Magpie

Friday, January 6, 2006

Just what the world needs.

Another place for the US to stash people accused of being terrorists.

According to the UK's Financial Times, US authorities are planning a 'high-security facility' for terrorist suspects in Afghanistan. At least some of the prisoners to be held there would be moved from the current facility in Guantánamo. We're sure that it's just a coincidence that it would be harder to monitor the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan than it is in Guantánamo, which is much easier to access by US-based human rights monitors.

The new Afghanistan 'facility' is to be built at Pol-e-Charki, a Soviet-era prison — something that reminds us more than a little of the US choice to hold Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of Saddam Hussein's most notorious prisons. The Financial Times report notes that plans for the new prison are being opposed both by the UN and the European Union, but the reasons for that opposition are not explained.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:48 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, January 5, 2006

Carnival of Feminists 6.

It's that time of the month again, and the newest Carnival of Feminists is available for your perusal here at Reappropriate. As usual, this one is just chock-full of feminist linky goodness. If you haven't caught the Carnival before, it's a semi-monthly roundup of the best feminist posts from around the web, appearing on the first and third Wednesday of each month. [Attentive readers will have noticed that we neglected to post about the last Carnival, which came out on December 20th, due to our hiatus. You find Carnival 5 here.]

This time around, Jenn has put together an especially excellent set of posts, even by the high standards of the Carnival. She leads off with a section called 'The Intersection of Race and Gender: Feminism of Colour,' from which we've excerpted the following:

To start things off, Woman of Color Blog eloquently mourns for the invisibility of women of colour when the plight of their male counterparts are repeatedly touted in the national media. She compares the high profile execution of Tookie Williams with the thousands of women of colour whose stories still remain unheard to this day.

In an arena in which women of colour are visible to a fault, blac(k)ademic of black lesbians say what? records her disgust for and argues against the racism of pornography. Interspersed with search terms that have been used to pull up her blog, blac(k)ademic deconstructs the racism of the sexual fantasy that fuels those seeking pornography featuring women of colour.

Speaking of sex and race, it seems that the hypersexualization of women of colour comes with another heavy price. Mad Melancholic Feminista insightfully considers the targeting of African American and Hispanic neighbourhoods with billboards promoting abstinence to be just a "wee bit" racist.

In South Korea, Silverfish cleverly wonders what South Korean feminists have to say about the inescapable overrepresentation of White women in South Korean advertising and toy products. On a related note, over at Egotistical Whining, shannon credits the diversity of her childhood reading -- beyond the usual literary "classics" -- for helping her avoid internalizing white supremacy and female inadequacy.

Meanwhile, erin, over at Hyphen Blog, recounts how she lost a little of that holiday spirit after picking up a David Sedaris holiday collection of short stories only to be confronted by a truly despicable caricature of a Vietnamese whore in one of the stories. Erin explains how she had believed that Sedaris, as a gay man, would be sensitive to issues of stereotyping and caricatures -- turns out facing discrimination and bigotry doesn't prevent you from turning around and giving as good as you got.

There are plenty other links for you to check out in the 6th Carnival if you go over here.

The 7th Carnival is coming up on Wednesday, January 18th, and it will be hosted by Feministe. The general theme is feminism and pop culture. If you want to recommend a post for consideration — you can even recommend one of your own — send it to web[at]feministe[dot]us by midnight on January 15th. Make sure your message has the subject line Carnival of the Feminists.

And if you want to keep posted on what's up with the Carnival in general, bookmark the home page.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

If a geek blogger ...

... can use Amazon wishlists to do this, imagine how much information the real data miners — especially the ones in the US government — can compile.

It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people. Most of us don't have access to the databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources. Here's an example.

There are many websites and databases that could be used for this project, but few things tell you as much about a person as the books he chooses to read. Isn't that why the Patriot Act specifically requires libraries to release information on who's reading what? For this reason, I chose to focus on the information contained in the popular Amazon wishlists.

Amazon wishlists lets anyone bookmark books for later purchase. By default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches by name. If the wishlist creator specifies a shipping address, someone else can even purchase the book on Amazon and have it shipped directly as a gift. The wishlist creator's city and state are made public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private. Amazon's popularity has created a vast database of wishlists. No index of all wishlists is available, but it remains possible to view all wishlists by people of a particular first name. A recent search for people named Mark returned 124,887 publicly viewable wishlists.

For an all inclusive search by name, you could compile a comprehensive list of first names and nicknames from the baby names databases available on the internet. Armed with this list, and by recording the search results for each first name, it is possible for you to retrieve the vast majority of public wishlists on Amazon.

For the purposes of this exercise, only a single name was chosen — a common male name that returned over 260,000 wishlists. I'm not going to divulge what name was actually used. Let's pretend it was "Edgar," in honor of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

And that's just the beginning. Read the whole story here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:42 PM | Get permalink

Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Uh-oh. We got tagged.

Mary at Pacific Views hit us with the Meme of Four. So here goes:

Four jobs you've had in your life: Courier, radio news director, bookstore clerk, directory assistance operator

Four movies you could watch over and over: Antonia's Line, Local Hero, Tampopo, Robin Hood [the early 90's UK version]

Four places you've lived: Minnneapolis, Santa Cruz [CA], Portland [the one in Oregon], Yuma [AZ]

Four TV shows you love to watch: Daily Show, Battlestar Galactica, Frontline, Kaput & Zosky

[We find it very interesting that the meme asks about movies and TV shows, but not about books.]

Four places you've been on vacation: UK, Newfoundland, Nashville, Saskatoon

Four websites you visit daily: The Sideshow, I Blame the Patriarchy, Bitch PhD, Grow-a-Brain

Four of your favorite foods: mackerel sushi, flan, jambalaya, chocolate

Four places you'd rather be: Cape Breton Island, London, Melbourne, employed

We're supposed to tag four other blogs, but we can't think of any that haven't already been tagged by someone else. Maybe we need to get out more, huh?

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:17 AM | Get permalink

Monday, January 2, 2006

Sorry for the sporadic posting of late.

The end of December was rough. January will be better, we hope.

Oh yeah: Happy 2006!

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:02 PM | Get permalink