trollzor’s blog

I have had this in draft for a while, so I am posting a bit late in the game and it’s been covered already by many other bloggers, but I just want to add my discontent to the whole Bagaric affair. This prof of law at Deakin has a journal article (ironically at USFCA in SF) and an opinion piece in The Age which basically abandons the principles of liberal democracy by calling for the acceptance of torture in some “ticking bomb” situations. I reject Bagaric’s carefully constructed hypotheticals totally on the slippery slope principle in the application of such a policy in real life.

Quiggin links to this wonderful piece that shows just how corrupt the sets of practices surrounding torture can get. Quiggin also notes there are few who would actually defend Bagaric’s position on the right, their refusal to condemn is equally interesting. But I would have to say this issue really can’t be divided into the simplistic left/right stuff as the true liberals on the right and progressives on the left won’t have a bar of it.

There may even be a case for Bagaric’s removal from his position as head of school of Deakin law (retaining his job, just not the extra title). Is it appropriate for a law school to have as it’s symbolic head a person who does not advocate the basic principles of liberal democracy? He should be allowed to make his case from a professorship, or apply for a position in a political science department… but should someone be able to lend the weight of their title as HoS to publish such beliefs? Already there was a letter in the op-ed pages of The Age from one of Bagaric’s colleges who was (rightfully) trying to distance Bagaric from the sentiments of the rest of the department. It’s a difficult question, because you always have to be wary of academic censorship, so I think Bagaric should certainly retain his job, and should not be silenced, but perhaps such a special title and position isn’t appropriate. Would a racist be allowed to exist as the head of school of a Cultural Studies department, or a creationist as the head of a biology department in a secular university? Sure, let them speak, but the head of the department should represent prevailing views of the department (or else how are they supposed to represent it? or lead it’s research agenda for that matter?). In the end it’s up to Deakin Uni and his colleges as to whether he still has their confidence, and while I know it’s not black and white he certainly doesn’t have mine.

This also forms part of a block of attacks being made on the presumption of innocence we are told more and more that: torture is ok at home, that ASIO can detain people without lawyers, that we should have mandatory detention of those seeking asylum (from regimes we are fighting for being evil no less), and while we’re at it - lock up children too, the Indonesian court system is fine and we shouldn’t criticise it, that US torture somehow isn’t that bad because such policies make us safer.

More interesting coverage from the world of blogs

Podcasting is term which I really dislike as it connects the practice of downloading audio files to a particular portable media player, the ipod. Yes, the practice of encapsulating the whole thing in a feed (RSS) occurred at a time when the ipod was/is the dominant portable audio player, but I don’t see that as a compelling reason to bow to a given company’s PR department. I guess I am just one of those people who says vacuum and tissue not “Hoover” or “Kleenex”. Hopefully it will pass, but Apple resides deep in the tech/cool zeitgeist (not undeservedly mind you, but in this case it’s perhaps not the most appropriate). I see this less as the rise of a new medium than the realisation that streaming media is not the best solution to many “problems” it was trying to solve.

My second gripe, before I get on to how cool it is, is that people are still using MP3 and not an Ogg container with Vorbis (better than MP3) or even FLAC (a lossless codec which I use ripping CDs) encoding. An MP3 decoder can’t be bundled with free software programs because it violates the patent (which notably they didn’t enforce until MP3 became popular). Notably CBC is trialling Ogg Vorbis and the BBC has people working on an open source video codec.

Here is a screencap of the feed reader I use for linux, Liferea:

You can see I am subscribed to a number of blog feeds which are automatically updated, which is a nice central way to keep an eye on things. You can also see I have ABC, BBC and CBC radio feeds (aka. “podcasts”) from the experimental trials. The way Liferea handles opening files isn’t great, it just sends it to the default system browser, so I just pass a copy of the URL of the mp3 file to wget and download it. Before Liferea I was just opening the xml and getting it from there, but that’s hardly a fun way to do it.

This opens up the interesting topic of what effect this sort of “download and keep” system will have on the media. It seems that the publicly funded broadcasters and the amateurs already have a viable model, I am not sure what commercial broadcasters are going to do. They are starting to take a look (and at other things too). I suppose in some of the networks news is run at a loss anyway and just serves in a network prestige role, but others will have some difficulty making a transition. On a slightly unrelated note I just saw Network recently, which I recommend highly (esp. the character Arthur Jensen’s speech)

Interesting commentary on some things newmedia (more blogs) from onlineopinion contributer Hugh Brown in his pieces here and here. There is also a directory, podcast.net, which I have yet to check out fully, but it looks very nice.