Software, blogging, estrangement

Befuddled by FOSS

The new woman who is set to replace me when I retire in a couple of months seemed a little surprised today. First of all there was a screaming match going on in the next room over the submission of a fundraising proposal. I wasn’t paying much attention to it as I was busy trying to explain some things about the job (maybe that surprised her too). Then, when I got into explaining about Piwigo (the photo gallery software we use), and kept praising the recent changes introduced by the “developer”, she asked me what I meant by “a developer.” She is used to big companies with hundreds of developers, not free open source software. She said she didn’t feel safe otherwise because “What would happen if the developer goes away?”

So I pointed out that Google (whose software we also use) is guilty of dropping so many applications – just yesterday, I had mentioned another one (Currents) that they are dropping. And I pointed out that if Gmail one day becomes unprofitable, Google could drop that too. “And look at Twitter…” And then, I said, it isn’t so strange to be using something that doesn’t have a powerful company behind it, because the same is true of many essential parts on which the whole structure of the internet is built! Finally, I showed her the Piwigo website, which says that the application has been around for 20 years and is used by numerous universities, etc.

This is really insignificant

I think that most people with the audacity to publish what they write probably think that they have some essential contribution to make, or something important to tell or sell humanity, and usually this is true. So I feel a heavy responsibility to explain that none of this is true here.

Hardly anybody reads this stuff and they have no good reason to do so. This is, rather, a compendium of unoriginal reflections on the life and times of a forgetable nobody. Whatever ideas are expressed here will certainly have been stated more cogently by people with greater intelligence. If you haven’t come across the ideas already elsewhere, you are welcome to restate them in a better way, without credit or, instead, to use them as a prime example of flawed understanding, with or without credit. flags

Those flags…

With the above thoughts in mind, I listened this evening to a podcast on the Haaretz site by journalist and TV anchor woman Ilana Dayan. She felt that the judicial reform that is going forward is so significant that she had to step out of her usual role as a presenter of content and to analyze its deep negative impact on Israeli democracy. She made me aware both of my extreme ignorance, and of how much of an outsider I am to Israeli society and culture. Her presentation was erudite and informed. But it also had the essential quality of issuing from an insider. Her gut feelings and trust in Israeli society are based on her familiarity with the way things work and the way Israelis think.

I lack all of that. I can’t and don’t feel like an Israeli. I’m not even sure that I know what other Israelis, especially those who are involved in politics, are really feeling. I simply know that I’ve emotionally rejected the reality in which they feel at home. I cannot sympathize with a national group that, on the one hand, is proud of its democratic institutions while, on the other hand, it denies basic rights to Palestinians. Somehow Ilana Dayan, who, as an investigative journalist, has a much keener understanding of how the system works, and how it is skewed against Palestinians, can juggle that, and still come out thinking that she is blessed to live in this country.

There was another Israeli journalist, Yossi Gurwitz, whose early death was discovered on Monday. In his later years, he became an anti-zionist, called for BDS, castigated religion and the state. Yet I somehow feel that even he was speaking out of the Israeli experience; existentially linked to the Israel he rejected.

The rejection of an insider is different from the rejection of an outsider. I’m an outsider to Israel as I’m an outsider to the other countries I have lived. I’m a stranger to the national life of those countries as well as to their institutions, such as their academic life, culture, news media and other facets of civilization. Wherever I go, I live on the outskirts, and without the least regret.

My experience is not unique – it’s surely commonplace. Perhaps even the majority of people, or a growing number of them, are rootless in a similar way. If I’m more aware of my position, or am more self-reflective about it, it is probably because I have lived so long in a country that is like Israel, which places a high value on the nurturing of its national identity.

National self-harm

I watched the 2nd part of the BBC’s The Modi Question, heard a discussion with a historian of modern India, on The Wire, and watched the Israeli TV news.

Israel’s turn to the right has many of the same characteristics as India’s. In both cases, rightwing politics are causing ongoing national self-harm. This is not unlike the self-harm caused by Brexit in the UK.

The item in the Israeli TV news spoke about how the uncertainties created about Israeli “democracy” and the independence of its judicial system is likely to damage its economy by discouraging investment in its all-important high-tech industry.

The articles about India showed how the policies of Modi and the BJP have destabilized the delicate structure that keeps the (soon to be) world’s largest nation together and undermined its democracy while failing to address core issues of concern to every Indian no matter what caste or community they belong to, such as the dead rivers and poisoned air, disease and poverty.

The articles about Britain speak of the reversal in public opinion regarding Brexit, as people gradually realise that they were mislead: the broken promises regarding the public health system that is now in crisis; the so-called economic opportunities that have come to naught, and the prospect of a shrinking economy.

It seems to be an almost universal paradox that right-wing political parties, while championing nationalism, only harm the nations where they come to power. It should be obvious really that the only way to advance a country is to bring benefit to all citizens, rather than promoting some and leaving others behind. Otherwise, the structure you are building is a house of cards.

In Israel, this means creating a nation where Jews and Palestinians from every ethnic, religious, geographical and economic sector can live as equal citizens.

In Britain, the Brexit referendum was determined by the country’s longstanding inequalities; huge parts of the population that felt left behind, and a large segment of older people who were willing to betray the hopes and dreams of the young.

In India, the BJP came to power for a host of reasons, including the lingering after-effects of colonial rule, but the result has been to deepen the country’s divisions and to damage, perhaps irreparably, the secular democratic framework that made India so unique among South Asian nations.

India’s Taken a Dangerous, Divisive And Self-Destructive Direction Under Modi: Ramchandra Guha https://yewtu.be/3SjZNXIDibQ

Indian students watch banned BBC documentary critical of PM Modi https://www.france24.com/en/video/20230126-india

Truss and Brexit have sunk Britain’s economy – and the right is in deep denial about both

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/01/liz-truss-brexit-sunk-britain-economy-right-in-denial-imf

Hundreds of economists warn on gov’t judicial system reform https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-hundreds-of-economists-warn-on-govt-judicial-system-reform-1001436443

Bank of Israel governor says judicial reform could hurt economy – reports https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/25/bank-of-israel-governor-warns-netanyahu-that-judicial-overhaul-could-hurt-economy-reports

UK visa process

I spent the late afternoon and evening helping a neighbour and friend fill out his application forms to obtain a temporary charity work visa to the UK – a frightful process. Among the tasks involved was to detail every visit to another country within the last ten years, page after page of form filling, questions about having expressed “extremist views” or support for “terrorism”, if he had committed “war crimes”, if he had been convicted of breaking any law.

I wonder about the mentality of people who formulate such questions. Israel is a fairly open, western-style democracy (for Jews). It isn’t ruled by an autocrat and isn’t a place where the violent overthrow of the government might be seen as more humane than preserving the status quo. But, even in this blessed national oasis of democracy, it would, for example, be an “extremist view” to hold that the Israeli army regularly commits “war crimes” in Gaza. The idea that Palestinians have a moral right to resist the occupation, such as by throwing stones at tanks, would be “extremist”. Even to express humane, democratic values would in some case be “extremist”. One could be convicted of incitement for expressing such views.

And what of Britain itself? Those climate activists who, the other day, broke the windows of media outlets for producing feel-good stories about the recent heat wave – “Enjoy the sunshine, carry on as usual” – would obviously be seen as dangerous extremists in the minds of those who created those forms. Maybe they should be expelled from the UK? – if they happen not to have UK citizenship they probably could be – but if so, they might not be allowed into other countries that express a similarly restrictive mentality and who produce similar visa forms.

The visa costs around £350. There’s another £50+ for a meeting to provide biometric data (where one pays to enjoy the privilege of being fingerprinted and photographed). Every additional service, such as help with uploading forms, asking procedural questions, even getting an SMS to inform you that your passport has been returned to you, carries an additional price tag. Calling someone to ask questions costs 69p per minute. I would personally have strong doubts about seeking a temporary work permit to assist in a UK charity if I had to go through such a process. I would probably conclude that the UK is a paranoid and exploitive nation undeserving of my support, though it might be badly in need of all the help it can get.

Trying to recycle an old router as a range extender | nations

There are a few articles and YouTube videos on how to do what I spent a few hours fiddling with today. But eventually I grew convinced that the reason I stopped using my old router was that it simply doesn’t work – in any capacity. Not even after several attempts and a firmware upgrade. Also another old range extender didn’t work. I do have one range-extender working, and I’ve done this before. Never mind; now I know just to ditch these old devices.

I stared at the following picture in my feed today:

And I thought: That’s not it. I’m not an anarchist. Just a nobody. I love it when there are others whose job it is to collect the garbage. In the early days of the village, before we were formally recognized as one, we had to take turns with the garbage. Goodness, that was a smelly job. One day there was a dead sheep in one of the bins, crawling with maggots. The guy who was on collection duty had to empty everything into a big green container – I suppose even then, it was the state’s responsibility to remove that at least. But today I pay my taxes and it’s somebody else’s function to remove the garbage from its varicolored bins. I’m told that the salary isn’t so bad.

My ideal state is one in which the recycling bins get emptied and the trains run on time. It doesn’t involve complicated matters like citizenship and patriotism. It doesn’t require a flag. Those who live there pay their taxes, treat each other as equals and abide by a reasonable set of laws.

Recently we have a wave of stabbings and shootings. Five people were shot dead tonight in Tel Aviv. Ayelet Shaked, the Interior Minister, came on and yapped about cancelling citizenships. I don’t have one of those either, come to think of it. I do have a foreign passport, though its only current utility is to allow the brief respite of traveling from one corrupt, racist, soul-destroying country to yet another corrupt, racist soul-destroying country. They are in many ways the same.

No, I’m not an anarchist; just a nobody; one of those stateless, allegiance-less world citizens that Margaret Thatcher said are “citizens of nowhere” and whom nationalists everywhere love to malign. For me, countries are purely a matter of convenience. We give something and get something back. I would be happier if the groupings were a little smaller than these hateful conglomerations of unknown millions, who are pleased to kill each other on the slightest whim, vandalize anything that is not their personal property, and shrug off the destruction of the biosphere as if it is of no concern of theirs. Human beings find it hard to relate to each other or the earth fairly, as soon as their numbers grow too high or the territory too large.

We need treaties and covenants – all those declarations of the rights of the child and of women; international days for peace remembrance of past holocausts – they should be taught in school and shown to us in place of cola ads. We need frameworks to manage the delicate matter of how communities deal with other communities. It’s just that the whole thing should be based on a modus operandi of cooperation instead of rivalry. Let there be a NATO. Give it a more inclusive name. Rename it the Russian Federation for all I care, but bring China and India in too. Once everybody is in the alliance, nobody will be left outside of it to fight with.

These ideas, like nations, like anarchism, are too vast. Better to remain a nobody.

Plain text, Nations

I think the tiredness and weirdness I feel today may be a result of the 2nd booster shot that I had yesterday. It just occurred to me that that may be the cause. I hope it’s the vaccination and not the virus itself.

Yesterday evening the storm struck out power to the village – they only fixed it at around 10:00 this morning. I watched an episode of The Expanse and went to bed.

Plain Text

A couple of days ago I read through the entire blog (or the parts that I understood) of Bastian Bechtold – I had it via his RSS feed, which was easier to go through than the blog itself. (As is often the case.) This got me thinking once again about the relative virtues of plain text. Really, I think we should be doing everything in plain text. However secure our CMS systems, the text is only as secure as the system. For non-programmers like me, at least, it’s really hard to retrieve the text from a CMS system. I recently tried a WordPress plugin that produces static files from the blog and it ended up producing about 6,000 files. It’s possible to extract a newsfeed but I wasn’t able, on my last attempt, to get all the posts at once. (I think that was in WordPress.com – I’ve since found out how to do it in self-hosted WP) Plain text is surely the most future-proof of any format.

The value of a system like Bechtold’s org-static-blog is that every post is a simple org-mode plain text file. Many static blogs create for every post a separate folder, of which the post is the index.html. I prefer the product of org-static-blog; a directory with org files and another one with the posts. The method of creating and publishing files is easy, and the code itself is as easy as it could be. It doesn’t have a templating system; just an ordinary CSS file.

I used org-static-blog previously, but was lured back to the comforts of CMS posting. I’m not very good at remembering the codes found in emacs, and every time I go back to it, I find that I’ve forgotten them again. Maybe age plays a role, since I used to be very good at remembering WordPerfect codes, for the DOS versions of that word processor. As a word processor, WordPerfect and others of that era weren’t so far removed from emacs

Anyway, I think I will give org-static-blog another spin. One of my good sides of my tech-fickleness is that I’m never intimidated by learning something new, or re-learning something that I’ve forgotten.

Nations

Nations are crap; pretty well all of them. Since nations seem to be the inevitable reflection of the individuals that make them, I suppose that means that we are crap too. At least, nations reflect the worst part of ourselves. Today I was reading the Guardian story about the death of the 78-year old Palestinian at the hands of the IDF (as if there was any doubt, his death was found to have resulted from “external violence”). There are many, many such stories about Israel’s total disregard for Palestinian lives. But without the least attempt to excuse this country for its crimes, my problem is that all the other countries that I know are culpable too. Visiting or going to live in another country can provide a breather from the concern or disgust we might feel for our domicile – the problems of “foreign” countries are less within the sphere of our interest, after all. But it isn’t necessary to dig far under the surface to find the same phenomena, on a greater or a lesser scale.

Sometimes we have the luxury of feeling that there has been progress. Britain is no longer the imperialist power that it was when it oppressed half the world. Germany is no longer the Germany of the third reich. But in the timeline of human history, 1939 or 1858 are just a second away and nothing much has been learned. When I look at the growing crisis in Ukraine, that seems obvious. It would be so easy for the parties of that conflict to reach a solution. Why do we need a Europe where nuclear-enabled forces of two hostile parties face off along a narrow divide. Demilitarize the whole area; move forces and missiles away from the borders on both sides.

All conflicts based on the perception of “us” and “them” are problems only of perception, and the larger the group identities become, the larger the potential for destruction. Wars between huge nations are obviously more dangerous than squabbles between clans. The dynamics are similar but the consequences are influenced by scale.

Let nations exist as convenient groupings to organize social services for the good of citizens. They are not worthy of our loyalty or patriotism. In an ideal world, individuals would be able to flow freely between nations. Their loyalty would be towards humanity as a whole and towards the welfare of all beings.

I rather liked the insult hurled by the Turkish journalist, which Erdogan said “would not go unpunished”:

‘The alleged insult was a proverb that translates as: “When the ox comes to the palace, he does not become a king. But the palace becomes a barn.”’

Thoughts about immigration and adopted identities

Having lived most of my life outside the country of my birth I often have thoughts about this. For many people, group identity is a matter of importance. Here in Israel/Palestine I have seen many newcomers go to great lengths to integrate into one or the other society. Some people also seem to see a deficiency in their original identity, and try to adopt a new identity even without really needing to on a practical level. For example, they have converted to Judaism, taken on something of the national ethos, but then gone back to their own countries. Or they have taken up the Palestinian cause, and sometimes converted to Islam, and continued in this while living elsewhere.

Different types of newcomers:

There are some immigrants who spend long years painstakingly adopting and perfecting a new national, linguistic, tribal or religious identity (these sometimes go together).

There are some who are natural chamelions and quickly adjust; without necessarily taking any new group identity to heart. They would just as easily adapt to living in a third country.

There are some who live in a new country but staunchly resist its influence, asserting their foreigness and maintaining their love for their former country (sometimes without realizing that they have been subtly changed by their adopted country, and probably would not be able to live again easily “back home”. I think this has been true of my parents.

There are some who live a double life – pretending to “belong” when they are dealing with citizens of the new country, but privately living and keeping up the attitudes and prejudices of the former country.

There are some for whom group identities are unimportant. They take the trouble to understand the outlook of people in their adopted country: their red lines, hangups, prejudices, and the things that make them happy, proud, or provoke favourable responses. But they don’t go out of their way to change themselves. They don’t feel a need to take on a new identity package because of this, or feel any need to abandon a former national, linguistic, tribal or religious identity.

I think I am closest to the last category. Group identities or membership in them are not so important to me. I have no doubt gradually accrued certain traits from the places I have lived. This is not so much a conscious process, but happens all the same. There is no particular country where I feel entirely at home, and whereever I go I feel something of a foreigner. But this doesn’t really affect me.