Read all about it here in the Guardian.
And if that’s not enough for you, read the disgusting anti-Semitic comments under David Hirsh’s post at Comment is Free. Here’s a recap, and a warning from one of the posters (emphasis mine):
This thread demonstrates (if there was ever any need to demonstrate the point) the very short path from the holier-than-thou rhetoric of the boycotters and outright anti-Semitism and bigotry of racist filth like stealthy and his/her/its ilk. I suggest that everybody in favour of the boycott reads carefully this thread to see exactly who are your friends and where it is all leading. [emphasis mine]
Good advice.
Here’s a hint: it’s not leading anywhere good. And I am glad that I live in the United States, where, I would like to think, this disgraceful, shameful, appalling vote would not have passed.
There’s this story of an Iranian dissident who was jailed, beaten, and sexually assaulted by her captors—and who fled Iran and, unafraid, tells her story.
“But I know of no religious morality that can justify what they did to me, or other women. For these people, religion is only a tool for dictatorship and abuse. It is a regime of prejudice against women, against other regimes, against other ethnic groups, against anybody who thinks differently from them.”
And the Farceur-in-Chief of Iran has outdone himself, this time in an interview with the German magazine Spiegel:
Ahmadinejad: Let me ask you one thing: How much longer can this go on? How much longer do you think the German people have to accept being taken hostage by the Zionists? When will that end - in 20, 50, 1,000 years?
SPIEGEL: We can only speak for ourselves. DER SPIEGEL is nobody’s hostage; SPIEGEL does not deal only with Germany’s past and the Germans’ crimes. We’re not Israel’s uncritical ally in the Palestian conflict. But we want to make one thing very clear: We are critical, we are independent, but we won’t simply stand by without protest when the existential right of the state of Israel, where many Holocaust survivors live, is being questioned.
Ahmadinejad: Precisely that is our point. Why should you feel obliged to the Zionists? If there really had been a Holocaust, Israel ought to be located in Europe, not in Palestine.
And the New York Times raised the alarm bells (”Iran Chief Eclipses Power of Clerics”) the other day by publishing a frank assessment of the power play Ahmadinejad seems to have undertaken in Iran, and the backdrop against which this is happening:
Mr. Ahmadinejad is trying to outpace the challenges buffeting Iran, ones that could undermine his presidency and conservative control. The economy is in shambles, unemployment is soaring, and the new president has failed to deliver on his promise of economic relief for the poor. Ethnic tensions are rising around the country, with protests and terrorist strikes in the north and the south, and students have been staging protests at universities around the country.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s critics—and there are many—say that the public will turn on him if he does not improve their lives, and soon. It may ultimately prove impossible to surmount these problems while building a new political elite, many people here said.
I wonder when I’m going to start hearing that these things, too, like the “utterly discredited” Yellow Badge for Iranian Jews story***, are neocon fabrications meant to stir American sentiment against Iran as a prelude to our “nuking” that country—that’s the tenor of the comments I’ve read all over the blogosphere.
The Iranians themselves, meanwhile, are busy accusing the U.S. and the Zionists of stirring sectarian tensions in their midst.
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***In my estimation, this story, despite the many claims that it was bogus, is still mysterious. No one has retracted the story that the Iranian parliament has considered or is considering a dress code for Iranians—which is the fundamental totalitarian evil at issue, as I mentioned here. That, of course was the gist of Taheri’s story: the dress code for Iranian Muslims. The fact that non-Muslim Iranians would have to wear distinctive and different clothing was, as I understood it, an extrapolation.
Now, Taheri has been denounced and smeared, along with anyone who associates with him. The speed with which intelligent people were so ready to make a final judgment about this story—and about Taheri and about his associates, and about anyone who defends him—is disturbing and upsetting.
from Daily Kos:
“The sole source for the pile of crap was Amir Taheri, an Iranian-born journalist with ties to warmongering neo-cons”
from AlterNet:
The story was pushed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose penchant for backing-up right-wing fabrications has made it — in my mind — no longer a credible source.
The guy who wrote the Post article, Amir Taheri, is a writer for, among other pubs, the National Review and Murdoch’s New York Post. The National Post retracted the article hours after it was posted to their site, and blamed Taheri for the bad info.
Taheri’s pimped repped by Benador Associates, a public relations firm that has all the leading neocon nutcases.
Via GalleyCat comes news (to me) that there are some people (apart from Jason Epstein, whom I mentioned here and here) who aren’t just thinking about the future of books or saying they’re making plans; they’re actually doing something about it.
[The Instititute for the Future of the Book] is working toward a vision of what books can be. This summer, it will release the first version of Sophie, an “all-purpose tool” for creating multimedia texts. Like the institute itself, Sophie’s mission is both simple and complex: to help authors easily create books that use any medium …. It’s a key goal, because the future of the book lies in the hands of authors first. Give them the tools they need to deliver dynamic, digital books, and dynamic digital books will flourish.
Echoing what Jeff Jarvis has been saying at BuzzMachine, GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan highlights the fact that “moving online will transform the relationship that books have to their readers and to each other.”
In an interview, Institute fellow Ben Vershnow goes even further. He says that intellectual discourse itself “is moving away from print to networked, digital media.”
Here’s part of an interview with Vershbow:
What about those who provide and use information today? Surely there are legal, cultural, and business interests in keeping information flowing?
Our notion of intellectual property also defines the parameters of how we interact with information and culture. Today’s media industries want to preserve old business models built on scarcity in a network of abundance. Clearly, notions of value need to be recalibrated, but these industries are determined to stick with what they know. So, we find ourselves tangled in a web of restrictions, closely monitored in our use of media online. … [This issue, among others, comes] down, in one way or another, to ownership. Who owns the Internet? We the people who create it and make it meaningful or the companies that maintain the plumbing? Who owns works of authorship? Do we own them once we’ve paid a fair price for them, or are we always tourists in someone’s closely surveilled online reserve? And perhaps most troubling, who owns our network identities?
What future for the print book? Is it even conceivable that future generations will eschew the benefit of multimedia?
It’s really impossible to predict exactly what will happen to print books. Of one thing, though, I am pretty certain: the main arena of intellectual discourse is moving away from print to networked, digital media. That doesn’t mean that certain forms of print books will not persist. In fact, the mass migration to computers and the Internet in some ways serves as a foil for print, dispensing with its more circumstantial uses and highlighting its most essential virtues. There are certain kinds of books I’m convinced will cease to exist on paper: directories, reference works, textbooks, travel guides, to name a few. But deep, linear narrative works read for pleasure like novels, biographies, and certain forms of history may persist in print for some time. [emphasis mine***]Then again, this could simply be a generational question. People raised with high-quality electronic reading devices, using only multimedia electronic texts in school and forming little or no attachment to dead-tree media, may consider paper books at best fascinating antiquities, at worst, inert, useless things.
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***I also think narrative works may persist in print. And I also believe they should remain whole. Here’s what I had to say on the subject over at BuzzMachine:
May 27th, 2006 at 6:28 pm There are many thriving online communities and sites devoted to spreading the word about little-known works of fiction, non-fiction, works by foreign authors (not translated into English), etc. There’s a huge conversation about books taking place online. The lit world has yet to acknowledge it.The same lit world has yet to acknowledge that Bush is president, that computers make your life and your job easier, and that the world isn’t flat, however. Plus, they’re not the ones who are holding back the revolution. It all revolves around licensing issues: who’s gonna get paid for the content, how much, and how. And digitizing your back catalogue is a huge investment. Google has the money. Publishers don’t.Yes: hands-off fiction. But I think you’ll find that you want to keep hands off many non-fiction books as well: everything from the big biographies to nonfiction narratives to memoirs to popular histories, etc. Also, authors will want to keep their works whole. Don’t underestimate that, or their reasons. Some of it really is art, and not meant for mashing-up. And it is their work, and the decision should be theirs.Which doesn’t mean all of it shouldn’t be available digitally, in various formats, and that there shouldn’t also be value-added stuff (maybe like the supplementary materials PBS offers on its Frontline website) and that people shouldn’t start to apply themselves and start thinking about and creating the book world they want to inhabit in the future.
Apparently, Carly Fiorina had many choice words for publishers, telling them that they will not be able to hold back the tide and should stop trying. She also said some really stupid things about the editorial process, though, so she may have shot herself in the foot.