TOC*: politics

Posts tonen met het label politics. Alle posts tonen

vrijdag 15 maart 2013

dinsdag 15 januari 2013

AARON SWARTZ MURDERED by Corporate Interest

dinsdag 18 december 2012

Jacob Appelbaum on privacy, government surveillance and the curr....

maandag 10 december 2012

zondag 9 december 2012

Romania: 'Hackerville', capital of global cybercrime

via

donderdag 6 december 2012

Open letter to artist Barbara Kruger

Criticism is raining down on Danske Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in Northern Europe, for their latest marketing campaign ‘A new normal demands New Standards’. How and why this campaign ever saw the light of day is a big question for people in Denmark. For some, the ‘why’ overshadows the ‘how’, which for us has become the most pressing question in these past few weeks.

Danske Bank called on the advertising agency Mensch and artist-photographer Peter Funch, co-owner of Gallery V1 to produce the campaign. The gallery is celebrating its 10 year anniversary and is presenting, among others, famed artist and political activist Barbara Kruger, whose work has become emblematic with a practice of institutional critique and political awareness in a world where machinations, as she would call it, have lulled us to sleep with consumerism and false beliefs.

Barbara Kruger has felt the embrace of the mainstream she calls out, and she would probably claim that there is no out, other than what you carve, with the very same weapons used by the market.

The advertising industry has always had an especially acute sense for the latest, greatest and hottest in culture when it comes to appropriating its iconography for marketing. It is a means to an innovational end – namely branding. And it has also become a more or less accepted fact that this also means disarming everything that could serve as a threat to corporate entities.

The latest advertisement from Danske Bank seems to defy the myth that advertisement cannot go too far, and almost becomes a parody. The campaign was released on top of the medias lessened interest in what could rightfully be called the greatest theft ever to have been committed in Denmark, the ‘permanent’ loan amounting to the sum of 4 billion in U.S dollars, to which the bank answered with this hated campaign: that this loan was permanent and would not be repaid. It is ironic that if anything, the billboards and commercials succeed in waking the ever dormant feelings of dissent.

HERE

woensdag 5 december 2012

Hungary democracy or dictatorship

german or french only

donderdag 29 november 2012

Liberal VVD ensure majority support for scrapping blasphemy laws

There is now majority support in parliament for an end to the ban on blasphemy because VVD Liberal MPs have thrown their weight behind the plan.

The VVD refused to support efforts to lift the ban during the life of the previous government in order not to upset the fundamentalist Christian group SGP, whose support was needed in the upper house of parliament.

The D66 Liberals and Socialist party have drawn up a private members bill to have the blasphemy laws scrapped from the statute books, news agency ANP reports. This is a 'milestone in terms of criminal law', a spokesman for D66 said.

The blasphemy legislation dates from the 1930s.

The SGP said the decision to remove the ban on blasphemy is a 'painful loss of a moral anchor and a symptom of a spiritual crisis'. The party believes the Netherlands should be governed according to Biblical principles and has three seats in the lower house of parliament.

zaterdag 24 november 2012

Losing Humanity

The Case against Killer Robots

With the rapid development and proliferation of robotic weapons, machines are starting to take the place of humans on the battlefield. Some military and robotics experts have predicted that “killer robots”—fully autonomous weapons that could select and engage targets without human intervention—could be developed within 20 to 30 years. At present, military officials generally say that humans will retain some level of supervision over decisions to use lethal force, but their statements often leave open the possibility that robots could one day have the ability to make such choices on their own power. Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) believe that such revolutionary weapons would not be consistent with international humanitarian law and would increase the risk of death or injury to civilians during armed conflict. A preemptive prohibition on their development and use is needed. A relatively small community of specialists has hotly debated the benefits and dangers of fully autonomous weapons. Military personnel, scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and lawyers have contributed to the discussion.

They have evaluated autonomous weapons from a range of perspectives, including military utility, cost, politics, and the ethics of delegating life-and-death decisions to a machine. According to Philip Alston, then UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, however, “the rapid growth of these technologies, especially those with lethal capacities and those with decreased levels of human control, raise serious concerns that have been almost entirely unexamined by human rights or humanitarian actors.”[1] It is time for the broader public to consider the potential advantages and threats of fully autonomous weapons.

The primary concern of Human Rights Watch and IHRC is the impact fully autonomous weapons would have on the protection of civilians during times of war. This report analyzes whether the technology would comply with international humanitarian law and preserve other checks on the killing of civilians. It finds that fully autonomous weapons would not only be unable to meet legal standards but would also undermine essential non-legal safeguards for civilians. Our research and analysis strongly conclude that fully autonomous weapons should be banned and that governments should urgently pursue that end.

HERE