Registan - Different Stans

May 16, 2013

Joshua Foust’s Illiberal Arguments for Drones

Yemeni activist Farea Al-Muslimi testifies at a Congressional hearing about drones.

There is nothing likely more diabolically tempting to the human rights activist's mind (as distinct from the peace activist's mind) than the notion that war — which is a given, which is legal, which even has rules — can be made "better" or "more precise" or "more legal" or "less damaging".

And that's precisely the argument that the diabolical Joshua Foust makes to the policy community and the human rights movement which he always seeks to undermine with his latest apologia for drones, "The Liberal Case for Drones".

There's even a feel-good sub-headline, "Why human rights advocates should stop worrying about the phantom fear of autonomy". That's a reference to the idea that if machines are coded to go and do things, human agents will lose control over them, i.e. lose their autonomy, and cede it to machines, which thereby become more autonomous even beyond human agency.

I've written in the past about Foust's immorality on the drones issue here and here and about the problem of so many civilians killed here.

To extreme groups like CODE PINK, to the legions of facile shallow anti-American re-tweeters, it's easy to put Foust down as doing the evil bidding of the Amerikan war machine and discount his sophisticated arguments – but they're not his audience and they don't matter to him.

Foust wants to convince the technocrats in the human rights organizations and liberal press and think tanks to come around to his way of thinking, and he is already successful in some respects. While Human Rights Watch has boldly started a campaign against "Killer Robots" (like Yoshimi!), there are those in the same international law circles who find the Foustian logic compelling; they think that having a cleaner and more precise way to kill people, given that it actually isn't against international law to wage war if you follow humanitarian law, would be a boon for humankind.

"Lest You Dash Your Foot Against a Stone"

At one level, this parable is worth invoking because it's about a premise that divine (perfect) agency will work right every time and the right angelic interventions would kick in every time, and at another level it's simply about bad literalist arguments that don't take into the complexity of the divine.

In the Bible (Luke 4:9-11), Jesus Christ fasts for 40 days and nights, and then Satan tempts him three times. The first time he suggests Jesus turn a stone into a loaf of bread to show off his powers, and Jesus says "man cannot live by bread alone". The second time he shows Him all sorts of earthly kingdoms that could be His if only he would serve the devil, and Jesus dismisses him quoting scripture about serving only the Lord God.

Then Satan takes Jesus up to the top of the temple and says:

He will command his angels concerning you,
to guard you,
On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.

But this time, Jesus doesn't answer the substance of the temptation either literally or spiritually, as he did with the first two, but simply says "You should not put the Lord God to the test."

And what's diabolical about this — like the idea of the perfect, liberal drone — is that it's true that the angels would bear up any falling Jesus — that He could count on, He could go against the laws of nature, or perhaps that would be their fulfillment. But testing spiritual powers in a frivolous and self-destructive manner like this? No, that would be wrong. Jumping in the first place would be a misuse of perfection.

Knowing that many people, even if they hate drones, dislike religion and find parables annoying, let me be less oblique: this is a story about the uses of perfection — that you don't have to use perfection just because you can, or use it to show off perfection itself. The intellectual temptation that Foust is offering is the lure of perfection which then overshadows the not only commandments like "thou shalt not kill," but precludes an examination of whether a war without the deterrent of war's immediate effects is itself immoral (because it's beyond the reach of the premises of humanitarian law) and a course an examination of intent, effectiveness, and the psychological impact on local people that they simply won't change because somebody's been clever on Twitter.

"A Just War"

In our age of scientism, these arguments that are technically right and technically have nothing wrong with them and don't even have a sacred answer (for example, the arguments of "just war" seem to be irrelevant to the liberal drone advocates if they were efficient in ending war) — they are the most persuasive.

The three reasons most people think to oppose drones are as follows:

o the program is secretive so you don't know what they're doing, whether they're attacking the right people — it's under the CIA's management;

o people, even children, are killed accidently and aren't combatants and weren't meant to be targeted

o the people in these countries where drone attacks take place seem least persuaded of all those in the world that a liberal technocratic solution has been conceived justly to solve their problems — and more insurgents spring up in the wake of those killed by drones.

But Foust answers all these objections and more, and always diabolically replies that if you don't like the wars in which these robotic machines are used, hey, go and attack the "war on terror" policy at its root and don't blame the messenger.

Foust will be happy to say that the program should be less secret, or more careful, or even that it doesn't work so well in, oh, Yemen. But he keeps on finding more and more diabolical justifications to which human rights advocates don't have good objections, and peace activists have even less (they just keep saying war is bad for children and other living things, and who could disagree?)

Jesus could tell the devil that powers shouldn't be tested needlessly "because it's blasphemous" or "you're just trolling me" but he simply says "don't tempt me any more with this stuff because it's not going to work, I won't fall for it". So ultimately, while it may seem pretty thin and not very technically impressive or profound and scholarly, the argument must still be tried that says drones are immoral for all the reasons you can think of if we are to remain human, and not "more than human". Or less.

Agency and Autonomy: Whose?

Foust dismisses the arguments about agency — the engines of death are too removed from the people who fire them — by impishly citing examples of weapons such as South Korean guns that can target from two miles away — which nobody protests. Or indeed one could cite all kinds of weapons with computerized systems, and submarine missiles and so on. Even so, two miles is two miles, and a thousand or two thousand or more are, well, awfully far away.

It's not just about the agency, but the deterrence that you want war to have on the warrior. If they are on the battlefield or in situations where they are wounded or their buddies killed or they see awful scenes, they will want less war, right? Enough of all those atrocities, as they are having in Syria, and people will stop warring on each other, right? Well, no, it doesn't seem so, and there aren't even any drones in Syria. That argument could have been tried in the past, but it works less and less.

There's nothing magical or extra-terrestrial about robots — they are just the concretization of human will — for now. That's why I say whose autonomy is a good question to ask. So it's just the will of one set of humans against another, and it need not be made special or fetishized any more than computer programs. They can be criticized; they can be stopped; they can be modified with user imput. They have to be. So you can throw overboard some of the technological determinism by going back to the coder and his absence or morals or the buggyness of the code or the poor user experience (those people in countries who don't like the psychological feeling of drones bearing down on them from the sky).

But that only gets you so far, because like a good solutionist of our time, Foust says the drones are getting better and better, more and more accurate, and they can be made to be more perfect than humans.

Collateral Immorality and More Than Human

After all, he says — and here the devil is surely at work — "Collateral Murder" lets us know just how imperfect human beings are when they go about the task of finding an appropriate military target — armed men — and shooting at them without harming civilians. Right? Says Foust:

It is a curious complaint: A human being did not distinguish between civilians and combatants, apply the Geneva Convention, or determine an appropriate use of force during the infamous 2007 "Collateral Murder" incident in Iraq, when American helicopter pilots mistook a Reuters camera crew for insurgents and fired on them and a civilian van that came to offer medical assistance.

Of course, using Julian Assange's agitprop (which I totally take apart here) ought to be out of bounds morally all on its own in a debate like this, but such scruples wouldn't stop Foust, although he claims to be a critic of WikiLeaks and claims to have thought Cablegate was harmful.

The problem with "Collateral Murder," however, is that a journalist chose to be escorted by, or to be in the company of, armed men. Journalists endlessly debate whether this was appropriate, but it is a legitimate debate and it is at the heart of the matter — after all, had they not been, they wouldn't have been killed. It is a battleground, after all. The soldiers in the helicopter in fact rightly picked out armed men — their assumption that another man with a camera on his shoulder and not an RPG wasn't a combatant was wrong, but it wasn't immoral or a war crime. Reuters doesn't call it that; Human Rights Watch doesn't call it that; only the anarchists in WikiLeaks pretend that it is, for political purposes.

Foust holds out the possibility that in our forthcoming more perfect world, the drones will "just know" that they shouldn't shoot if they see something that they will know better is a camera tripod. Although he never specifies how exactly the more-perfect drones will now be better than error-prone humans (so very Foust!), the only thing I can think of is that the drone will do less shooting if it sees small forms that might be babies, or cameramen's tripods, which their facial-recognition or object-recognition programs will be very good at — better than humans. Or if the drone can see right through the van, and see that the small forms in it are children. Right? So if they can't lock on the target as exact, they just won't shoot, right? But they don't do that now…

Cyber-Autonomy

Foust then finds experts to fit his theories. First, if you were going to use the argument that drones are too autonomous, Foust would say, oh, but autonomy is on a spectrum — Armin Krishnan a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso has parsed it all for you.

If you were going to raise objections about the general tendency of machines to malfunction (which is why you had to simply turn off and turn on again your computer, phone, Xerox machine, etc. today, maybe multiple times), why, that's just not so: Samuel Liles, a Purdue professor specializing in transnational cyberthreats and cyberforensics, discounts your argument, pointing out ""We trust software with less rigor to fly airliners all the time." (In what year do you think they will drop the "cyber" for these phenomena because so little of these things will happen in the real world?)

Yet airplanes do crash, and they don't kill the wrong people when they take off and land normally. Drones are different; they are meant to kill and do. This is ultimately like those stupid arguments that gun-rights obsessives make about car accidents killing so many more people (although of course, cars mainly drive people to their destinations and people are mainly killed accidently) — or the argument that only four people died in Benghazi but so many more people are killed in fires every day. Yes, these kinds of "persuasive pairing" arguments are ALWAYS stupid at root.

Says Foust, about the tendency of machines to make mistakes — and maybe these are magnified by death-dealing machines sent from far away:

The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn't perfect. Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of recent conflicts….Yet, machines are not given the same leeway: Rights groups want either perfect performance from machines or a total ban on them.

Well, why not? Rights groups are trying to stop the inevitable and they should go on trying. The UN is trying to cope — it's already too late as lots of powers have drones now and more of the worst kind of regimes will get them, too.

Perfect Assassins

I often wonder why nobody interrupts these kind of arguments of organic morality versus technocratic machinopology by saying: you know, the CIA used to make very carefully targeted assassinations. Instead of sending lots of American troops into a country, where they'd get killed, and the locals would dislike them, and the locals would get killed, they'd just surgically take out one leader, or set things up to take out just one leader, like Patrice Lumumba, and then pull the strings in a government. Imagine if you were to take this debate and put it back in the 1960s or 1970s:

The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn't perfect.
Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of
recent conflicts….Yet, CIA assassins are not given the same leeway: Rights
groups want either perfect performance from CIA assassins or a total ban on
them.

Okay then, back to autonomy…

The Singularity

Of course, none of this is without context. We are all going to be living in what Robert Scoble calls the "age of context" soon enough (while he means something more airy about social networks, what it boils down to as far as I can tell is a future where machines do all the learning and remembering for you and serve it up to you through wearables like Google Glass). There's going to be the Singularity, and we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed.

Before that, comes the Internet of Things where everything will be wired and talk — and listen and watch, too. Perhaps in that bright future, you won't even need drones except as a last resort, because the Internet will find that whenever there is a nexus like "fireworks" or "jihad video on Youtube" or "pressure cooker" or "big black knapsack," the door will lock tight or the car won't even start or road blocks will spring up out of nowhere.

Until then, there's Yemen.

Deleted Tweets

And here where Foust's creepy immorality was really on display recently — and now it isn't.

I was following his tweets and copious re-tweeters one day in February, when he began sparring nastily (as he always does) with a Yemeni activist namedFarea Al-muslimi whose Twitter handle is @almuslimi

I don't know this Yemeni activist's background and I don't know whether he's an extremist or preaches "defensive jihad" but if so, it isn't visible. He appears to be a man who is simply disturbed by the extrajudicial executions the United States is perpetrating in his homeland, and that seems legitimate, whatever his back story might be.

Al-muslimi gets into a Twit-fight with Foust, who is merrilly going his usual drone-apologetics way and tweets:

almuslimi Farea Al-muslimi
@joshuafoust @gregorydjohnsen 8- stop ALL u r dn pollitically in yemen. 9- every place u shot drone, go build hospital/school.

Some other people chime in and say "stop tweeting from your couch about our country, you dont know anything".

Foust then savages the guy as if there is something false about the aposition of drone-killings versus school-building simply because the American miltiary does both.

I remember being appalled at the intensity and viciousness of this exchange and I wanted to copy it and put it up on Storify as a very good example of just how nasty Foust can be — as any of us who have Twit-fought him know for a fact.

But when I went back through his feed now, it was gone. He deleted the tweets. In fact, he shows only two tweets for all of February. Now, it's possible that there's a glitch on Twitter. But I think they're gone.

Using Topsy, I can see Al-Muslimi firing off many tweets — the sort of rapid-fire that you do if you are in a debate, not just talking to yourself. There most definitely were answers from Foust, but you can't see them now.

An indirect evidence of them comes from the fellow cc'd — @gregorydjohnsen — who writes a tweet about how he regrets their fight because "both of them are smart guys" — although Foust was most assuredly nastily to this guy who had the upperhand street-cred wise as it was his country where the drones were falling.

One of the more poignant things he said was:

u can't train me on rule of law wth ur right hnd – USAID- & shoot me without a court by ur left hand- drones.

Well, exactly. Who couldn't put it better? But Foust lobbed off something nasty about false apositives again — now deleted.

Al-Muslimi then wrote:

@gregorydjohnsen @joshuafoust joshua, do u knw even wher my village is n the map? plz STOP talking abt wat u have NO idea abt.! 4 truth, …

This was part of an argument, but it's now erased. We have only MuckRake:

What journalists are saying about #Yemen on Twitter – Muck Rack

for those who enjoy these things: @almuslimi & @joshuafoust are currently having a twitter argument abt US counterterrorism policy in #yemen · February 28 …

Why would Foust erase those tweets? Did he have a change of heart that he was so nasty? But he's nasty in exactly the same way to so many people…

No, it's merely because suddenly, Al-Muslimi was hot. He actually came from Yemen to the US to testify in Congress. Now, Foust was sucking up and re-tweeting:

RT @Yemen411: Farea @almuslimi having a moment before he speaks @ the Senate Judiciary hearing on drones in #Yemen http://t.co/gqtMzA4krY

He even acknowledged that they had "disagreed" but that he was impressed with him.

Well, Twitter. Whoever looks at past Twitter streams? You can't put your foot in the same stream twice… And @almuslimi likely doesn't care about this anyway, as he has much larger problems to worry about. I can only say, I saw what you did there…

Human Rights Drones

Meanwhile, Foust assures us that drones are veritable instruments of human rights compliance: "In many cases, human rights would actually benefit from more autonomy — fewer mistakes, fewer misfires, and lower casualties overall. "

Yet I'm not persuaded about the auto-magic way in which we get these precision targets that first depend on HUMINT and even re-checking from the ground.

And while Foust doesn't concede it or even mention it, it seems to me the precision and human rights capacity could only happen if the machines are programmed not to fire if they get to a house and see that the terrorist target is surrounded by his wife and children. Right? Is that what he means? Because isn't that really the problem, the only way you can get these people more often than not is by attacking them in civilian type of settings because they don't stay on the "battlefield," whatever that is.

That's why there is a total illusion here, regardless of autonomy and precision — it's not really about the drone itself. It's about the need to be precise *in a civilian setting* and only blow up somebody, say, in a car on a road, not when they reach a farmhouse.

"It Should Not Be"

In any event, the technocrats will never be satisfied with emotional answers, but in politics, the psychological matters. Sen. Markey is running for office again, and when the people of Boston let it be known that they didn't want Tamerlan Tsarnaev buried in their state because they had already been convinced he committed the Boston marathon bombing, Markey didn't say, as a good liberal Democrat, "we must be civilized; we must properly bury even our dead enemies"; instead he said "“If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried
on our soil, then it should not be.” And that's how it was, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Virginia. There's all kinds of things Markey could have said to try to lead and to educate — he didn't, not on this.

Ultimately, the arguments of drone apologists are about emotions, too, because they say that the concretized will of one set of people in the form of automated robots should prevail over other sets of people who feel they should not be used and they are immoral. And it's the lack of democracy and due process as much of the emotional and spiritual feeling of revulsion that matter in the political mix of how these weapons will be controlled; overriding those very real considerations and feelings is illiberal, especially when the goal is to prevent the killing of innocents.

In his testimony, Al-Muslimi speaks to an interesting problem — the lack of knowledge by local farmers as to why some leader is being targeted — they may not associate him with terrorism — and the fact that their own local security chiefs are connected to him and doing business with them. They are angry because they could have been accidently with him when the drone hit; they also feel they could have arrested him and questioned him about his wrong-doing and made a more careful and durable solution. In fact, their own security chiefs in cahoots with the terrorist were the problem — there was a texture and layers to this story that even the smartest drone couldn't figure out; what, it's supposed to hover while people hold a town meeting?

Related articles

Why America Stopped Sending 'Terrorists' To Gitmo And Started Bombing Them

Pak court declares US drone strikes as illegal

Drone Strikes Are Winning War in Yemen — for Al-Qaeda

By Human Rights Alone

No comments on Joshua Foust’s Illiberal Arguments for Drones

Human Rights, Pakistan, Registan
February 19, 2013

Will Unrest Break Out in Central Asia or the Caucasus?

Turkmens performing in state-orchestrated parade on Flag Day in Ashgabat. Photo by Golden Age, State News Agency of Turkmenistan.

No.

At least, not right now, and probably not next week.

Oh, there might be another wave of pogroms as there was in Osh in Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 where hundreds of people were killed, mainly Uzbeks, and thousands displaced, but it might be in some other setting, not Kyrgyzstan's south, but who knows, maybe Tajikistan, as police shoot-outs of suspected terrorists have occurred regularly there since the civil war was over.

Or there might be another massacre of workers as there were in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan in 2011, but probably not that again, and not there.

That's just it — whenever unrest does break out, whether in Andijan in 2005 in Uzbekistan, where hundreds were massacred or in Osh as I mentioned in 2010, the authorities make sure it is tamped down very well after that, making numerous arrests, silencing or jailing journalists and bloggers and citizen reporters. So that's that, we get it.

Except, we don't. Because unrest does occur, sometimes with large numbers of people, and it surprises those who aren't prepared. Like the overthrow of Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan in 2012, which shows signs of Russian engineering, but which couldn't have succeeded if there hadn't been underlying social disatisfaction with energy price hikes (induced by Russia) and other deeper and long-term economic and social malaise.

Nobody was ready when 20,000 or even 60,000 people came out on the main squares of Moscow and other Russian cities after Putin's orchestrated re-election, and nobody who got enthusiastic about the prospects then was ready for the severity of the crackdown that is now inevitably coming.

So yeah, unrest, but they tamp it down but then, they don't. So you have to be ready, and you have to have some theory about how society changes in these countries — and that would not be "due to Internet penetration" or "development of the middle class" — the mantras rehearsed by State Department officials and pundits worldwide. If only Internet saturation reaches X point that it reached in, oh, Iran or Azerbaijan (where unrest is reaching the thousands now in demonstration), why we might see those droids we're looking for.

But oh, remember This is What Can Happen To You, when Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior said about Azerbaijan that publicizing the news of the crackdown on Internet bloggers would chill the use of the Internet? Make people not want to go online or be very careful about their activities online? Remember how I was browbeaten to death for daring to suggest there was an Internet surge in Uzbekistan? But I countered this and said it was an Internet campaign that got the "donkey bloggers" released and I countered their theories of the efficacy of "networked authoritiarianism" (Rebeccah McKinnon's term) here and here (Is There an Arab Spring Bounce in Azerbaijan?) and then here for Central Asia. That is, I don't have ANY illusions that any Twitter revos are coming soon to these countries to utterly turn them over from head to foot, but I do ask: Why Can't We Say Azerbaijani Protest is Influenced by the Arab Spring and Social Media? Of course you can, and you don't need me to say this, you now have the released Emin Milli on the conference circuit to say it.

So last week, we were told at the OSCE Internet 2013 conference by Milli, the former political prisoner and blogger who just served 15 days in jail for his chronicling of demonstrations over the death of a soldier in the army, that there are one million sign-ups on Facebook. That's a lot of people for this small country. Socialbakers, the industry source on Facebook sign-ups, says there are more than a million now.

Says Socialbakers:

Our social networking statistics show that Facebook penetration in Azerbaijan
is 12.20% compared to the
country's population and 23.97% in relation
to number of Internet users. The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan
is reaching 1013080 and grew by more than
147280 in the last 6 months

Internet penetration was reported as 44% in 2010 by the ITU; then it was reported last year as 68% and is growing. So it's a lot, and people who say that Azeris are scared off the Internet by oppression were wrong, but people who say that such large percentages of Internet penetration will lead to revolution are also wrong, as the authorities are still very skillful in picking out people to coopt, intimidate or jail and torture as needed to keep the peace — especially for those Western oil and gas companies coming in to develop the Shah Deniz II fields.

The number of people on the square in Azerbaijan isn't one million and isn't 28,000 but more like 2,000 or 200 sometimes, depending on the topic.

Now, Central Asia is much, much more "backward" or behind when it comes to the Internet, let alone Facebook, and has not had the kind of "Youtube protests" about local official corruption that then leads to street demonstrations — although the phenomenon still can be found here and there even in these countries.

So you have to be ready, as these things can jump the synapse — significant unrest/revolution/unheavals in Azerbaijan would obviously affect other neighbouring countries and so on.

Even so, we're been getting for years now articles that tell us not to worry, everything is boringly stable in Central Asia, and implying that anyone who crafts any other scenario is just hopelessly mired in Twitter mania and Jeff Jarvis-style over-romanticization of social media's power (that would not be me) or just not "getting it" about the Arab Spring, which didn't turn out to be "all that" in the end as we well know (and this article, Aftermath of a Revolution, in the International Herald Tribune really sums it up well).

Even so, along comes Sarah Kendzior to tell us that everything is boringly stable: The Curse of Stability. Kendzior, who, together with Katy Pearce, in an article they'd probably like to forget now, told us how cautious we must all be about Azerbaijan (and the big crackdown and big sleep could be still coming there anyway as well all know, but each time the concentric circles grow).

This article was kind of written already on Kendzior's political home base, Registan.net, by Myles Smith: Central Asia: What Not to Look For, datelined January 2013.

Kendzior doesn't link to her colleague but should have, as he put down the markers for the prediction businesss, and I couldn't disagree, although as I said, you really need to have better theories of change and a more hopeful expectation about the people in these countries and their need to have a better life than they do under their current dictatorships.

I could answer Kendzior in detail but then, I already have in the past, and did on another article exactly a year ago by another specialist, Scott, Radnitz, Waiting for Spring, who told us "not to hold our breaths" and compare Central Asia to the Arab Spring — and it's a good thing we didn't, as we'd be as blue as a UN peacekeeper's helmet now.

Even so, I'll just cut and paste below the fold what I put in the comments to Radnitz's peace again, because it still applies. And keep in mind that what the Arab Spring had was Al Jazeera (not WikiLeaks or Anonymous, silly, that's just self-serving hacker twaddle). Central Asia doesn't have that; it has Russian TV. So, you get what you get, even if you add Facebook.

(more…)

No comments on Will Unrest Break Out in Central Asia or the Caucasus?

Arab Spring, Azerbaijan, Central Asia, Human Rights, Internet Freedom & Policy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Registan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
January 21, 2013

Isolated Talking Kazakh Elephants Or the Controlling Hand of Registan

Kazakh postage stamp of Batyr, the talking elephant in Kazakhstan.

Michael Hancock-Parmer strikes again. When we last heard from him, he was trashing the Russian journalist who covered the Zhanaozen massacre critically in an appalling post that earned a reprimand from his former professor, who was then "disciplined" by Registan dominatrix Sarah Kendzior into apologizing and admitting she had a lot to learn about becoming a better human being (!). Some people withdraw from conflicts with Registan because the price is very high — in academia, there is great fear of losing scarce positions, and the Registanis are horribly vindictive and will complain to people's bosses if they don't like their criticism.

I got into a side convio with H-P in email which he begged me not to publish, so I won't, but needless to say, he proved himself to be an ass.

Now this contribution from Hancock-Parmer, urging the Kazakh people not to Latinize their alphabet but to use…Arabic script.

I'm giving this the "Batyr" award, for the poor "talking elephant" that "died from an overdose of soporifics" (like reading too much Registan!). Everyone convinced themselves that the elephant could really talk because he mastered a few memes and gestures on cue and was rewarded. It was convincing!

Born on July 23, 1969 at Almaty Zoo, Batyr lived his entire life in the Karaganda Zoo in Karaganda, of ex-USSR Kazakhstan. He died in 1993 having never seen or heard another elephant. Batyr was the offspring of once-wild Indian elephants (a subspecies of the Asian elephant). Batyr's mother "Palm" and father "Dubas"^[3] had been presented to Kazakhstan's Almaty Zoo by the then Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Telling people in another country what kind of script they should use in their language — that's bad enough, and ranks right up there with Katy Pearce screaming at people on Twitter to use a certain hashtag, and if they don't use it the way she likes — even allowing for the fact that they may be regime tools — she tells them to "get off the Internet".

But telling them not to use Latin and instead, to use Arabic, for pseudo-scholarly reasons has got to be even worse — and it reminds me of the Batyr story because by mimicking humans on demand, Batyr in fact was isolated from other real elephants — and the humans were fooled.

Batyr, whose name is a Turkic word meaning Dashing Equestrian, Man of Courage or Athlete,
was first alleged to speak just before New Year's Day in the winter of
1977 when he was eight years old. Zoo employees were the first to notice
his "speech", but he soon delighted zoo-goers at large by appearing to
ask his attendants for water and regularly praising or (infrequently)
chastising himself.

Language is a natural and organic thing, and people pretty much speak it as they wish, except for the French who police anglicisms. Chastising people into speaking language a certain way — awful!

Kazakhstan of course has a long and troubled history with the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union and has a large Russian-speaking minority. So putting their Kazakh language into Cyrrilic script made a certain amount of sense but it was obviously coerced. What would the Kazakh language be if there had never been a Russia, or a kinder, gentler Russia? Well, there wasn't, so it is what it is…

But when Kazakhstan got its independence from the Soviet Union — or more importantly, from Russia — it gradually began to de-Russify and began to join the rest of the world and try to modernize. I don't buy the state's own propaganda about this at all, and it's a very rocky road.

Yet I do follow Kazakhstan sufficiently, including the various independent and state tweeters, to know that if they have to chose something besides Cyrrilic, it will be Latin, not Arabic letters. That's because the language of the Internet, like it or not, is English, and a lot of the computer and Internet terms borrowed in other languages come from English. God knows, for example, why Russians talk about "follovat'" on Twitter instead of "sledit'" which has less characters, but they do because it "feels right" to them as they'll tell you.

Kazakhstan is a secular Muslim nation where the regime controls religious expression brutally, and gets its hand on the Muslim communities in particular. So that means a turn to the Arabic world might not be for them.

But more to the point, just because they are Muslim doesn't mean they feel the need to turn toward Arabic. In doing so, they would isolate themselves further from Eurasia, Europe and the Internet lingua franca and I don't see any evidence that they want to do that.

Young people simply reply naturally that they use Latin because that's what English uses and they want to learn and use English.

This kind of prudish, controlling prescriptiveness for people's language has just got to go.

Only a fussy little Registani nerd like Michael Hancock-Parmer could have "concerns" about another nation writing their alphabet as they please (!):

I’m writing this post to share some concerns about the Latinization program for Kazakhstan announced by President Nazarbaev in connection with other progressive changes to the Republic.

The Too Long; Didn’t Read analysis of what I’m about to write is
simple: I am not as excited for Latinization as I used to be. I am not
forecasting doom or anything like it. Nor am I saying that this is all
part of some conspiracy or weird power grab on the part of Nazarbaev.
No. I am rather trying to share some concerns that might interest
Registan’s readers.

I have reservations that it will adversely affect Kazakhstan’s citizens
in their efforts to better understand their past and the formation of
the their current situation.

I'm the first to say that Russian is still a lingua-franca more than English is in this region; it's the poor man's lingua-franca because not everyone can get a Soros grant and go to a Western course or conference and perfect their conversational English. There is that large minority as well. If anything, we should be concerned about these people being forced to leave their comfort level to use Latin — but then, they're being asked to do that for the Kazakh language, not the Russian language.

What this terrible affectation about Kazakhs needing to "better understand their past" isn't really about "richness of literature" in the Soviet era (?!) but about the fetishization of Islam that is common among the New Realists in Washington and New York in general and the Registanis in particular. There's an entire mindset and contrived narrative they have acquired which goes like this:

o There is this "they" out there who exaggerate the threat of Islam and hate Muslims — be they neo-cons or traditional conservatives or Blue Dog Democrats or whatever — and "we" have to counter them;

o We are the smart people surrounded by idiots, so we will embrace the vibrancy and diversity of Islam and show "them" up to be bigots and haters

o In fact, if we don't stop this criticism of Islamic countries (which we believe to be hatred) then we are actually harming our nation's security because the US will "bomb Iran" and we will be in WWIII;

o The enemy of our enemy is our friend — conservatives and parts of the Obama Administration we don't like are too distrustful of theocratic states, so we'll be nice to them to show how cool we are.

I find this all very unscholarly, and I find that when there is this mindset, you can't get new facts and impressions to go through — it's like trying to get the miniature golf ball through the rotating blades of the windmill — very hard.

Sure, Latinization is contrived, like the very capital of Astana itself and lots of Nazarbayev state-building projects. Yet if people don't want to use it and want to stick with Cyrrilic, they will, and it will be hard to stop them.

There's another project lurking under Michael Hannover-Parmer's tender ministrations here — it's sort of like pan-Turkism. He wants to prove how close the Central Asian peoples are to each other:

In essence, “Arabic-script Kazakh” is nearly a contradiction in terms.
When written in Arabic script, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, and Karakalpak
appear much more identical then then do in the current Cyrillic
alphabets. Moreover, their close relationship with Uzbek, Uyghur,
Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Ottoman-Turkish was far more apparent. Though much
ink has been spilled attacking the awkwardness of Arabic at correctly
carrying Turkic language, the longevity of the alphabet must be
re-considered rather than seen as a sign of backwardness or Oriental
decadence. Rather, the very limitations of the Arabic script (i.e.
writing of the various Turkic vowels) might be considered as its
strength.

H-P tries to justify his own diktat in deciding what is "best" for a people and trying to back it up with tld;r "scholarship" by pointing out that Stalin was the one to manipulate languages and alphabets and narratives. Yes, we get all that. Yes, they are contrived. Yes, people will work their way out of it. But hardly with Arabic script. And…who says "integrationist processes" are really naturally occuring? They don't naturally occur in the EU, either…

H-P also has a touching concern for the "treasury of work written during the Soviet Union". Well, sure. No people should burn their books, even from discredited communist pasts. But, well, if there isn't a demand for them, there isn't. We don't all demand that even the classics be transcripted into the English of Beowulf or Shakespeare. Language is a dynamic and living thing, even if tyrants monkey with it.

Fortunately, nobody anywhere is likely to pay the slightest attention to this fussy fellow — read the reply in the comments from a young man who simply points out that QWERTY is what is there to use, and that's what he is using. Oh, and there's this:

Uzbekistan moved from Arabic alphabet to Latin in 1920′s because
Uzbekistan because a secular country and wanted to break with Islam.
That move made most of the religious literature instantly inaccessible
that helped to establish a secular society.

Whatever you want to say about Sovietization — and I'm happy to criticize it all day long — there's something to be said for secularism even of the Vladimir Posner/Soviet sort as compared to radical Islam. People shouldn't be cut off from their national religious literature, but there's no need to artificially crowbar it back into place, either.

But as I said, the fetishizing of Islam that this crowd indulges in brings them to this sort of untenable position.

I'd like Kazakhstan — if it is getting all national and independent — to a) come to a true independence which would mean independence of Nazarbayevism and even batyrism; and b) be tolerant of Russians and Russian-speakers in its own land even if it wants to distance itself from Moscow, generally a good thing. I think this process of Latinization might take so long that it is unlikely to harm the Russian population, but it bears watching.

Related articles

President: Passing from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet does not testify to Kazakhstan's geopolitical preferences

Jimmy Wales in: The Dictator and I

Kazakhstan to switch to Latin language by 2025

The Fundamental Fallacies of Katy Pearce's Machinopology in Azerbaijan

The Inherent Contradictions of Registan's Narrative

Twenty years of Russian-Kazakh friendship

No comments on Isolated Talking Kazakh Elephants Or the Controlling Hand of Registan

Elephants, Kazakhstan, Registan, Religion
January 19, 2013

The Fundamental Fallacies of Katy Pearce’s Machinopology in Azerbaijan

January 14 2012 youth protest in Baku by Obyektiv TV.

The other day a colleague sent me a link to a social graph that he said was "fascinating" — it was about the protests in Azerbaijan.

It turned out to be made by anthropologist Katy Pearce but I couldn't see her name in my view of the screen — it was only visible later when I returned for a closer look and scrolled down — but of course, visible to anyone who clicked on the link and took an interest.

Here's what it said (go to the link and keep reading for the full jargon-laden experience):

The graph represents a network of up to 1500 Twitter users whose recent
tweets contained "#protestbaku". The network was obtained on Monday, 14
January 2013 at 23:01 UTC. There is an edge for each follows
relationship. There is an edge for each "replies-to" relationship in a
tweet. There is an edge for each "mentions" relationship in a tweet.
There is a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a "replies-to" or
"mentions". The tweets were made over the 2-day, 6-hour, 37-minute
period from Saturday, 12 January 2013 at 15:36 UTC to Monday, 14 January
2013 at 22:13 UTC.

What, you didn't get the wind-chill factor or the latitude and longitude on Google maps? This report is the sort of high-falutin essential nonsense that passes for scholarship in our day, and I'm going to be ruthless with it. I've decided to call this field of study "machinopology" instead of "anthropology" because I think that not only have these social scientists ceased to study real human beings; when they study their spoor left on the Internet — not a good substitute — they become fierce apologists for this decidedly inaccurate and misleading means of studying people and you can't speak sense to them.

THE "SCIENCE" OF HASHTAG DIKTAT

In gathering this data, Pearce was heedless about what has been called the Niels Bohr effect — that the scientist himself intrudes on his data by the very act of study and is studying his study, so to speak. Pearce first goosed her contacts on Twitter to come up with a hashtag, then pushed them toward used of a standardized one, #protestbaku — policing with fierce hostility anyone who didn't keep to the meaning of the hashtag as she saw it (typical of the Twitter hashtag Nazis). There may have been very rich and rewarding conversations on Twitter on January 14; but if they didn't have Katy Pearce's hashtag, they are like a tree falling in the proverbial forrest…

In fact, Pearce was such a "scientist," that she even got into an epic Twit fight and started to mouth off to some of the people who appeared to be "pro-government" tweeters — who maybe just didn't seem to agree with Katy and her source-friends. She even yells at this woman to "stay off their hashtag" –– not just because she cared about the integrity of meaning, but because it would have screwed up her results if the meaning wasn't uniform. (If you don't understand the meaning of hashtags, email me, I've been on Twitter since 2007).

Imagine, pretending you are an impartial anthropologist, and telling anybody in the field — even a regime tool (which we can't be sure this person really is, simply because they disagree with the way the soldier's death should have been handled) — to "go home, turn off your phone/computer, watch a movie, and leave these people alone". Does she think she's talking to her toddler here?! This is just outrageous stuff — but it passes as "cool" because it's machinopology and not anthropology — and anything goes.

BACK STORY

Anyway, I use Twitter as a kind of "Delicious" if "Delicio.us" had ever been functional and useful. That is, I park links for myself there to catch up on later and figure I can also share them at the same time if anyone else has anything to say about them. I often go back to my own stream to find things — for me, re-tweet often does mean endorsement and I don't shirk from that association, but it also can merely mean "parked here to read later, looks interesting" or "read this, want to file it". I wrote on my tweet about the social graph an "h/t" to this colleague because that's what you do when someone else tells you something you didn't know — you acknowledge their reference. No big deal — but then I saw a rare response from Katy Pearce, the anthropologist who feels she owns this field of Internet studies in the Caucasus.

Her remark was puzzling to me because she said "thank you" — although I'm an enemy to her (she denounced me a year ago to my then-boss!) and then said she helped with a blog post. Not realizing what she was going on about, I called he out for her unsavoury role in joining up with Sarah Kendzior after I challenged the Registan diktat last year, and going to denounce me as somehow "unfit" to my editor at EurasiaNet because I…dared to stand up to Joshua Foust in a completely legitimate and much-needed manner, and because I refused to be bullied by these gals online.

I was particularly appalled at Pearce at the time — I published a perfectly ordinary and fine little blurb about the surge of Facebook membership in Uzbekistan, citing Socialbakers; I cautioned that it had to be seen in relative terms due to the harassment there, but she blasted me as using shoddy research. It was insane — over a blog blurb, and on Twitter. She herself later was found using Socialbakers, which is perfectly fine. She was doing this just to troll, as they say — it was sinister.

So ever since stumbling on these academics and defense contractors on Registan, I've challenged them as a group that is a funny amalgam of seeming criticism of the US yet reverence for US policies such as on drones, and seeming criticism of the regimes of Central Asia — but always within limits and always with disparaging the opposition, particularly in exile, and the human rights movements along the way.

It turned out Pearce was kvetching at me because she believed that "h/t"
should go not to the person who tipped me off to the link, but to her,
as designer of this graph. I simply didn't know it was made by her at
first, and no "impropriety" was intended; that she had to cross the
Internet to police this and make a snide comment lets you know how
HUGELY controlling she is — so much so that those who once criticized
her or Kendzior publicly are now beaten into silence — it's a scary
thing to watch. Academe is a frightful place. In a world where
attribution is one click away when you link, it's hard to posit ill will
or damage.

REALISM UBER ALLES

Thus, while I'm not in academia myself and not an Internet or official regional expert, I've had a long period of closely reading what Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior produce for the academic world, and have grown to be a very stringent critic as you can see in past entries of this blog under the topic "Registan": their thesis is designed to minimize and disparage dissenters; celebrate those who are more cerebral and incremental and less active; caution against publishing too much negative human rights material on the Internet so it doesn't scare off lolcat posters; and then essentially do the government's work for it — making sure that the Internet is something that grows on the conditions and timetables and in the manner that these New Realist academics wish instead of people who use it for protest and not only communications. If you think this is a caricature of their studies, go and read them and judge for yourself. I think you will come away very disturbed if you care about democracy and human rights. They are part of the New Realists school of Joshua Foust, Nathan Hamm and others at Registan and they work overtime to belittle, discourage, disparage, intimidate and bully people in the human rights movement who disagree with their RealPolitik regarding the post-Soviet countries.

Time and again, in article or op-ed or longer monograph or journal piece, I've seen their theses "prove" the same points: a) the governments of Central Asia are all-powerful and will never change; b) no Arab Spring will ever occur here; c) there is no civil society here and only 2 1/2 old Soviet-style dissidents who have no following; d) people inform on each other and hate each other and are spiteful so it is not a milieu in which a social movement can get started; e) repression is very severe and even deadly.

It's not as if any of these things are untrue in a sense, but it's their culmination and their vectors that lead you to wonder what on earth they are up to here: they seem to see it as their job to discourage any challenge to these governments by using the homeopathic method — only they get to challenge them — a little, in the way they wish, but not too much.

That's actually why it's so strange Registan is having a conference this week to discuss the passing of Karimov — it must be that they either feel this is a "safe" topic now or the defense contracting circles in which they travel find it useful to do a little scarifying of Karimov now. I've called Registan the "small game" before and that about sizes it up — it's about some sort of power trip, but it's just not clear whose, entirely.

SHINY NEW COOL INTERNET THING — WHICH WE HAD 12 YEARS AGO

The social graph that at first so fascinated me and others is a case in point for the kind of study of the post-Soviet countries that I simply find suspect — suspect because it leads to conclusions and influences policy in such a way as to get those in power in our government or wealthy foundations or universities to stop taking the opposition seriously and to discount human rights work as marginal. Any objection to their New Realism is met with withering scorn that you are a Neo-Con and hopelessly mired with Commentary and Jennifer Rubin. There's no in-between for these people. ANY criticism gets the "Neo-Con" slur.

So…At first glance the social graph seems really cool! Who wouldn't like a cool Internet thing like this! As it happens, I first saw a social graph like this in The Sims Online in the year 2000, made by Will Wright. He had developed a program to capture in that simulated virtual world a way of showing relationships to people — every time you gave a balloon to someone as an avatar, or even just interacted with them, that person would become your "friend"; if you slapped them, they would become your "enemy", and these "balloons" would then show as green or red in an elaborate graph accessible above every avatar's head on his profile. People spent hours pouring over these balloon graphs — they were fascinating. You could acquire a "balloon" merely by going to a simulator or a place on the server and being in proximity to other people — many a sim-hubbie would catch his sim-wifey cheating by reading her balloons. You could also see who wasn't letting their relationships "stay green" — the more interactions you had with a person, the higher and brighter your relationship would show. The capturing of relationships by machine was something that fascinated Will Wright, maker of the Sims and now on the board of Linden Lab, maker of Second Life.

People don't take these virtual worlds seriously, thinking them as pathetic sexting chat rooms and furry enclaves, but I have followed them for their interesting sociology for more than a decade because I see them as petri dishes, simulators and testing grounds for the means and methods of social media and social networks on the wider Internet. Time and again, I have seen things prototyped, or played out in Second Life, that then appear in the real world, almost as if it had uncanny predictive powers — events like WikiLeaks or the Instagram scandal — all these have played out in these worlds first.

Another thing that Will Wright did was show — because he could, possessing control of a virtual world in which every person's speech and actions could be captured by the machine — what people were doing or saying. So he could take snapshots or make dynamic pictures — X percent were kissing or X percent were going to the toilet as you can do in the Sims — and X percent were saying the words "love".

So it's not surprising to me that now people use Twitter — and all the gestures, as they are called ("likes", links, comments, replies, retweets, etc. etc. ) — to track social relationship.

MACHINES ARE NOT PEOPLE

The problems is that machines are far from perfect in replicating organic human relationships — replicating their ways and means online in social networks can be disastrous — and the scientists studying this and pretending that it enhances anthropology don't seem to take into account the fundamental fallacies of their science, making it a pseudo-science.

I realize just how cool it is to have charts and graphs and fancy jargonistic words like edges and vertices. We have seen this in Second Life for years and it's old news for some of us. But it has to be thoroughly questioned, as it is laying now — in its still-primitive state — the grounds for the totalitarian Wired State, and it has to be challenged before our freedoms are eradicated. It's not just study; it's study with an aim to control society by letting certain elites drill and analyze the data and then use it to shape online experience — where we all increasingly live. The most obvious exploitation of this data was in the recent elections, where sociologists were put to work for the Obama Truth Team to manipulate stories to attract voters.

THREE FALLACIES OF MACHINOPOLOGY

But there are deep fallacies in these machine-readings of people, and they need to be called out

Here are three main fallacies right off the bat in this artifact:

1. We can't be sure that retweets equal political affiliation. We are told ad nauseum especially by the Registani types on Twitter that "retweet ≠ endorsement" — they love using the geeky ≠ which means "does not equal" but which isn't always instantly recognizeable as such to the average person. Of course, people usually lie when they say this, and are merely covering their asses, especially at jobs. Of course their retweets are endorsement. Especially when they retweet each other and bolster their friends. They're just saying that but we know better.

The assumption of Katy Pearce's graph here is indeed that retweet DOES mean endosement because she uses it to group people into political affiliation. She even says that pro-government forces are known for using certain words like "yolo". Of course, "yolo" is what the kids say on Tumblr or Facebook, "you only live once". It's very popular now among teens here in New York, especially Hispanic teens although it isn't a Hispanic word, it just sounds like one. There may be an insider's piece of esoteric knowledge here, where pro-government forces in Azerbaijan have already been established as always saying "yolo" like hipsters in New York, but I am out of the loop so I'll have to say that it needs questioning.

We can't be sure that every person who retweets dissenters' links or retweets government links are on the same page as those forces. Maybe they are only bookmarking. Maybe they are making a cover story but disagree. The fact is, you can't have it both ways. You can't, as academics CYAing on Twitter yourself and telling us "≠" on all retweets, yet in your shiny social graph studying a country's demonstration, suddenly then group everybody's tweets in a certain political framework as if retweets *do* equal endorsement. Which is it? Or at least admit that it's sometimes one, and sometimes the other, and you don't have a basis for grouping people rigidly in this fashion.

2. Many accounts, especially pro-government accounts, could be fake or bots. As one of the Azerbaijani tweeters noted, there are a lot of fake accounts made by the government. For all we know, there's a few guys sitting in the basement of the secret police and manufacturing all these personas. Or maybe some loyalists who spontaneously on their own do this, although the former scenario is more likely. There could be hundreds — thousands of them — and they could be set up by scripts or bots to behave even realistically.

The Anonymous types always grouse about the US military and its "persona" projects, which is used only overseas to do things like debate on Al Qaeda's web pages; they are not supposed to engage in propaganda at home, which is known as "blowback". But Anonymous itself wrote the book on persona craft, and do it themselves all over, everywhere, in spades, and were the first to cause destruction everywhere with it, corrupting the entire online environment. And the descendents of the Bolsheviks and the KGB, who were masters at making doubles and disguises, have no problem in moving this skill online. Again: they can sound very realistic but could be fake or even bots. The Flatter Bots in Second Life that go around appearing as suave men and women and flatter people's outfits and then eventually get them to give them money have had amazing success earning the bot wrangler tens of thousands of real dollars. Artificial intelligence and online persona work is really getting good. Turing would be proud.

3. Relationship lines may not mean anything. One of the first things we discovered with Will Wright's experiments 10-12 years ago, and then Philip Rosedale's experiments in Second Life in the last 5-7 years, is that when machines grab and aggregate and render relationship lines from chat and various other social gestures, they can be woefully inaccurate or outright wrong. I already mentioned the "balloons" in the Sims that caused couples to break up — someone could teleport to a sim by accident, or due to a spam invitation; they would acquire a seeming "relationship" by appearing in proximity to someone, but it would mean nothing. In Second Life, when someone invented two-way wrist watches (hmmm) to show who was near you and beam that information up to a webpage for display, people howled and screamed because they felt it was an invasion of privacy.

It was. Unscrupulous and unethical hackers said it was open data so they could get to scrape it and use it. Technically it was, although no one who had chosen to make a public profile with their static data linked to their name and their list of favourite places or comments had ALSO granted permission for real-time display of their proximity data.

GIRLS NEAR ME DO NOT WANT TO BE NEAR YOU

It's like what happened then five years later — just last year — with Girls Near Me. That app was widely popular with boys — they grabbed open FB data about girls with geolocation and used it to stalk them for dates. The girls did not like this because they hadn't put up FB pages to be accessed by creepy guys in bars with smart phones; maybe they didn't know how to fix their privacy sliders. This is a case where users screaming enough finally overwhelmed geekitude, and the ap was removed. People HATE HATE HATE having proximity data even if "open" displayed to the web; they HATE HATE HATE others — scientists and marketers — making judgements about it. Anthropologists are not supposed to do experiments or gather information on people without their consent. Did the people in the graph given their consent to be shown this way? Of course not.

But it's not only about privacy; it's about ridicularity. As one woman put it very aptly about the newfangled search thing that Facebook put up the other day: "Hey, is this thing going to make it so that FB stops offering my husband's ex-wife as a friend?"

Bingo. That's proximity data handled by machines in Machinopology which is a very poor substitute for anthropology — which itself isn't always in ethical and skilled hands online or in real life these days.

I find that FB is uncanny in chosing just those people who are sworn enemies and serving them up to me over and over again as "friend" prospects; Linked-in is the absolute worst at this. It really is annoying and drives you away from the service. Of course "it can't know" and you wouldn't want "it" to know — and it is supposed to "get smarter" by having you X out the offer. But you don'to want it to get THAT smart…do you?

MY FAVOURITE LINK TO HATE

So if I answer somebody's tweet; if I retweet them, if I even favourite them, it means nothing. One of the most common gestures I see online is when Anonymous "favourites" something critical I've said about them — they don't mean that they like this; in fact, they hate it. They've favourited it merely to keep it parked and accessible so they can organize attacks on me among their contacts. I've seen this played out with others as well. Most things are not what they seem online; much of the time, they are just the opposite.

How many of those using #protestbaku were secret policemen; how many were hipsters; how many wanted to prove to Western grant-giving foundations that they were active? We may never know.

HOW SAFE ARE SOCIAL GRAPHS?

This brings me to the issue of privacy and the usage of these graphs. This first thing I noticed when I clicked on this thing — after the initial "ooh, ahh, shiny" that anyone will make at seeing all the protesters of Azerbaijan laid out in a nice "map" — was that the people in this nexus might not like being shown this way. Somebody casually firing off a tweet on their iPhone may not realize that a social scientist has now captured them and fixed them like a fly in amber as talking to a notorious opposition leader; now through a sinewy wire on a jpeg that is easily copied, they are forever not alone.

And that must be why you can't see this picture clearly. No matter how much you click or resize, the names actually don't show up. Only Katy Pearce and her fellow "scientists' can see this information.

This could be a function of my browser (Firefox); of the need to register for the site (I didn't) or some other artifact, but the fact is: I cannot click on it on various computers and on the iPhone and see anything, and others likely have that experience to.

So this Internet shiny dines out on being part of the "open" Internet and "accessible" and "free" but…you actually can't see it. If you *could* see it, you might start reality-testing it. You'd click on some of the big nodes — people with larger and familiar pictures — and see if those people linking in were really friends or enemies; casual or dedicated — you might judge it.

But you can't do that: it is not clickable to a bigger size to really study. And I'm actually fine with that, given that this is Azerbaijan we're talking about — that thing is an indictment! But there's something slimy about sending it all over the web to be gawked at, but not really seen. It's elitist and controlling. I think it's wrong. You could start from the premise that anyone with an open Twitter account in a sense "consents" to being seen and having their data known. But as we saw with Second Life and Girls Near Me, what people HATE HATE HATE is when their *proximity data* is shown. And that's what this does — more than standing next to someone at a demonstration, it shows who was connected enough to share an idea, a link, etc. And that is risky. I think this has to be debated; it isn't being debated. Machinopologists — the term I think is apt for people who have replaced the study of humans directly with the study of machine-gathered data about humans *and* are fierce apologists for this method — think everything is up for grabs; they are greedy.

DISPARAGING THE DIASPORA

I also want to say something about the groupings. Katy Pearce, like Ethan Zuckerman before her, and others of like mind, seems to disparage the diaspora. This group is least interesting to her and if it is larger she discounts it. These are people not in the country, and almost then "disqualified" from study. There's a loathing of the diaspora among the New Realists because they tend not to be very realistic about their homelands; they are "in the way" of making that OstPolitik that the NRs want to achieve.

But I think this is hugely shortsighted. The diaspora is the living link to the closed society; it is the best thing we've got. Social media, the study of the social graph and the social gestures online are no substitute for these living human beings. Lots of people come and go from the diaspora, or receive family and friends as visitors who come and go. It's a rich milieu and it should never be discounted. If a few very vocal opposition leaders in exile seem to set the tone, well, look past that; there is a lot more there. Twitter, Facebook, Live Journal — these are the living ways these connections are kept up these days, and the diaspora handling of them is vital — it simply shouldn't be disparaged as somehow irrelevant or "not a Twitter revolution". The diaspora is what helps bring awareness to Western countries as well (and the rest of the world, for that matter, but the West cares the most).

LIKE BIRDS NOT ON A WIRE

So that leaves the core of the people actually in the country, using Twitter for logistics, and tweeting with a geolocation of Baku itself (and as we know from the time when everyone switched their Twitter to say they were in Iran to try to confuse the secret police, this could be misleading as well).

One of my most vivid memories in monitoring human rights in Eurasia in the last 35 years is a scene I saw in Baku in the early 2000s — perhaps 10 years ago or so. There was a large street demonstration organized by opposition parties and groups. It was all men — women were seldom seen on the street. They all had cell phones and used them to coordinate their movements and get information about police movements and arrests and the route of their march.

Suddenly, the government shut off all the cell phones — they can do that in a country where the mobile companies are under their control. Everyone on the square suddenly got disconnected. None of them could talk to each other and they were all confused and worried now, and couldn't figure out what was going on. That's how the government wanted them. It was like a flock of birds, suddenly flying into some poisonous air or something. They all stopped or jerked around and began meandering off in odd directions.

I've seen the authorities do the same thing in Minsk.

So the social graph is fragile; it is risky to establish it, but it isn't *so* fragile and *so* risky that people don't make it and use it.

And of course opinions change, groups form and reform, affiliations break and rejoin — and these kinds of graphs are ephemera and really of limited value. There is no substitute for talking to people live in real life.

WHY CAN'T YOU JUST INTERVIEW PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE?

One of the critiques I had of another study done by Pearce and Kendzior is that they outsourced their field world. That is, while no doubt they've done interviews in the field, and talk to people online or when they visit the US, and while they do go to these countries occasionally, they tend to write articles and studies without going there for significant periods of time. And they literally outsourced their questions on one survey about the Internet and attitudes towards risk and critical information to some USAID type entity that was making a survey *anyway* already in country, and simply tucked in a few questions on the subject of Pearce and Kendzior's study into their own large and baggy effort.

I found the redaction of the questions odd; I found the whole thing just unsound. Why can't you go there and do your own surveys, even with less samples? Maybe it's too hard to get a visa and function in the country? Well, then let's not pretend we're studying a closed society just because we have a newfangled "open Internet". The two don't necessarily mesh.

There's more that could be said about the personalities involved in Azerbaijan; about the issue itself; about the things that motivate people to demonstrate. There was a strange locution that Katy Pearce was happy to pick up and rebroadcast: "this isn't a political demonstration". Nonsense. of course it's political. Every demonstration is political. And there's nothing wrong with being political and demonstrating. It's as if the hipsters of Baku want to be post-political as some strategy to save their skin. This won't work. And it denegrates others who are demonstrably political. Again, it's okay to be political; just because a demonstration wasn't on the platform of a political party or with political party leaders speaking or whatever the criteria was, doesn't mean it isn't highly political — which AGAIN is ok to be! You sense that for Pearce, it's wrong to be political because that means challenging the government in unrealistic ways….That won't do if you are a New Realist.

I wish people would criticize these things more.

2 comments on The Fundamental Fallacies of Katy Pearce’s Machinopology in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan, Human Rights, Internet Freedom & Policy, NGOs, Registan, Social Media
December 21, 2012

Registanis Makes a Parody Account of Me

Hilarious!

An anonymous Registani — probably Nathan Hamm — has made a parody account of me called Grumpy Catfitz. The pics aren't easy to "share" as they are gifs set not to copy easily, so you have to go read each Twitter post to see them.

Joshua Foust, Sarah Kendzior and Ethan Zuckerman have all eagerly followed the angry kitteh.

They take my tweets and grind them into a meme generator and they are hilarious — I'll have to make some myself!

Why does suspicion fall on Nathan Hamm? Well, because the grumpy kitties started not long after this post about GooGoogsha's new awful video in which I mentioned Hamm's "strangely incoherent" piece about Karimova and Uzbek culture — and that probably spurred him to do his usual anonymous drive-by swiping.

It's funny, in Second Life, the Woodbury goons, an offshoot of Anonymous/4chan sort of culture, have created elaborate artwork, griefing textures and objects, memes, catchphrases, etc. around my simple critique of them as Bolsheviks. They make detailed Stalin uniforms and boots, star pins, giant blimps, huge Stalin gothic palaces, Soviet flags, etc. and bombard me with them. Hamm hasn't approached anything near that creativity, but then, maybe they don't teach Photoshop in defense analyst school.

Yes, these adults at Registan stoop to the level of 4chan…

RL effigy of myself being gobbled alive by a Communist chicken in Second Life, by Woodbuy/Anonymous. My glasses have fallen off, like Piggy's.

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Registan
December 21, 2012

More on the Immorality of Drones and Evil Robots

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips

Joshua Foust, the former defense contractor who now serves as a non-senior analyst at John Kerry's American Security Project, has yet another piece published on the liberal PBS site about why the Obama Administration should continue to feel good about drones.

It's in response to a report by Human Rights Watch called appropriately Losing Humanity.

The premise is basically — oh, you civilians and peaceniks filled with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt as the geeks called it)! You just don't get it and you just aren't cool because you can't realize how efficient drones are and don't realize how much we already use robotic stuff. Silly you, and stupid you! And smart me!

My answer:

The reason a lot of science fiction is scary is not because it's about machines, but because it's about people — people against other people, and not under a shared sense of the rule of law.

The computer code that runs the killing machines is made by humans and is a concretization of their will, not something uncontrollable or entirely automatic and escaped from their control.

More importantly, the decisions about where to deploy the machines that involve targets drawn from Panatir data-dredging, or heat-seeking missiles or counter-mortar systems are made by humans. Before drones are deployed, humans sometimes have to do things like call up leaders of countries and seek their intelligence and their clearance. So, in the first place, nothing that is portrayed here as automatic is in fact as automatic as Foust strangely makes it seem, because it's in a context and a system where humans do make decisions about the very theaters of war in the first place.

Yet precisely because in our time, the weapons are far more automated, and in the case of drones, there is a greater acceleration and precision — and therefore ease and seeming moral comfort — in their use, we have to look at the moral dimension. Foust seems content if drones just don't miss very often or don't have much collateral damage. But if they get so easy to use, won't the temptation be to do more killing with them and make them more automatic? Where will it stop and who will be authorized to make the judgement call?

There's also the question of whether it's really the case that drones *are* so precise, given how many reports there are from human rights groups and local lawyers about non-combatants, including children, who are hit. These victims can't seek compensation, as their counterparts killed by regular US or NATO actions with more traditional weapons can, because drones are in a secret program run by the CIA, and not the military. This is apparently because of the need to keep them secret, apparently particularly from the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So this raises questions of governance, as to whether we can morally retain these weapons as secret and unaccountable, and whether we should put them under the regular armed forces' leadership.

More automation can in fact decouple the moral imperative from the results of the action of weapons particularly because of the acceleration and capacity for devastation.

Foust has a curious coda to yet another unconscionable piece in defense of drones as efficient war-machines — he posits the idea that a less active role by people — i.e. less compunction about use and nature of targets and consequences — could somehow be a goal, and that more automation need not diminish our values. How?

In fact, if these programs reflect our values, they would have to become less secret, and attacks less common. Foust has already stripped away the moral context by pretending to find all kinds of "good" uses of "automation" that in fact a) aren't automation as he claims because of the prior choices about war in the first place, and theaters of war, and targets and b) have more unintended consequences than he prepares to admit.

As Foust notes, the Pentagon released a directive on "appropriate levels of human judgement," but Foust seems to think the radiant future can contain more automated processes if we can just all agree on our priorities.

There's nothing wrong with a cultural heritage that seems autonomous robots as deadly; they are. Pentagon planners and the CIA don't wish to kill civilians who are not combatants. Yet they do. They do because the targets often tend to have their families around them and the military can't wait until they get into the clear. That's the crux of the problem.

There's a strange notion that raising any moral questions about killing machines, as Human Rights Watch has done, is motivated by "fear". It seems simply to be more motivated by morality, and also the practical sense that machines don't have consciences, and code never renders human interaction as perfectly as real life.

Related articles

"I Have a Drone"

Pentagon: A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You

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Afghanistan, Central Asia, Human Rights, Pakistan, Registan, US, War
September 1, 2012

Should Christine Fair Work for the State Department?

First, let me say this.

I'm a HUGE believer in Twitter free
speech. I've fought hard for it in the early days of Twitter when people
like copyleftist cultist Cory Doctorow wanted to get a critic like me
banned. I've literally refused to extend a contract with the
Soros-funded Eurasianet.org of Open Society Institute because they
unjustly wanted to slap a Twitter gag on me merely for legitimately (as
board and staff members conceded) fighting back against the contentious
Registan.net crowd. That's how strongly I believe in fighting Twitter
censorship — in a way few have ever done who spout about it.

And
as I've documented amply on this blog, four people associated with
Registan — Joshua Foust, Nathan Hamm, Sarah Kendzior, and Katy Pearce — all used
Twitter to harass and heckle me for my *legitimate* criticism of their views, and
even called for me to be removed from my position. I found that an
enormously creepy phenomenon by those close to power getting Department
of Defense contracts, and a tremendous chill on free intellectual
debate. Joshua Foust is a very-much documented bully, but that he has
groupies who also serve as his henchmen is not as well known.

So I'm very much for any kind of free speech on Twitter, and I have made the sacrifices for it personally. It's precisely for that reason that I distinguish between free speech and the kind of harassment and incitement for removal of somebody's livelihood that some engage in. In this post, I'm honestly asking whether a cocky public figure who brags about their knowledge and connection should be in government. That's what you get to do in a liberal democratic society.

So
because I put my money where my mouth is — very literally — I think
it's more than fine to ask when people harass and bully you on Twitter,
going beyond even pointed debate — whether they are fit for their jobs
or fit for even more prestigious jobs.

I've been travelling and
also on vacation and also started a new project so I haven't been
blogging as much. I left it to Twitter to give a little pushback on
Joshua Foust's awful article on Pussy Riot (and I'll try to return and
give it due diligence — Update, here I've taken it apart now). It was his usual ultimately pro-Kremlin stuff, wrapped in a
surrogate attack on intellectuals and celebrities who criticize the Kremlin and a tucked into a cunning and misleading faux-critique of Putin — and
gosh, don't you dare ever take a position accusing Foust of cunning pro-Kremlin
positions or bashing anti-Kremlin intellectuals as a surrogate, because
then he will call you a neo-con, or worse, a McCarthyite! It's so
tiresome.

That somebody could cross the street and dump on Pussy Riot
and urge that it not become "the next Kony" is simply despicable. I've
been far more tempered than most on the Pussy Riot question as I think
freedom of expression doesn't get to trump freedom of religion under the
principles of universality, but surely they don't deserve punishment
more than two weeks of community service and it's a welcome and unexpected development that despite the pernicious fashion of the Kremlin these days, especially with agit-prop Russia Today. Foust can't see his way clear
to moral positions like that, so he reaches for his club to bash his
fellow intellectuals who can, all the while pretending that unlike everybody else, he understands the "real" threat of Putinism and has explicated it with far more sophistication — *snort*.

For some reason, when I posted this
tweet describing Foust's position as awful, after several people agreed with me, someone named Christine Fair
@cchristinefair intervened and writes "@catfitz Hey Cat Fish..the dude is spot on. What's your grouse? @joshuafoust

Of
course, the marker for Internet assholery is obvious here, when
somebody has to make fun of your name to make an argument, but then the
perspective — supporting Foust in is odious slam not only on Pussy Riot
but their defenders — is its own marker as well. Who knows what drives
these awful positions? It's part "enemy of my enemy is my friend," and
part fake concern trolling for some putative balanced human rights
position that they themselves never practice in condemning America and
its friends as well. Does Christine Fair take the same uncritical — and
shifting and twisting — position on drones as her pal Foust?

This Twit spat might have ended there, but it didn't. It goads her enormously that anyone is characterized as pro-Kremlin. "Christine Fair
‏@CChristineFair

@joshuafoust You are so pro-Kremlin! WHO talks like that? Ms. Cat Fish talks like that!"

Yes,
I sure as hell do, because that's what the position is, and that's what
needs to be called out. What *is* this fashion of going soft on Putin by pretending to understand him "better"
really all about, again?!

Says Foust then, "@CChristineFair don't feed the trolls, Chris. You will rue the day!"

So there's more sillyness: "Christine Fair
‏@CChristineFair

@joshuafoust No sir. Ms. Cat Fish will rue the day…She'll be the Wikipedia entry for "cat fish rues the day""

Foust then replies, "@CChristineFair go get her. She's been banned from half the Internet for her horrible trolliness"

Ugh.
Go get her?! What is this, the thought police?! I have been banned
from… Sluniverse.com, a website for fans of Second Life whose denizens
tend to be pro open source and to give griefing and online harassment a
pass so I'm critical of them and they hate me and ultimately banned me
for standing up to some really creepy types in 4chan and Anonymous, if
not LulzSec, who in fact were banned from the virtual world of Second
Life for harassment of other users and server crashing. Hello! I'm not
banned from this world or from its official forums (as is often
misreported, simply because long ago in 2006, I was for a time for the
same reason — thin-skinned open source cultists unable to take
criticism, but then wiser heads prevailed because I had not violated the
TOS).

I can't think of any other sites I'm banned from *except*
Registan. In fact, one of the reasons the ban-hammer Nathan Hamm banned
me was because in fright, he believed I was someone related to some
other Internet critic of his, and in intimidation, he had this illusion
that I was "banned everywhere" hyped by others, so he felt justified.

Good Lord, what a lot of nervous nellies.

Not Christine Fair, however. She writes boldly, "Christine Fair
‏@CChristineFair

@joshuafoust She can rumble with the trailer park rabble! Back to more Pak defense nonsense. Reading Hilal right now. Wanna shoot myself."

Er,
trailer park rabble? I deserve to have my name ridiculed, to be
threatened with online bullying ("go get her"), because…why? Because I stood up for
Pussy Riot and its defenders against the immoral Joshua Foust? Huh?

Foust later adds, "joshuafoust
‏@joshuafoust

@CChristineFair Hahaha Catty Catty Fitz Fitz is a priceless treasure whom everyone hates! (see also her Second Life: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=prokofy%20neva …)

"Everyone"
hates me, you see — LOL. And then he resorts to an entry in Urban
Dictionary put in by 4chan and Anonymous bullies who have been hounding
me since 2007, ever since I began reporting accurately on their Internet
antics, long before it became fashionable. So yeah, Joshua Foust and
Christine Fair are aligning themselves with an anarchist hacker movement
that has attacked the Pentagon and other government sites. Are they
pleased with themselves?

So I respond to Foust the only way you can:

CatherineFitzpatrick
‏@catfitz @joshuafoust @CChristineFair Still feeling insecure after all these years, Joshik! You *wish* you were as proud of your second life as I am!

Because at the root of every bully as we know is insecurity. That
much is clear from the twisted account of his life put up by the
equally-odious EXiled.

Now Christine replies, "Christine Fair
‏@CChristineFair

@catfitz dudette, you know that sounds cat-hoarding, stalker crazy? @joshuafoust

So,
wait. Standing up to a bully online who has written falsehoods about
you and harassed you for months on end is "stalker crazy"? Is
"cat-hoarding"? How do people *get* like this? Have they been on the
Internet too long? Has no one ever questioned what they do?

And this is why I ask, with frank bewilderment,
how a person gets this arrogant and cocky and engages in what can only
be described as casual assholery on the Internet. On her Twitter account, Fair writes:

Assistant Professor of South Asian pol-mil affairs at
Georgetown. Views are my own-especially if they are twisted. Awaiting
your anonymous, ad hominem attacks.

Washington DC
·

http://christinefair.net

Well, sure, we get the disclaimer, dearie. But what kind of
professor behaves this way? Oh, I know. another professor who was at
Georgetown — Katy Pearce. Is this how they are?

Again, the
issues isn't *criticism* of views or even *strong, robust criticism* of
views. It's *assholery*. That's the word you need to describe when
people behave badly — calling names, calling on others to "go get 'em,"
bullying, harassing, making up wild stuff like "trailer trash" and "cat-hoarding" and
"stalkery crazy".

As is known, when people continually do that, I
fight back — I fight back hard. In some cases, I'll find the perfect
name for them — and thought they have behaved badly first, they will
then find a taste of their own medicine and then indignantly cry foul.

But
I haven't called this Assistant Professor Fair any names nor accused
her of any outlandish stuff, other than alliance with Foust which she
herself expressed. I don't even know her and never heard of her, uh,
contributions to the military-political affairs of South Asia.

Here this cocky, brash obnoxious lady brags:

Christine Fair
‏@CChristineFair

@faisalkapadia @Manticore73 AT least parts of the State Dept…won't say which one as I might be doing a fellowship in State 🙂

So…let's get this straight? This, er, academic is not willing to call out which parts of the State Department still think the Haqqani network (just finally characterized as a foreign terrorist organization) are "useful" because….she might work for that department. How could someone be so craven? Only if they felt an absolute sense of their own high credentials and powers, even from their "assistant professorhood," because they feel they are a brain that someone will always want to hire for their expertise.

These kinds of fellowship seem to be more frequent under the Obama Administration than they used to be, but someone can correct me if I'm
wrong.

In any event, I have to ask: this person should be in the
government, with this kind of approach to debate and intellectual
freedom? In other words, an approach that is antithetical to freedom and
involves bullying and harassment — name-calling and intimidation?

This
person should be involved in diplomacy??? Why? Because they have a
hook-up at State? Because they have friends in high places?

And of course there's the larger question of whether a) someone should publicly criticism State policy if they wish to work there or b) our modern-day challenge, whether someone should Tweet that they still hope to get a job with State so won't name the folks guilty of still hanging on to the Haqqani illusion — calling into question their academic credibility.

Prof. Fair comes extremely high-credentialed:

Previously, she has served as a senior political scientist with the RAND
Corporation, a political officer to the United Nations Assistance
Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, and as a senior research associate in
USIP's Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention. She is also a
senior fellow with the Counter Terrorism Center at West Point.

How
is it that all of these institutions — the RAND Corporation, that
people still think of as nearly synonymous with the CIA with all their
studies from the Cold War era (I'm reading a particularly delightful one
now on Bolshevik tactics); UNAMA, which for all its troubles has tried
to do good in Afghanistan and keep the record; USIP, which is a perfectly nice kind of
pasture for all kinds of officials to graze in for awhile between jobs and serves a
useful function in government; and West Point. West Point! How could
somebody who has been through West Point and RAND take part in childish
bullying online on Twitter against someone who *rightly* criticized an
awful ultimately pro-Kremlin blog post? It's as if flirting with Putinism passes
for critical thinking.

Prof. Fair may indeed be heavily qualified
for her fellowship at the State Department. But if she wants to be a
*good* official and engage in *good* governance, she will have to
refrain from bullying and harassing. It's just not professional. And I
hope some interviewer tells her so.

I'm going to read up on her
works and positions and see if she enjoys such fraternization with Foust
because she follows that same curious line of dismissing the
documenters and critics of terrorism as ill-informed hysterics.

"She is a many-time survivor of the University of Chicago. She earned
her B.S. in Biological Chemistry in 1991. She also completed an M.A.
from the Harris School of Public Policy as well as an M.A in South Asian
Languages and Civilizations in 1997. In 2004, she received her Ph.D. in
South Asian Languages and Civilizations.

She can cause trouble in multiple languages."

I'll bet.

The
reason a heavily-credentialed person close to all the military analysis
and planning of our country can do something like call a stranger names
on the Internet and ridicule them as "cat-hoarders" (?!) is because
they feel a supreme sense of impunity. Everyone who isn't in the same
corridors of credentials and powers is fair game and unprotected.

Maybe this is one of the things that is wrong with our country?

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Registan, Social Media, United Nations, OSCE, Multilaterals, US
April 18, 2012

Registan Pretending to Care About Human Rights

Nathan Hamm, the defense analyst, is up to no good again at Registan, so it needs to be called out.

For those just tuning in, or those getting merely a Google news delivery on key words, or those only superficially following Registan, it looks like Hamm has been writing pieces about human rights in Uzbekistan lately.

Why, he's merely proving his oft-told point that in fact Registan is really balanced and the bloggers there really do cover human rights and that they aren't just craven symps of Central Asian regimes or the Kremlin or the DOD…or something. Oh, no, never.

I'm reminded of that famous WikiLeaks on Karimov, however, where the US Embassy official quipped that Karimov "does just enough to get the West off his back." Indeed. And we're seeing that lately as he doles out a sick prisoner or does some other little thing even as very bad things continue (like what happened to Elena Urlaeva).

So what Hamm is doing is writing some very cunningly crafted pieces that can give the superficial appearance of challenging the regime and caring about human rights, but which contain various sandwhiches with contents that in fact deliver other messages.

First, there was the post about the US Commission on International Religious Freedom declaring Uzbekistan "a country of particular concern". They do this every year. They do this for amply documented reasons in their long reports, which include things like Tashkent having more than 5,000 devout Muslims in the prison system who have been tortured and denied a fair trial as they've been detained on various grounds, often appearing as pretexts.

This is a no-brainer, and the US doing this isn't something that even Hamm (or the other owner of Registan, Joshua Foust, who has run an incessant campaign against human rights groups for more than a year, for example in this piece in the Atlantic) can really criticize. After all, if you're going to be part of the establishment, you can't question the government THAT much. And this is the government! It's also obvious, and even the most craven symp couldn't really fault it.

Interestingly, in this post, Hamm even says (!) that the US has leverage of sorts with Uzbekistan because it needs to get out of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan supports that cause, and they should have common interests. Imagine! I guess he's been reading my blog! *Cough*.

Of course, maybe all of this is to do a fake tap-dance to show "daylight" between the positions of Foust and Hamm, but not really, it's more about this:

The moral of the story is, leave the driving to the government. Not unruly and chaotic and obnoxious NGOs. Let the US, in its wisdom, have its advisory commissions; let them render rulings; let the State Department then…ignore them. (Because that's what the State Department does: they listen to this "country of concern" stuff and do nothing, as they've already waived Uzbekistan of the normal restrictions to military aid that might apply. So Hamm can safely pontificate on this subject with hand on heart, knowing that it won't affect a damn thing.)

But the mainly the message is: the government should make these rulings, reports of groups like Human Rights Watch or Committee to Protect Journalists are only to be scorned and sneered at (as Joshua Foust has in fact trashed them).

Next, Hamm turned in another piece about UNICEF, and the sham that is their relationship with the Uzbek government. Now here, there's another twist; if the previous post was all about reifying government commissions and dissing (by not mentioning even) NGOs, now Hamm is slamming a multilateral institution's agency that is, of course, a soft target. Everybody knows UNICEF contorts itself into a pretzel just to get to stay in Tashkent. They…help innoculate children and iodize the water supply or…something. That's why it's all worth it! And it's easy to slam their less-than-honest relationship with the duplicitious Uzbek government because they are helping them do nothing about child labour. UNICEF never condemns forced child labour as such in Tashkent, but has a program where they sort of mitigate it, or at least monitor it…but of course, not like the ILO would, were it allowed into the country.

As we know from WikiLeaks, UNICEF was pretty craven with the Uzbek government on a number of accounts, and the US went along with it. This isn't news. In fact, if I or HRW or anyone else wrote about this, it wouldn't be accepted by Registan because then we'd be gratituously tying these issues to the NDN…or something non-PC in Registan's book.

So Hamm happily bashes UNICEF but inevitably thus deflects attention from the real problem — the Uzbek government — and obscures the brave figures responsible for documenting and exposing this in the first place, the independent human rights movement in Uzbekistan and its allies in the international human rights movement. To do so would, of course, challenge Foust's essential condemnation of these groups for even…existing. Or rather, for failing to just simply exist and document the sins of the Uzbek government, but then shut up and not think of ways to get their attention via various proxies like the EU.

It's sad to see people fall for this show Hamm is putting on, because they haven't seen all the viciousness that went before from him and Foust toward human rights groups. Well, they'll figure it out eventually.

Then comes the third post. Indignation about Gulnara! Now seeing that piece, there are those who would be tempted to think that Registan has been on the road to Damascus and decided to stop carrying any water for the regime.

But of course, it's merely that Gulnara happened to set up a nice one-two punch for the "progressives" mad at Komen, the breast-cancer people who got all the PC crowd pissed off when they tried to de-fund Planned Parenthood.

For the sake of bashing the religious right, or conservatives, or anybody else who thinks that Komen should have been able to fund who they want regardless of what any one else thinks (it's a free country), Hamm will cross the street, and even take on appearing to dis Gulnara just like those human rights picketers that Foust and others thought were "all wrong" last year in their obsession with Gulnara.

So all in all, quite the tour de force of bad faith from this poseur.

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Registan, Uzbekistan
March 29, 2012

Registan Needs to Learn Russian!

I have to laugh when Nathan Hamm of Registan copies my blog. How do I know he even reads it? Because he sometimes kicks up a fuss on Twitter, and because the person who comes here nearly every day from "hidemyass.com" has to be him (most people wouldn't bother with that sillyness). He was also hear using software to scoop up all the pages, imaging they would be changed or something.

Oh, sure, everybody is writing about the dancing dictator, the story first covered by Radio Ozodlik. And you wouldn't have to be copying me to say that Karimov is interested in protecting his family's wealth, that's a no-brainer.

But to dig into an uzmetronom.com post that was days ago and already buried on that site and reference that AND to mention Sobirov, who is never in the news — as I did — that's just too much of a coincidence.

Funny, Hamm looks at the dancing video and says Karimov looks like he's vigorous. Actually, not, he looks pale and sick and moves stiffly.

As for uzmetronom.com, which isn't reliable, way in the bottom of a story already gone from the first page and even the "previous" pages, there's Ezhkov's theory that the next ruling party head will be the next head of state, so watch that space (i.e. in the December 2014 elections).

But Hamm really needs to learn Russian better, it is the lingua franca for this region. He mistranslates uzmetronom.com as follows:

that the election was shifted so that it would take place when large numbers of seasonal agricultural workers were out of the country and unable to vote.

But what Ezhkov wrote (in a part I skipped because it was just speculative snark) was about workers inside the country:

Experts analyzing the Constitutional Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan, "On the Next Elections to Representative Bodies of State Authority and the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan" do not understand why the next elections of the president (but not all subsequent elections — that's fundamentally important) coincide with the peak of spring field work, at which usually about 60 percent of the population of the republic are occupied.

The confusion emerged because previously the moving of the elections to the head of state from January to December was explained in fact because in December, the agricultural population has finished its season and has free tome, which is necessary for an objective evaluation of the campaign platform of every candidate for president.

The Uzbek government isn't terribly worried about the vote of the migrant workers who in principle could vote in Uzbek Embassies abroad — they manipulate the vote to be the percentage they need, so it's not so important.

No comments on Registan Needs to Learn Russian!

Registan, Uzbekistan
March 27, 2012

Denver Post Coverage on Muhtorov Tilting Under Pressure?

The Denver Post found itself in recent months under a barrage of assault from Registan for its coverage of the case of terrorist suspect Jamshid Muhtorov — and Joshua Foust also falsely assaulted me as a "liar, lunatic, and fabulist" (!) which I refuted here in implying that the prosecutor quoted my blog (!) in this case.

And inevitably, such pressure does take a toll, even though the journalists are trying to do a good job and have been doing a good job with this complicated story, despite the snark from Registan, underscored by that perceived Beltway "sophistication" and superiority over flyover states and their courthouses.

In today's piece about a formality in which Muhtorov pled not-guilty, Felisa Carona, the Post writer who has been covering the story, takes up less of the description of the prosecutor's findings from the FBI investigation, and his theory of the case, and focuses more on the defense's narrative. That's fine, if she doesn't just then settle into that narrative for the rest of her coverage of the case. Hopefully, there will be the totality of all the events covered and all the pieces to look at as a whole.

But already I see signs of some slippage of objectivity — I'm a big believer in the "view from nowhere," as Jay Rosen contemptuously calls it, which I describe as merely "compiling all the perspectives in the story" in letting the reader judge for himself.

The first point is in the question of Muhtorov as a "human rights activist". Says Cardona:

Muhtorov has a documented record as a human rights activist in the country. He fled Uzbekistan and so did members of his family because they claimed they were oppressed by the government. His sister remains jailed there on an alleged false murder charge, according to Human Rights Watch and government documents.

Well, technically this is true, but he's a former human rights activist, because while once in Ezgulik, a prominent registered human rights organization in Uzbekistan (the name means "Charity"), he was fired for not turning in financial reports and wishing to join another, more radical political group of farmers who wanted to overthrow the regime. Then he fled the country. After he fled Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, he was not known to be in any human rights groups or indeed any emigre or international groups of any kind, until this charge about his relationship to the Islamic Jihad Union.

Making a distinction between human rights groups specifically devoted to monitoring, publicizing and protesting human rights as defined by universal international law; and political groups like those wishing to overthrow the regime, much less terrorist groups — that's important. Someone might think casually that if Muhtorov was once a human rights activist, then he remains one. But it's important to note that he is not considered one any more by human rights organizations.

I'm not for demanding that someone must be a card-carrying member of a group approved by the state or the international justice jet-set in order to be qualified as a human rights activist — but I do think it's important to point out that he is really not considered one any more, and that after he left the country, he wasn't known for any activism at all (and that's also not required, especially for emigres struggling with adaptation, but just something to note).

As for this claim in the Post — "his sister remains jailed there on a false murder charge, according to Human Rights Watch and government documents" — that's compressed and in fact leading one to a false conclusion. Human Rights Watch didn't make any finding about any validity of any murder charge. They merely reported that he himself believed this to be the case (as far as I know — I don't see any HRW document or report claiming the case was false).

We also have the account of Tolib Yakubov published by uznews.net that says he believes the story to be false, that the sister was in fact a member of a gang that used her as a lure to taxi drivers who were then robbed and killed, and that while she may have been mistreated or even tortured and didn't get a fair trial, basically, she's guilty.
Many impugn Tolib's stories because he is not liked, being very persistent and very dramatic in taking up human rights. But it is an alternative to the narrative that bears consideration as much as anything else — yes, the Karimov government sets up people falsely all the time, but sometimes a murder accomplice really is a murder accomplice. I've never seen any human rights group in Uzbekistan claim that the sister is innocent of the charges. And that's in a country where several do in fact still take up cases of such false charges and try to press the government.

As for the "government documents," that's just a very compressed form of saying "The State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" that again, mention Muhtorov's beatings and his claims about his sister, putting as the source the local human rights groups and/or HRW, but not making their own findings to validate the information (a frequent device one finds in the Country Reports, BTW).

Now here's the Registan-induced graph:

Critics of the charges against him say if Muhtorov was supporting the IJU it wasn't for the purpose of hurting American forces, rather it was to continue fighting a dictator in Uzbekistan.

"Critics" is likely a reference to Joshua Foust and other commenters at Registan, who also migrated over to the anonymous comments section at the Denver Post.

Originally, Foust and others seemed to wave away the charges of the IJU on the grounds that it didn't exist. After some drubbing by another blogger, Foust seemed to concede the IJU existed, but then the narrative began to be implied somehow: that an Uzbek emigre might join the group not because he was actually hoping to bomb NATO soldiers, but merely because he wanted to get back at Karimov (as if violence is ok if it's in a "good cause" — a premise I reject.)

That was why Foust could take up the bashing of the Denver Post in the first place — he felt, after the angry commenter (with the anonymous handle of "correct" ) said that the headline was misleading and should be changed, that it was changed — and that the difference between the prosecutor saying Muhtorov admitted he knew what the IJU was and that it fought NATO, and admitting that he knew what the IJU was and he himself wanted to fight NATO was really crucial.

I believe that it's a distinction without a difference. Regardless of what Muhtorov thought he was doing, if he plans to support a group on the US foreign terrorist organization's list, and he is found at trial to be materially supporting said group, that's support, regardless of whether he thought he was targeting Karimov or NATO. It's also wrong, morally and legally, because it's helping an extremist group to commit violence.

Foust's very firm conviction that this *does* make a difference, which he is hammering the Post about, suggests he may have other sources from somewhere about this case, possibly leaked to him. He was a former defense contractor and has extensive contacts in the government and think-tank world in Washington and "followers" on Twitters. Or perhaps his conviction is merely a function of his usual arrogant skepticism about any terrorism case.

The defense may hope to play up two aspects of this case: a) that Muhtorov had a history as a human rights activist and b) that he only cared about attacking the Karimov regime, not NATO. (As the Post has repeatedly said in all its reports, Muhtorov is not charged with attempting to set up any terrorist acts on American soil.)

Should his determination to fight only Karimov and indifference about NATO matter in his defense? As I said, in terms of the law, I don't see how it could. In terms of a moral wrapping to the case, I also don't see that it should because any effort to use violence and support violence to change a government, even a hated one, is wrong — and it's why the human rights movement has always taken pains to be non-violent in its approach.

While the lawyer is going to look narrowly at what will support his client's case, hyping the human rights activism will do a terrible disservice to the human rights movement as it will conflate it with extremism and terrorism. Foust doesn't care about that — anything that discredits the human rights movement would fit well with his chronic assault on the movement.

And the defense may focus on Muhtorov's legitimate beefs with the regime (whether or not they are valid is impossible to find out) over his sister and the state's persecution of him first as a businessman, then as an activist disseminating Human Rights Watch pamphlets.

But ultimately, there is this to remember from the Post:

In an affidavit, the FBI says they tapped Muhtorov's phone calls and recorded him talking about final goodbyes to his family and about his allegiance to global jihad.

Phoning while Muslim? Interneting while Muslim? The FBI does not appear to think so.

Meanwhile, neither Muhtorov himself has said anything more than "not guilty" (probably on the advice of his lawyers) and the lawyer himself hasn't said anything more, either. Bakhtiyor Jumayev, who was charged with donating $300 to Muhtorov toward the IJU cause, was arrested but hasn't appeared in court yet.

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Human Rights, Registan, Terrorism, US, Uzbekistan