inamerrata

One objection to email fees is related to email viruses: if every email you send costs a cent, and you get a virus that sends out 20,000 emails you’ve just lost $200. That sucks. Fortunately, that’s straightforward avoidable by limiting the amount of money your computer can access without your authorisation (by way of password, eg). If you limit the amount of money your computer has access to to $5, that’s 500 emails you can send before you have to worry about recharging your account (more presuming you get sent some emails), and if you do get infected by a virus, you only lose $5, which is a nuisance, but not a big deal. Odds are you lose that much in time anyway. And even better, instead of sending out 20,000 emails, you’ve only sent out 500, reducing the problem globally.

There are other protection measures you can use too. If you’re in an organisation, and you don’t want your 1000 staff members all losing $5 at once to a virus, you can setup your mail server to require manual authorisation if anyone tries sending more than a couple of emails every few minutes. That’s possible now, of course, but there’s no reason to do it: it doesn’t stop the organisation from getting infected by the virus, since it already is, and it doesn’t much matter that other people get infected. By moving the cost onto the sender you setup an incentive for people to start using email programs that are resistant to email viruses, and to setup procedures to ensure that even if they are infected, that they don’t cause problems for everyone else.

UPDATE 2004/03/16:

Martin responds to the above post (without permalinking, tsktsk), and makes a couple of points. One is that it opens a new avenue for insecure monetary transactions — in this case from your bank account or credit card company to your mail client’s moneybox. If that avenue is too easily accessible it’ll be exploited by tricksters. I don’t think that’s a major concern because it doesn’t have to be easily accessible: most of the time you’re going to be aiming to come out square in the email fees you send and receive; and given that the amounts per email are so small, you should only be expecting to withdraw a few dollars a month. Having this be a fairly automatic part of your ISP billing cycle (and thus out-of-band as far as trojans and viruses are concerned) is also possible, for example.

Martin also writes:

Another way to produce that backpressure would be to sue or prosecure someone for negligently continuing to transmit viruses. I think it is fairly clearly negligent to send mail; it might even be covered by existing computer crime legislation.

Coming from someone whose Orkut profile lists him as a “libertarian”, this seems odd — resorting to legislation and police intervention is pretty heavy handed; and doing so when solutions that only require agreement between consenting parties haven’t even been tried seems quite anti-libertarian, at least as I understand it.

The obvious problem with legislation is that it’s slow, not very reactive, and by it’s nature is a one-size-fits-all solution. For things like spam, where different people have different classifications of what’s a problem and what’s not, it’ll never be a good solution. If I don’t like real estate agents sending me mails just because I talked to them once a year ago, a legislative approach isn’t going to help me, because it would hurt both the real estate agent, and the people who are interested in getting those emails.

Martin’s final remark is:

So we only need to worry about high-volume senders. Most people won’t need to send more than say 100-200 emails per day, and it would be a good start to cap dial-up/DSL users to that. Perhaps organizations which do need to send in large volumes should pay a bond to some kind of underwriter.

(This comment is in reponse to the claim that email postage is free as long as you send less mail than you recieve; which implies that if the spammers find a way to work around this and keep sending you spam, at least you don’t lose out; otoh if you are losing money, then you’ve also managed to substantially decrease the amount of spam you get. ie, you can’t lose! In theory, anyway. I don’t think Martin’s comment follows from this, because it assumes we already have email postage. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, though)

Anyway. 100-200 emails a day just means you need to infect 10k machines to send a million emails every day. If the owners of those machines don’t really care about that — they’re not losing their money and their computer is still working fine, eg — then that ought to be relatively easy, so it’s questionable whether the problem would actually be solved. Paying a bond to “some kind” of underwriter, meanwhile, makes a system that’s only useful for a few people (and thus doesn’t get many network effect benefits), and opens up similar scope for monetary abuse: either getting funds by claiming to have gotten spammed by one of the bond payers (possibly after trojaning their systems yourself), or simply depriving the target of funds (by convincing the bond holder that the group is a spammer and causing them to not return the bond).

The real benefits of email postage compared to other money-based solutions is that it’s broad-based and fair (no one has to worry about following a different system to anyone else, which is a nice equalising property of the Internet that’s worth retaining, and there aren’t areas for big businesses to position themselves so they can extort money from users); that it is implementable entirely at the endpoints (you just need to upgrade mutt or Outlook, you don’t need to change ISPs), that it’s flexible (you can change the fees you expect depending on who the mail’s from, who it’s to, or what it’s about), and it has very few external costs (you don’t need to reimplement the internet, you don’t need to create a new police taskforce, or put more cases through the courts, or add lots of new restrictions to ISPs — basically it has the property when people don’t follow the rules, you just don’t get their mail, you don’t get hurt and have to seek a remedy).

The Gnu Hunter writes:

Yahoo and Microsoft are looking at ways of imposing a postage fee for emails as a way of reducing the ever increasing number of junk emails or spam.

No, Yahoo and Microsoft are looking at ways of making more money by charging for something that was previously “free” and are using junk mail as an excuse to do so. They will only impose this charge if they can impose it.

[…]

40% of the many millions of emails sent each year are spam mail. Whoever could tax it would be worth a fortune. Whoever reaped the tax would be very reluctant to eliminate spam. Spam would be here forever. It would be renamed to non optional business marketing or some such.

I’ve thought about similar things to what Microsoft are proposing, and been met with similar criticism trying to discuss it. Criticism’s fair enough, but this criticism is, I think, terribly misguided.

First, I’ll note that the response isn’t a rational one. There’s two ways of responding to ideas you don’t like: one is to say it’s got evil outcomes, the other’s to say they’re inspired from evil motivations. The former’s a sensible thing to analyse, the latter is both impossible to know and useless to boot. Gnu Hunter’s rant is entirely attacking Microsoft’s motivations, rather than analysing what harm it will do, or what good will be obtained. So it can be dismissed on that basis.

But the motivation being attacked isn’t one that you’d expect a rabid right-winger to attack: it’s the profit motive. The argument’s one that left-wingers make regularly: that a good service, which is currently readily available and effectively free to use, is going to be taken over by evil corporate influences, made unaffordable and otherwise ruined, all in the name of the unholy dollar. Compare Gnu Hunter’s remarks with “The Government’s looking at ways of making more money by charging for University places that were previously free, and are using the current funding crisis as an excuse to do so”, for example.

The real flaw here, I think, is due to a knee-jerk fear, almost a loathing, of money and the profit motive. Not an unjustified one, perhaps, but rather an unjust one.

Going through the post above in too much detail is a bit cruel — it’s presumably intended as a dashed off comment, not a thoughtful response — but I’m going to do it anyway. The first claim is that Microsoft “are looking at ways of making more money by charging for something that was previously free”. Is that bad? One of the big things that’s happened in our culture recently that I find terribly amusing is the sale of bottled water. Tap water’s perfectly drinkable in most places I go to, yet I quite happily shell out a couple of bucks for a bottle of water every now and then. Why? Mostly because it’s convenient, it’s cold, and I’ve got a lot more confidence it hasn’t been spat on, urinated on or thrown up on recently than I do with most bubblers around the place. Sure, it used to be free, but now some company’s making money off me for the privelege of having a drink of water. Actually it still is free — they’re still plenty of bubblers and taps around and as far as I know you can go into most cafes or pubs and get an glass of water without too much hassle.

The next comment is that Microsoft “will only impose this charge if they can impose it”. Except, well, they won’t do anything of the sort: if you want to keep receiving spam, and people want to keep sending it to you, and your ISPs don’t mind either, there’s nothing Microsoft can do to stop you. There’s no chance of anything being imposed against your will here at all. But chances are you don’t want to keep getting spam, and your ISP doesn’t either, so that one or both of you will be eager to play ball if it actually works out. Worst case, you can switch to using competing email software, and avoid whatever Microsoft and your ISP might try to conspire to get you to do. So this case is much the same as for bottled water: maybe there’ll be a pay-to-play option, but anyone who doesn’t like that can always keep using email exactly as they do now.

Another comment is “whoever could tax [spam] would be worth a fortune”. Well, that’s kind of true: governments are already doing that by income tax on the spammers, and by most standards, governments are worth a fortune. The real issue isn’t taxing spam though; it’s annihilating it; if the only way to do so is via a new tax, well, so be it. One way, possibly the only way, to stop spam is to increase the cost of sending an email to more than the value of a spam. The value of a spam is very small — it can take millions of them to get up to being worth a couple of hundred dollars — but the cost of sending an email is far smaller. If you don’t increase the cost of spamming (either directly like Microsoft are attempting, or indirectly by having stiffer laws or terms of service and stiffer penalties), then it’ll keep getting sent, and your only option is to try to get your computer to filter it out once it’s already gotten to you. That works, but it doesn’t work well.

Now, there’s an interesting conundrum here. Increasing costs is fundamentally evil. It’s inconvenient at best. By definition it’s wasteful. It goes against our drive towards efficiency. But if it’s the only way of stopping spam, there must be some good in it.

The trick is that we’re not trying to increase costs globally; we’re trying to reduce them. The particular costs we’re trying to reduce are on the reciever: the cost of anti-spam software and services, the cost of lost mail due to false positives when checking for spam, and the cost of wasted time and computer resources in dealing with email you aren’t interested in that nevertheless makes it through your filters. What we’re thus trying to do isn’t increase the costs, but shift them onto the individuals getting the benefit from spam, ie the spammers themselves.

In a sense, what that means is that we’re not talking about increasing the cost of sending an email, but rather increasing the price of sending an email. The difference is very subtle, but it’s important. Increasing the cost increases the friction in the system: it means that more time and energy and resources are being lost than is necessary. Increasing the price does not. If I want you to bake me a cake, and you say you won’t unless I spend an hour digging a hole in the ground, then fill it back in again, then that’s a cost. If you instead demand an hour’s wages from me, that’s a price. The difference doesn’t matter to me, but it does matter to both you and the person for whom I did an hour’s useful work. You because you know have some money you can use, and my employer because they’ve now had their garden hoed.

The logic is simple: if the number of spams to be sent is to be reduced, then the cost of sending spam must be increased. If the cost of sending spam must be increased, then spammers must either devote more money or effort to sending spams. The only question left is who should benefit from that extra money of effort: Microsoft, the government, the recipient of the spam, or the dread lord Entropy?

At the moment, it’s the recipient who pays the most — in wasted time, and in unnecessary annoyance — and entropy that does all the collecting. That’s doubly bad in my opinion. The technology to do this right, to have all the costs borne by the spammer, and any excess benefits accrue to the recipient, and to ensure the energy and effort expended and lost to entropy in sending a message remains minimised, already exists. It’s called money, and it allows the spammer to encode efforts and work she’s done in the past in an easily transferred form, and give that to someone else, who can than decode it into effort and work that he in turn finds valuable.

And yet, the possibility that money may become involved in something previously pecuniarily pristine is enough to inspire fear and horror in even the most educated and rational.

I find that really rather bizarre. But it’s nevertheless nice to see it in an avowed apparent right-winger: sometimes the differences between left and right seem far less surmountable than they have any right to be.

(For what it’s worth, the economics here seem to make sense: the cost of looking at a spam’s subject and sender and deleting it without actually reading it seems to be about a second for me, and at $20/hr, that amounts to about half a cent per email. Charging the sender half a cent per email is noise for most people (I send a fair bit of email, and it’d cost me about $2/month), and in any case can generally be made up from the profits you make receiving email. But by contrast, for spammers, it’s bankrupting: they’d need to pay me well over $300/yr to send me what they send now; email viruses would net me another $200/yr at the current rate. With a little care — less than goes into dealing with spam filtering rule sets, by my estimation — most of the obvious problems, such as mailing lists and server load, can be dealt with to at least not be significantly worse than they are now. While some new external effects will no doubt be introduced, all the ones I can think of encourage good trends over the long term.)

UPDATE 2004/02/06:

Maybe a good way of looking at this is thus: email postage is free to you as long as the number of emails you send is less than the number of spams you receive.

So, here’s the lede:

Howard blasts ‘sloppy’ Latham

Prime Minister John Howard has launched a scathing attack on Federal Opposition leader Mark Latham, saying he is sloppy with the truth and he wants to expose him.

But the Labor Party is unfazed by Mr Howard’s criticism.

At the time of writing, that’s what’s visible on the ABC’s main page. What are the immediate conclusions you can draw from that? One is that Howard is attacking. Another is that he wants to expose Mark Latham, but presumably hasn’t yet. The Labor party, meanwhile, are reacting to this attack with calm aplomb. What attributes do you thus associate with whom? Howard gets “divisive” and “ineffectual”. Labor/Latham get “victim” and “stoic”. Note also that Howard makes claims, while the Labor party is unfazed.

Note also the complete lack of information. What’s Latham being sloppy about? Is Howard right to make those accusations? Or is Labor right to be unconcerned? Let’s look at the story. Or perhaps I should say, the “story”:

Mr Howard accused Mr Latham of being “sloppy with the truth” in his speech he delivered yesterday at the ALP National Conference.

“This man, when you go below the glib generalisations, hasn’t got a grip on some of the basic facts,” he said.

Mr Howard says Mr Latham’s address was full of mistakes on issues such as the economy and unemployment, and that Mr Latham “doesn’t tell it as it is”.

Okay, great. We already knew Howard was criticising Latham. Were they just general issues about the economy and unemployment? Because there’s a lot there that we don’t understand well, and there’s a lot of room for legitimate differences of opinion. But if you want details, you won’t find them in the ABC story, which ends with some more, unrelated criticism from Howard, also devoid of any specifics:

“He has an interesting put and take attitude to the past, whenever something’s embarrassing about something he said in the past such as his attacks on George Bush or his attacks on female journalists he says, look this election is about the future, yet when it suits him he likes to talk a lot about aspects of his own past,” he said.

and some replies that are equally voided of any substance:

ALP president Carmen Lawrence said that was “a bit rich”, coming from Mr Howard.

“My God, he should look at a mirror someday, really that’s amazing, that’s desperate, let me tell you,” she said.

Mr Latham also brushed off the criticism.

Also, yay for ALP bigwigs that sound like a primary schoolkid who’s been insulted, and can’t think of an original comeback. Next thing she’ll be doing Peewee Herman impressions: “I know you are, but what am I?”

So, left completely uninformed by the ABC, let’s try ninemsn, which is running the same story. Their lede?

Latham sloppy with truth: PM

Opposition Leader Mark Latham is sloppy with the truth and has a dangerous tendency to blame his staff, Prime Minister John Howard says.

What’s your impression from that? Seems fairly straightforward to me: Latham is bad, if you can believe what Howard says. Can we believe what Howard says? Let’s see what that is:

Mr Latham had said 370,000 Australians were long-term unemployed.

But the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for December found the figure was 117,200 – the lowest since September 1990, Mr Howard said.

Mr Latham had made a totally erroneous claim on ABC radio on Friday morning that the government’s proposed Medicare safety net would cost billions, Mr Howard said.

The real cost was $250-to-$260 million over four years, Mr Howard said.

“This man, when you go below the glib generalisations, hasn’t got a grip on some of the basic facts,” Mr Howard said.

Also justified, with a couple of examples, is the claim he blames staffers too much. It’s disappointing that that the rule of three wasn’t followed: if you’re going to make a general claim, you should always offer three examples: one’s happenstance, two’s a coincidence, three’s a trend, and four is just gloating.

The Sydney Morning Herald is running the same AAP story as ninemsn; News Ltd appears not to have picked up on it at all yet.

Bias in the ABC’s news reporting is forgivable, but having their headline story contain nothing but fluff, when even the AAP can do better, is utterly disgraceful.

UPDATE 2004/01/30:

Oh, an addendum. If we look at the ABC’s “offbeat” stories, we have this lovely one demonising the US State Dept for changing a typeface. Yeesh.

There are only three exceptions to the draconian new typographical rules: telegrams, treaty materials prepared by the State Department’s legal affairs office and documents drawn up for the president’s signature, it said.

The memorandum offered no explanation for the exceptions, leaving foreign service officers to speculate as to whether the White House, US treaty partners and telegram readers are not yet able to handle the change.

We’ve got “draconian rules”, exceptions for the president, lack of explanations, and important sections of the government too incompetent to deal with even a minor change like this.

This one’s from the “Agence France-Presse”; along with a fair chunk of the ABC’s reporting on America.

I had dinner with Michael. Other people showed up too. Michael forced me to post pictures, because he’s vain. Unfortunately he’s not vain enough to blog. Bitch.

As part of moving, I needed to get the Internet hooked up again, which meant getting a new ADSL modem. Looking around, there seemed to be good deals for combination ADSL modem/4 port hub/wireless access point dealies, and as it turned out I was able to get a second hand one for even cheaper. As you’ve guessed from this post’s title, I got a Billion 743GE, which does all of the above, as well as providing some VPN stuff.

First problem when I got it home was that I couldn’t ping it, even after doing a factory reset. Crap. Second problem was wireless wasn’t working at all. Double crap. Naturally, if you can’t ping it, you can’t use the web interface to configure it, either. Crap, crap, crap. Fortunately there’s a serial console mode you can use. Unfortunately, all the computers I use these days don’t have serial ports. Fortunately, I have an old box which I don’t use which still has a serial port. Unfortunately, the console mode seems to be completely undocumented.

Long story short, I managed to eventually tweak a couple of things to get the box to talk to computers other than the previous owners’, and managed to configure things up so that, well, I can post blog entries again. The web interface is nice, but doesn’t seem complete — you seem to be able to screw things up in the console interface that you can’t fix with either a facotry reset, or the web interface. And unfortunately the console interface doesn’t make an incredible amount of sense. It does look like I route the wireless and ethernet ports entirely separately though, and even possibly route each individual ethernet port separately. That seems like a pretty cool thing if I’m going to set up any VPNs using this little device, which I might — at the very least, I really don’t like having anyone be able to connect via wireless to the secure side of the VPN.

So far, it looks like a very cool product.

Well, the year has certainly started off in a decidedly odd way. At the very least, I’ve commenced it the way I hope to finish it — with broadband Internet at home. Yay! Those couple of weeks without while I moved were… wearying.

In any case, this hopefully marks the resumption of irregular blogging.

UPDATE 2004/01/02:

When I say irregular, I mean it. White Glenn has posted about his new year’s celebrations and mentions that he watched CNN and read an Honor Harrington novel. They’re great books — fun characters, some excitement, some nice twists and tension, and always a good ol’ happy ending. For those who don’t know, they’re sci-fi/space opera, and the first book or two in the series is available for free in the wonderful Baen Free Library. What I was really amazed to find after reading the books is how closely they follow the naval tradition exemplified by the Hornblower series (the first episode of which was just on ABC), and the Jack Aubrey novels, now a major motion picture. The characters, the plots, the tactics, the strategies, the politics, all of it is straight out of the history books, albeit mixed and matched quite a bit, with some entertaining science fiction hooks thrown in for good measure. Anyway, I just thought I’d rave for a moment. It’s my blog, I’ll do what I please. Nyeah.

Ben and David have been having a little cross-blog discussion about Saddam being found in a hole, and how much America sucks.

In his followup, Ben writes:

But no, I dont believe the Americans should get a break. The US is unquestionably a superpower and with that superpower status comes a responsibility to lead like it or not, people and nations around the world look to politically and culturally strong nations like the United States for leadership.

In a similar vein, Ben’s also said in the past (in relation to his Pot. Kettle. Black post):

<bjf> well, if i were aiming to be a reputable media outlet, i’d feel more strongly obligated to be less biased politically

Hopefully Ben won’t mind that quote being pulled from IRC and stuck on the web for all to see, especially given it’s not terribly different in intent to the quote above. Basically, the viewpoint is that people in positions of power should be held to a higher level of responsibility and accountability than others — usually the speaker.

Personally, I don’t think this makes sense. It’s obvious hypocrisy — holding others to standards to which you don’t hold yourself is the definition of the word afterall — for a start, but even moreso it’s just a bad philosophy.

For one, no one’s going to care about your standards if you don’t live up to them yourself, and if you’re not powerful by regular means, you’ve got no other leverage than persuasion. America doesn’t need anyone’s support to destroy its enemies, however much it might like that support but Australia does.

For another, it’s liable to degenerate into arguments about who’s powerful: find a right-wing columnist, and they’ll tell you they’re a voice in the wilderness barely heard amidst the chirruping of the left-wing media. Ask a left-winger the same thing, and they’ll tell you that their principled dissent is under constant attack by the conservative forces and their propaganda machines. There seems to be very strong evidence of an “underdog bias” when evaluating your own ideology’s position, and the natural result of that and the adoption of Ben’s principle above is that everyone refuses to hold themselves to high standards, but expects everyone else to do so. That’s not healthy.

And finally, if you don’t get some practice holding yourself to high standards when you’re not doing an important job, you’re probably not going to be able to when you are doing something that involves a lot of power. That can happen without you doing anything — “Linux hacker” wasn’t a very important or powerful position in the early 1990s, but it’s a lot moreso now — so it’s best to be prepared as soon as you can be.

(Is this one of the divisive issues between “left” and “right”? That right-wingers expect everyone to act responsibly at all times, and left-wingers only expect certain elites to act responsibly? Do left-wingers ever accept responsibility themselves as a matter of course, or do they only thrust it upon others, or have it thrust upon them? Are right-wingers any better in practice?)

Isn’t it?. Where’s Media Watch when you need it? On Christmas Holidays, of course.

David writes:

Australian snow

Better visit it while it lasts.

[ 00:53 ] [ /misc ] [ ¶ ]

Tim Blair writes:

SKI! SKI WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

[…]

Posted by Tim Blair at 01:26 AM | Comments (22)

I’d say “Advantage: Inchoate”, except daylight savings make the call too muddy to make. Either way, this is plagiarism of the highest order! Call in the MediaWatch special operatives!

Why do people act like such idiots? LSL in response to a complaint by Greg Black:

We received an unclear feedback from Consumer Affairs, basically this is disputable and can go to the court and up to the judge to decide. However, he suggested us that since this is only $6.30 it is better to settle this dispute amongst ourselves. We listened. So today, we will send you a cheque for $6.30 to refund you the cost of the freight for sending the defective DVD to us.

However, we would like to call for your attenttion that since there is dispute between us, we will not be able to offer you any services or goods in the future.

Actually, didn’t the dispute just get resolved by you guys capitulating? Or is there now a new dispute over whether you guys are morons or not?

Perhaps Everything Linux is a better place to buy Linux stuff. Or PlanetMirror.

(Google — commodotizing word of mouth since 1999)

One of the more annoying things about managing a Debian system is sitting around waiting for apt-get update to finish. On broadband it’s irritating, and on a modem it’s absolutely horrendous. The worst part is when it takes longer to do an update (get the information we need) than it takes to do a dist-upgrade (work out what to upgrade, and upgrade it).

Basically the problem is that we need to have a current list of available packages to work out what to upgrade to, but that list is absolutely huge, sitting at about 10MB uncompressed, or 2.0MB using bzip2 compression. On the upside we usually already have a list that was current not too long ago, and generally not all that much will have changed in the intervening time. So what we’d like to be able to do is just download the updates.

One way of doing this is using the rsync algorithm. Unfortunately that only works on uncompressed files, and it’s something of a brute force solution. It looks at a file in big chunks, so if you change one line, the entire chunk will be downloaded. That’s okay, and it’s reported to be quite useful, with downloads reduced to about 10% of what they were beforehand.

But we know what changes are likely, so we can optimise for that. Packages files are sorted by stanza (lines of non-blank lines separated by a single blank line), and usually only a few lines in any given stanza will change on an update (the Version: line might change, while the Description: lines don’t, eg). So we want a way of listing just the lines that change. The easy way to do that is with the diff --ed command, which produces a file saying things like:

6,7c
foo
bar
.

The above example says “replace lines 6-7, with two new lines saying foo and bar“. Brief and simple. It can be applied by saying (cat EDPATCH; echo w) | red - FILE. The patch program can also handle it, but has been flakey in the past.

So, how cool is that? Well, this isn’t a remotely new idea, and Robert Tiberius Johnson has done some analyses, back in the day. Basically, using the Packages files which were about two-thirds the size they are now, you can reduce the average apt-get update to be about 13kB per day since your last update. That’s as little as 0.7% what was previously required.

Long, boring emails ‘r us!

Wow. It’s good to be number one!

Interestingly, there are 3370 hits (almost six times as many!) when you do that search for equivalent “liberal” blogs. Yet another example of the disgusting strangle-hold through which the irresponsible liberal media attempts to mould the minds of mankind. (Hat tip: Rhys Arkins)

Feh. Listening to Sky News tonight report on Bush’s visit to Baghdad airport. What did the Iraqis think? “Some were indifferent, others were angry.” Apparently not one actively approved. Meanwhile the ABC’s current take on it is to headline a story that says:

The American media has given a generally favourable response to US President George W Bush’s surprise visit to Iraq.

with CNN unhappy about Bush’s surprise visit to Iraq. Hey, guess what: who got seats on the plane isn’t news. How it’s affected the soldiers, the terrorists, and the people of Iraq, that’s what the news is, not which news agency is having a hissy fit today — least of all when it’s the one that refused to report atrocities when Saddam was in power. Meanwhile, we’ve got another story today, this one about an anti-terror demonstration in Baghdad. The ABC titles that one Hundreds protest against violence in Baghdad — because hey, it’s important to blur the line between terrorists who use violence against civilians, and soldiers, who use violence against terrorists. And what’s their lead?

A US soldier has been killed in a mortar attack on a base in northern Iraq as hundreds of Iraqis marched through the centre of Baghdad to protest against the violence plaguing the country’s reconstruction.

Yeesh.

And now that we’ve had time to digest the news, what’s the “analysis” of Bush’s visit? Well, the ABC’s got the answer to that, too: Bush’s Iraq visit a pre-election PR stunt: analysis. And hey, all you’ve got to do to get an unbiassed analysis of a political event is to quote a selection of editorials from the world’s newspapers. But hey, at least it gives you an excuse to make your summary both long, and exclusively downbeat.

Many newspapers in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf, carried no commentary on the visit which took place as Muslims in the region were still celebrating the Eid al-Fitr holidays which follow the holy month of Ramadan.

How much of a disappointment must that’ve been for the author? All that story needed was inflamed Islamists spouting their usual anti-American bile to make it clear that that idiot Bush’s pathetic domestic political stunts were going to kill us all.

Bloody. Morons.

I’m inclined to think bitching about things being “an election stunt” is stupid too. If there hadn’t been an election due for years yet, would it have still been worth doing? If it inspired the troops, if it cowed the terrorists, if it strengthened the US/Iraq alliance, if any of those things happened, it was in America’s national interest. If none of them did, it was a waste of time, money and effort. What does an upcoming election mean? Absolutely nothing more or less than that the American people get to judge him — on whether it was useful, or whether it wasn’t — or more accurately, get to act on that judgement.

In other words, election stunts are exactly what we want — let’s have our leaders making grand gestures and doing tremendous things that justifiably impress us all the time, not just once every few years.

Portraying it as just an election stunt is pure propaganda, designed to avoid us realising that it might have usefully furthered our activities in the War on Terror and to diminish Bush in the reader’s eyes. Worse, they do this specifically by being misleading on important issues, upon which we rely on them. Worse, that people and organisations we rely on and respect, like CNN, the ABC and the New York Times, act this way actively defeats the achievements Bush makes — sure, maybe the terrorists get a little bit upset that Bush can appear amongst his supporters in Baghdad and that Saddam can’t, but hey, no need for that sourpuss face when respected news agencies the world over are there to run your propaganda for you.

And what’s with news stories that don’t have a byline, and barely even a wire-service attribution? How does that do anything but inhibit accountability?

UPDATE 2003/12/05:

From the ABC website:

World

• Bush draws fire on steel move
• White House changes story again
• Bush cans steel import duties

That’s right, the only world news relevant to Australia is that Bush is evil. The one that really drew my attention was the middle one though. What sort of headline is that? What story are we talking about? What information does that convey except “The Bush government suxx0rs but we can’t say that outright because the bias would be too obvious”. Let’s have a look what it’s actually about, shall we?

For the second time in days, the White House has changed its story about a mid-air encounter that was one of the most vivid anecdotes about US President George W Bush’s surprise trip to Baghdad.

Yes, that’s right, we’re still going on about the visit to Baghdad. Why, for heaven’s sake?? Yes, great, it was a cool little morale booster, and it was a nice bit of excitement for America on Thanksgiving Day. But, you know, we’re not America — this is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation — and this foreign, domestic, partisan nonsense just isn’t all that interesting to anyone who’s not looking for an excuse to criticise Bush (or to criticise the ABC’s grossly poor reporting).

The article also goes on to say that the photograph of President Bush holding a turkey was of a display turkey, rather than one for eating. Somehow we’re meant to extrapolate something important from this, presumably that Bush is all fake, and didn’t actually do anything to help the troops. White Glenn debunks that, if anyone can be bothered caring.

And just quickly, let’s look at the other stories. They’re about steel tarrifs, which are evil, just like all tarrifs. Australia was almost affected, but we did a deal and got exempted. Yay for the Howard government. Meanwhile the Europeans got annoyed, and threatened to retalliate. Now the tarrifs are going away, which is what we all want. Yay! So what’s the ABC’s take? Bush draws fire on steel move. Yes, that’s right — let’s focus on the criticism, even though this is a Good Thing for Australia. Notice:

“I am disappointed that the President won’t be renewing the tariffs just as they’ve begun to work,” Republican Senator George Voinovich of Ohio said.

“The Bush administration deserves credit for doing something that the previous administration never did, despite pleas from steel companies and steel unions, and that’s come to steel’s rescue,” he added.

See, even his friends (fellow Republicans) hate him, even though they have to add on little riders to make sure they don’t get disendorsed. Who else hates him?

Ohio representative Ted Strickland said: “We have a President who capitulated in the face of the European threat.”

Interesting, don’t you think, that Ted’s an “Ohio representative”, while George is a “Republican Senator [..] of Ohio”? I wonder which party Ted belongs to. Why, yes, he’s a Democrat. Is it remotely possible that Ted’s comments could have been influenced by his party membership and that maybe it would be useful for readers to be told that up front?

There’s more slant: critics “lashed out” at the changes, supporters merely “praised” them or “expressed satisfaction”. Of the direct quotes in the article, Greg’s above is the only one that is ina ny way supportive, while there are quotes from Daniel DiMicco, and Leo Gerard supporting Ted’s take.

Where can we go to get an honest, forthright and unprejudiced take on world events? Obviously not the ABC.

UPDATE 2004/01/03:

Ah. The wire service most of those stories are from is the “AFP”, also known as Agence France-Presse. Yay, our State-run broadcaster is passing on barely attributed propaganda from our enemies.

Peter Lewis is a bloody idiot. Even the alt.usage.english FAQ agrees. What’s up with the Speaker in State Parliament being more arbitrary and implausible than a random Internet newsgroup?