That’s when I found the group ZSocial Innovation on their site. I urged them to make their platform free software, but they only gave vague indications that it might happen later, when the software was more stable. Well, it’s not getting more stable, so today I urged them again to make it free software, if only for practical reasons. If they’ll just let me fix their bloody login page, they can keep my monthly subscription, otherwise I’m out.”

I also had correspondence with Albert at that time. I said there why I would not be paying the $3 / mo. subscription fee for a service in which I had no personal contacts and which was basically a closed-garden. Why should I bother to place content there which only fee-paying members would be able to read? If they had created a system so expensive, why had they not thought to use one of the existing open source systems that were already perfectly serviceable?

The responses I got back from Albert were arrogant or confused.

Me: I would not pay $3 / mo.

Albert: Interesting… I wonder how you know that already….

Me: [It] would have been possible to use existing free open source systems as backbone such as Diaspora, Friendica, Status.net.

Albert: Tis wouldn’t change our costs…arguably they would wind up greater…

Me: [It] should interact with other networks.

Albert: Not sure what you mean, but it does…remember it is just beginning…

Me: Status.net and Friendi.ca use standard protocols in order that it is possible to join and exchange messages between networks hosted on different servers – as I understand it, that’s the meaning of a decentralized distributed social network. It is also possible to interact with those services via offline clients like Gwibber. If you didn’t begin to work with standard protocols from the beginning, it is unlikely that you would be able to add them later without making huge changes to your system. Of course, you might be able to interact with Facebook and Twitter, using their APIs. But I think you agree that it would be better to create an alternative to these companies.

I tried to find ZSocial today, which wasn’t easy because it isn’t mentioned on the front page of Znet. I couldn’t even find it in Google. When eventually I found the link in an article, it led to an error page. If I’d been paying $3 per month and had gone to the trouble of placing content there, I might not be so happy about that today.

Why Free Speech Loses in India : The New Yorker

Comprehensive article about Penguin’s capitulation in Wendy Doniger affair (and other recent cases.

Power, Privacy, and the Internet | NYRgallery | The New York Review of Books

On October 30–31, 2013, The New York Review of Books held a conference, “Power, Privacy, and the Internet,”

It’s just Om

Someone asked why I in my email signature I generally put the symbol ॐ

My response was:
It’s just Om.
ॐ isn’t really a word, so it doesn’t mean something in the way that words do. It is a symbol, and symbols mean something in a different way that is harder to pin down. Arthur Frawley thinks that in an earlier age, humankind was more adept at symbolic language, and that when intellectual learning became prevalent and we began to insist upon defining everything (i.e. להגדיר things, or put fences around them) in a singular way, we lost our ability to understand the universe of meaning as many-layered. The idea is well represented in Genesis.

Placing a mysterious undefinable word that means nothing and everything and which can never be understood in any conventional way bang in the middle of the mantlepiece serves as a reminder that the tendency to define has its limitations.

Certain spiritual teachers would never sign their name as anything but ॐ

But I didn’t reach that level yet.

Is Zionism Racism?

A Palestinian friend shared (he wasn’t the originator) the following photo and caption:

Some of my friends, neighbors and colleagues consider themselves to be Zionists. Some declare themselves anti-Zionists, and many others don’t wake up at night wondering about it at all.

I’m not going to start looking up “Zionism” in Wikipedia, but as I understand it, in its broadest sense, it mainly expresses the aspiration by some Jews to “return” to the “promised land”. Of course others (both pro-and anti-) have attempted to define that further, such as by saying that Zionism holds that the land of Israel belongs exclusively to the Jews. But if we take it in the broadest sense, I wouldn’t say that Zionism necessarily equates to racism. Zionism has certainly been used as a motivation for racism at many levels, including racist policies towards Palestinians by the State of Israel. By the same token, many other ideologies and religions (perhaps all of them) have been used as a motivation for reprehensible and often genocidal policies. I’m not positive that Zionism is demonstrably more tainted than other isms.

The aspiration of Jews to “return” to the land of Israel is not necessarily something evil. People all around the world, now and in the past, have been expressing the aspiration to go to other places. The entire history of the human race has been one continuous migration of peoples across continents, and sometimes these migrations have been back to perceived homelands or promised lands. There is no doubt that many mass migrations have been responsible for the displacement or extermination of indigenous peoples.

Did the newly United Nations in the 1940s understand that by sanctioning the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine this would entail both the birth of a decades long conflict and the birth of a state that embodies racist policies towards its non-Jewish population? Maybe, but I prefer to think, regarding the latter, that they had higher expectations from a people who had just suffered their own holocaust. The European states that are Christian in character do not necessarily treat non-Christians as second-class citizens. A state that is Jewish in character need not necessarily treat its Palestinian citizens, or refugees from other places, badly. That’s only a choice that it makes. It isn’t or needn’t be inherent in the fact that the state has a Jewish character, or is founded on Zionist principles, if this only means that the state has decided that from its own perspective it is “Jewish” and will preserve an option for all Jews to live here in their “homeland”. It could maintain a similar option for Palestinians and place limits on both. It could proclaim itself entirely secular while still being the “homeland for the Jewish people”. The existence of Jews in a Jewish homeland does not necessarily preclude that others can see it as their homeland too, and that everyone can live in peace together. In the same way, no reasonable person disputes that Jerusalem is sacred to three religions: its sacredness to one religion does not preclude its sacredness to the others.

When we talk about entities such as “the Jewish people” or “the Palestinian people” we are actually only giving credence to myth. That is not important. People are what they believe themselves to be. They are the illusions they cling to, and the affiliations by which their enemies know them too. Those who see the myth, do so only because they are outsiders or have somehow managed to break free of it. Probably they are clinging just as strongly to other illusions or delusions from which they are unable to extricate themselves.

To return to the picture of the children with the flags, the question is not whether the Israeli flag, or all flags should be burned. They won’t be. People will always keep their flags. Flags are not racist. They are only symbols drawn upon fabric. We humans decide for ourselves what the symbols mean. The swastika has meant one thing, over millenia, to Hindus and meant something entirely different for Nazis (and their victims).

I look forward to the day when the Israeli flag will not mean that the land of Israel belongs only to Jews, and when it and the Palestinian flag can fly together, or even be merged as they are in this optimistic picture. For that to happen will require an arduous struggle. May it be waged humanely and nonviolently, so that these children and other children will not have their hopes dashed.

Obama’s NSA speech

EFF’s scorecard on Obama’s announcements

I’m not a clever or sophisticated presidential speech analyst, or even very knowledgeable about the issues, but I realized that listening to Obama’s speech on NSA and national security, was that besides the multiple contradictions, such as about protecting dissidents (like Snowden?), the speech could be interpreted as a kind of mirror writing, which illuminates the unresolved problems by his drawing attention to them and claiming to resolve them. A lesser speech might simply omit mention of the major unresolved problems. But Obama’s technique is to show full awareness of the issues that trouble everyone and pretend to address them, without really doing so.* If you’d submit the speech to analysis, it could therefore be read point by point as an admission of guilt, as if a murderer’s testimony in support of his innocence would mention details known only to himself.

And, “As the nation that developed the Internet, the world expects us to ensure that the digital revolution works as a tool for individual empowerment rather than government control.” That’s indeed what the world wants, Mr. Obama, but what it has come to expect is exactly the opposite.

There is also some comedy, in the way Obama echoed Snowden himself. In his cheery Christmas message, Snowden demanded: “Remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel asking is always cheaper than spying.” Obama: ‘The leaders of our close friends and allies deserve to know that if I want to learn what they think about an issue, I will pick up the phone and call …’ Snowden: “privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.” Obama: “When you cut through the noise, what’s really at stake is how we remain true to who we are…”

Someone** tweeted a photo of an Obama speech in which Bill Clinton suddenly comes on stage waving to the audience and said, imagine if at the end of the speech, Snowden would show up behind Obama, all smiles.

The full speech is here.

* Others say he didn’t:

“It was not what was in the President’s speech that was particularly noteworthy, as The New York Times aptly put it, but what was left out entirely. President Obama neglected to address many of the worries of the world’s largest tech companies — like Apple, Facebook, and Google, among others — delivering no assurances that the NSA would give up its practice of monitoring and sucking up the billions of bytes of data flowing to and from these companies’ users on a daily basis. It was a practice Google’s Eric Schmidt called “outrageous” at best and potentially illegal late last year.”

Recode

** sorry, couldn’t find who this was when I looked again, though I found the famous photo.