Kristine Lowe

New year, new opportunities (even to see the end of SOPA)

I have so much I want to blog about from last year and for this, but I guess I'm suffering from a bit of a blogger's block.

In the meantime, here's wishing you all a happy and prosperous new year and a link to a much more optimistic outlook on law proposals such as SOPA, and how it all will play out, than what I've held until now:

"SOPA is a terrible act of legislation because of some of the words used in the bill. Words that were put in by people desperately trying to preserve the problems of the past. And the level of desperation is a good measure of the way time is running out."

I'm not sure if I fully share the optimism, but as always lots of food for thought from JP Rangaswami in this blogpost on why he's excited about 2012.

Anders Behring Breivik joins the Unabomber, David Copeland and Zacarias Moussaoui

What do these terrorists have in common? The have all been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics.

The psychiatrists tasked with determining the mental state of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik today declared him to be criminally insane.

According to their evaluation, the terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway this summer is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - just like the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whose manifesto  Brevik copied large sections from word by word for his own manifesto.

The conclusions by the state appointed psychiatrists are of course controversial, and are bound to be debated for a long time. Many feel that this, declaring Breivik insane, is a way of letting hateful extremist ideology off the hook.

«Muslim terrorists are a product of Islamic hate-rhetoric. Norwegian terrorists on the other hand, could not possibly operate on the basis of an ideological background. No sir. The explanation for Norwegian-bred terror is to be found in the brain chemistry of the perpetrator,» wrote Norwegian blogger Paal Hivand (my translation).

There is some truth to that, but I suspect we might find various personality disorders or psychiatric disorders if we look closer at many terrorists and mass-killers, regardless of ideology.

The case that instantly sprang to mind when I read about the psychiatrists' conclusions today was Ted Kaczynski.  Comparing the two cases reveal fascinating similarities.

As Kaczynski, Breivik has also rejected the diagnosis, is likely to reject a plea for insanity from his defense and is also likely to claim paranoid schizophrenic  is a "political diagnosis”

This piece in Psychology Today is very interesting on that account:

Several (but not all) of the forensic psychiatrists and psychologists who examined Kaczynski diagnosed him as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia ...Though his defense attorneys tried to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, Kaczynski refused, perhaps in part due to denial about his illness, a very common symptom of schizophrenia; or perhaps because of his own narcissism, not wanting to be maligned as mentally ill.

And it goes on:

….Terrorism is itself a form of madness. Perpetrators of terrorism express their rage at the world destructively, in a desperate, last-ditch and sometimes suicidal attempt to gain recognition, fame or glory for themselves and their cause and, ultimately, to give some shred of meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives. Terrorism is typically an infantile and narcissistic act of violence stemming from profound feelings of impotence, frustration, and insignificance.

That is perhaps why we find many other terrorists and mass-killers, from different ideological backgrounds, who have been diagnosed as  paranoid schizophrenics.

Among them, David John Copeland, who became known as the "London Nail Bomber" after a 13-day bombing campaign in aimed at London's black, Bangladeshi and gay communities, and admitted terrorist and 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. Evidence was also said to strongly support that Virgina Tech- Killer Seung-Hui Cho had paranoid schizophrenia.

Still, it’s not an easy conclusion to swallow in regard to Anders Behring Breivik, who meticulously planned and prepared his terrorist attack for many years.

I have read his manifesto twice, and he comes across as many things, certainly a narcissist, but insane? I'm not so sure.

Breivik may have grandiose and delusional ideas about saving Norway, his own importance in history, segregating races, breeding true Norwegians etc, but so did Hitler. If Breivik is criminally insane, why wasn’t Hitler?

However, at this stage it’s difficult to make any bombastic conclusions about Breivik's case as there are so many things we simply don’t know about the 230-page long psychiatric report on him.

So far, we’ve only heard the main conclusions, and very little about the background for how the psychiatrists arrived at them.

But what we do know is that with Breivik labelled both psychotic and paranoid schizophrenic - if these evaluations are not contested at the next stage of this process - it is very unlikely he will be allowed to give any of those long political speeches to the jury he had planned to make.

Neither will journalists be quite so keen on interviewing him. That would raise all sorts of ethical conundrums...

57-year-old made staff reporter

You have to wonder at the state of our industry when the story about how a newspaper just employed a 57-year-old news reporter made headline news yesterday.

And no, I'm not thinking that the news site E24.no was wrong to run it, which it did under the broader headline "57-year-old gets permanent job" - but it really makes me wonder about the state of the world in general, and about the media industry in particular.

It's devastating that we live in such an ageist time that such a story is headline news, pretty much regardless of profession, and it's particularly sad that this is especially true in our industry and that many resourceful people with very valuable experience are simply let go, or unable to find new jobs, when they reach a certain age.

Amusingly, I vivildy remember being told at 26 that I was getting old for the news industry by a former UK news executive (we never worked together, it was just a piece of friendly advice).

Of course, sometimes it's the other way around: young reporters with valuable multimedia skills find themselves the first to loose their jobs in financial crisis'. These matters often depend on issues such as how strong the journalist union is in a certain country or in a certain media company.

But I do wish we could look more towards getting the right balance of skills and experience, and not let age become a variable in itself.

At least to me, age has always been a state of mind.

What global meltdown?

"Yes, yes, I understand perfectly: the global meltdown," said a British journalist I interviewed on Thursday when I told him the day was a busy news day so the story might run later.

"No, it's about the catalogue of errors made on 22/7, revealed on 22/7 and in the aftermath of 22/7," I replied.

Funny, albeit perfectly understandable, how the key headlines still revolve around 22/7, I thought to myself - and wrote as much on Google+

Then came Friday, Norway's then minister of justice and police resigned in a move, which, despite all protestations to the contrary, ended up being all about 22/7.

And today the terrorist behind 22/7, Anders Behring Breivik, will get to explain his heinous crimes in an open court hearing.

People, including many who survived the shootings on Utöya, are queuing up to see him, and the court will have to prevent him from turning the hearing into a PR-show for his manifesto - the one he claims the atrocities he committed on 22/7 only were a marketing ploy to promote the ideas in.

The global meltdown? It will just have to take the sideline for a while.

Norway’s minister of justice resigns to spend more time with his family

- I’ve cried almost every day since 22/7, Knut Storberget told the media when he resigned as Norway’s minister of justice and police Friday.

But he vehemently denied his resignation had anything to do with the Ministry’s growing catalogue of errors in handling the twin terror attacks on Oslo and Utöya 22 July.

It had nothing to do with how Norwegian police was slammed for poor rampage response on 22/7.

Nothing to do with how the emergency communications system broke down on 22/7.

Nothing to do with how a witness alerted the police to no avail about a suspicious, fully armed man (the terrorist) leaving the Oslo-bomb scene before he took off for Utöya.

Nothing to do with how the terrorist could park his car right outside the Government headquarters he bombed to pieces despite weighty reports recommending that area be shut off for traffic.

Nothing to do with how the terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, cannot be sentenced as a terrorist because the police’s computer systems are so out of date (it runs on Windows NT 4.0) they can’t handle the ”new” penal code passed in 2009.  

And nothing to do with all the other critique levelled at Storberget recently, but rather a move he had planned together with his family as early as February.

However, in a move slightly more related to the events on 22/7, the Ministry itself will be renamed to the Ministry of Justice and Emergency Preparedness

”…the Ministry’s internal organisation will be examined in order to improve the Ministry’s ability to handle crises. The Ministry will be given additional resources. In order to visualise these changes, it has today been decided that the Ministry of Justice and the Police from 1 January 2012 will have its name changed to the Ministry of Justice and Emergency Preparedness,” we could read in the same press release that announced Storberget’s resignation.

So now what?

Storberget has been replaced by Labour Party veteran Grete Faremo, a move I saw more than one online commenter applaud, and greet with such sentiments as ”finally a minister of justice who has balls”.

Maybe she’ll even have the balls to ban vans and cars from parking right outside the entrance to the Norwegian parliament like this (spotted by Pia Prestmo on 13 October 2011):

Rude tweet hits six o’clock news

Now, what did you have to do again in the good old days to get yourself on the evening news? These days all it takes is a tweet.

Arguably it might take what most people would call a tweet too far, but still… This week I was invited to discuss what is probably the most shocking tweet I’ve come across on a six o’clock news show  – with the guy who wrote it and a few others.

The set-up was somewhat surreal:

Last Sunday a far-left-wing journalist-author wrote the mentioned tweet in reply to the debate editor of Norway’s newspaper of record, Aftenposten.

The latter had  recently written a short and scalding, if still civilised, review of the former’s recent book.

To which the former replies to the openly gay editor with a tweet that somehow manages to include such phrases as ”suck negro cock” and ”jewish cunt”  in the same tweet.

The political editor of Aftenposten replies with a harsh leader on the implied racism in that tweet and he, the tweet-writer, the head of Norway’s Union of Journalists and me are invited to discuss the affair on the before mentioned evening news show.

It should be mentioned that the guy who wrote the offending tweet was quick to apologise on Twitter, but on the evening news we also learned that the tweet was meant as a joke and was paraphrasing a scene from a Norwegian movie (”facts” which had entirely escaped me before that session on the evening news).

Aftenposten’s political editor made the very fair point that had this tweet been sent by someone from the populist far right it would have created a media upheaval, and the news presenter tried to get a discussion going on whether journalists should be allowed to tweet privately...

Now, imagine: Journalist says something stupid, rude and racist on TV? Should we therefore ban all journalists from TV? Of course not, and no one was seriously suggesting during that TV slot to ban journalists from using social media privately either – but it was one of the topics being discussed, as well as all the awful kind of things people can bring themselves to say online…

I must admit I’m not quite sure what to conclude from all this, it was a somewhat surreal event, but it’s definitely part of that brave new media landscape of ours…

The Utöya election and lessons in social media campaigning

“I for one want to vote the Utøya-generation into office.”

I’m not certain where I read that statement now: on Facebook, Twitter, blogs.

It probably flashed past me frequently on all those platforms after 22/7, and after the municipal and county elections last moth it’s clear that many people did exactly that:

Several of those who so tragically lost their lives on Utöya were elected, as were several of those who survived the atrocities.

That must be unparalleled: How, as a symbolic action, people voted for those who lost their lives but who’s names had not removed from the election lists.

As for those who survived the atrocities and were elected, it will be interesting to see how their influence will play out.

22/7 was certainly a big influence on the election, but mostly in a positive way.

Let it be that after 22/7 too many politicians just trotted out the same old slogans and solutions which now feels oddly like ghosts from a bygone age.

There were also politicians who met the tragedy with great compassion and strength, who somehow became much more real, more human as a result of it.

That side of them was probably always there, just now we got to see it.

I thought a lot better of many politicians for it. Not that it made me vote for someone I otherwise wouldn’t have voted for, but I hope it will lead to a wider recognition that letting your guard down can be a good thing – even for a politician.

Also, for the first time in perhaps a decade or more I felt good about how I cast my vote. See, in the words of an acquaintance, I voted for the internet party.

Not that there is a party by that name in Norway, but it was the first election where social media played a major role for me:

I voted for lots of really clever people I know from the Internet (in Norway you can cast personal votes for your favorite candidates from more than one party at municipal and county elections).

But among those candidates there wasn’t one I voted for because I’d seen him or her with a Twitter-profile stating their name and their political party.

I never follow those kind of Twitter-users back. All the folks I voted for were people I know, either just online, or online and in real life, for a long time and not primarily as politicians.

They were all people I “know” because of the work they do, the blogs they write, or because we have interests in common.

In fact, while casting my vote I found myself thinking I could easily have voted for a blogger I’m a big fan of despite being on the opposite side of the political divide.

What I’m trying to say, both when it comes to my “internet party” and those politicians who let their guard down and thereby became more real, more human after 22/7:

Personality matters, humanity matters, being real/genuine/allowing yourself to be vulnerable and go off script is a good thing.

Nothing revolutionary there you may say. In fact it’s all very Cluetrain.

But it is also quite the opposite of the social media strategy many politicians and/or political parties seem to subscribe to.

To them just getting a Twitter-profile spewing out politically correct or mundane and largely uninteresting stuff seems to equal a social media strategy.

Well, it’s not a very successful social media strategy.

It has to be personal.

Not necessarily in the sense that you have to share personal stuff, far from, but you have to get a sense of the person behind the social media profile even if it’s just their genuine passion for a certain subject.

But it has to be genuine, and it’s definitely not a short-term fix.

 

Steve Jobs, innovation & serendipity

Writing about Steve Jobs and his philosophy of life for work today I was reminded about liberation management.

I was really struck by this video (which must have travelled all over the web by now), Jobs 2005 Stanford commencement speech, and how it gels with the other things we know about his life.

I especially found myself wondering how many leaders of disruptive and/or innovative companies subscribe to something along the lines of this statement:

”Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

It reminded me about liberation management as I said (I’ll return to that), but also of how Google's Marissa Mayer once described Google's culture and how it could reinvent the rules online in the early days (quoted in Steven Levy’s excellent book about Life in the GooglePlex which I reviewed for work around Easter).

”You cannot understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey was Montessori kids," she said, and continued: ”It’s really baked into their personalities, to do things their own way, to not respect authority. Do something because  it seems sensible, not because someone told you to”

Page has later said he thinks there some truth in this.

But this all comes down to how important it is to think outside the box to be truly innovative.

Oh, and in Jobs case (whom I wrote more about here for work, in Norwegian) about trusting that serendipity can benefit, and even be crucial to, your career.

Which brings me to liberation management.

It’s just about five years since first I blogged about Tom Peters’ 50 strategies for increasing the odds for getting innovative ideas and creating innovative companies, or at least for attracting a little nuttiness into your life, so I think it stands repeating.

One of my favourite strategies, which writing about Jobs’ philosophy of life reminded me of today, is:

48. Nurture peripheral vision. The interesting “stuff” usually is going on beyond the margins of the professional’s ever-narrowing line of sight

I don’t agree with all of these, especially not on constant reorganisations, but they offer food for thought and here’s some other good ones:

31. Spend 50 percent of your time with “outsiders.” Distributors and vendors will give you more ideas in five minutes than another five-hour committee meeting.

3. Ready. Fire. Aim. (Instead of Ready. Aim. Aim. Aim. ...)

11. Ask dumb questions. “How come computer commands all come from keyboards?” Somebody asked that one first; hence, the mouse

14. Don’t back away from passion. “Dispassionate innovator” is an oxymoron

9/11: Internet just couldn't keep up to speed

What I remember most vividly about 9/11 is a woman alternately sobbing, crying and screaming over the phone line as the drama unfolded on the TV-screen.

I was at home in East Finchley, London, working on my masters project, when my ex-partner called me and asked me to turn on the television. Maybe he called me twice, I'm not sure now, but he was working for Aon at the time, and Aon had 1100 employees in the South Tower.

A key competitor, Marsh and McLennan, had several hundred in the North Tower. Luckily, my ex was in the London office, but there were many Americans working in that office too, not to mention how so many had close ties to colleagues New York.

So I have no idea who that woman in Aon's London office was, maybe there was more than one, but those terrible sounds of distress over the phone line while I was simultaneously talking to my ex and watching the drama on TV is what I remember most strongly about the day.

Those sounds of distress somehow made the events of the day both more heart-wrenching and more real as I have to admit that what unfolded on the TV-screen was almost too surreal to grasp.

I remember too being frustrated by how slow my internet connection was, I was using a dial-up modem, and by how slow many international news sites were to load and update.

Still, internet, TV and the mobile were my key sources of information on the unfolding events, even though my mobile wasn't smart back then and only was used for phone calls and text messages (on 22/7, all my information for five hours or more after the bomb went off came via either my own or friends' smartphones).

I do wish Twitter was around.

I've seen some pundits say they were glad it wasn't, but what we saw with the recent terror in Norway was that even though rumours abounded the twitterati didn't go over the top with rumours and misguided, hateful attacks the way we saw on Facebook.

I also wish I had the sense to keep up with the blogging adventures friends of mine embarked on just after 9/11. But as the job market took a nose dive, and I handed in my masters thesis just after 9/11, all I did for two months there was sending out hundreds of job applications. 

Since I couldn't even seem to be able to land an admin job, I stopped by three local pubs one day - and was offered a job by two of them.

Amazingly, taking up a job in the pub I did turned out to be a brilliant career move as I met one of my most important mentors there - and many of the regulars gave me lots of tips for jobs and other stuff (actually, working in a pub is a lot like being a blogger - but that's a topic for another blog post, one I've failed to finish for the last three years or so;-) )

And the rest is history, isn't that what they say?

Actually, I caught up with the blogging phenomena one year later, in 2002, and there's so much to say on 9/11, so many thoughts and feelings - especially after the atrocities of 22/7 in Norway this summer - that I thought I'd better just stick to the facts for now.

The newspaper man who lost his foot on 22/7

This mobile snapshot keeps fascinating me. I snapped it on my way out from work 8 August when Oslo was still full of roses after so many had showed their support for the victims of 22/7 by leaving roses all over town.

As some of you will know, this is just in front of VG's headquarters, and the statue, who lost his foot in the bomb attack, sits just across the street from the Government Headquarters were the bomb went off. Still, I'm thinking there must be so many meanings one can read into this photo:

How journalists see each other

I just came across this brilliant post by DigiDave on how various types of journalists see themselves and others.

Lots of food four thought and laughs in this image:

 

The empty threat from Irene

Luckily, Irene turned out to be an empty threat in the end.

Mind you, I’m talking about the woman. Not the hurricane turned tropical storm which caused very real damage along its path. Even though its impact could have been much worse I agree that «nothing is ‘not that bad’, when lives are lost».

I feel for all those who lost loved ones or saw their property wrecked.

But I must admit that while I was watching the coverage of Irene, the hurricane, hit New York today - despite being worried for friends and family - another Irene also played on my mind.

You see, if Irene the woman had been more than empty threat I probably wouldn’t have been here today.

My late grandfather, a war sailor, met Irene at some British harbor, and was quite decided on leaving his young family for her. Had he done so when that thought took hold of him, chances are my mother might not have been born.

As chance would have it, he hesitated right up until my mother was conceived.

Her arrival made him change his mind and stay, a fact he recounted to me on more than one occasion, although he did have the audacity to give his new daughter Irene as a middle name (a name my mother later removed).  

From this story you may rightly conclude that my grandfather was a rather colourful character, but all the same, despite all his flaws and quirks, he played an important role in my life and I loved him dearly.

Incidentally, he was the one who bought me Tajo, the dog who later saved my life.

Tajo was his gift to me.

All very lucky coincidences without which I wouldn’t have been here today.

That’s the thing about all the horrors this summer has brought with it:

It really makes you count your blessings and wonder at, and feel grateful for, those big and small decisions, which may once have seemed trivial, but turn out to be so crucial when seen from a distance.

Or, as Grethen Rubin just blogged (updated 29/8-11 23:01 CET):  "It's a sad foible of human nature that it often takes loss, or the threat of loss, to make us appreciate what we already enjoy."

Can we have the silly season back, please?

Shocked out of holiday mode, and a general cutural innocence, by the worst terror attack in the country's modern history, it is perhaps not surprising that some Norwegians find themselves missing the summer's traditional silly season.

"I miss headlines about dangerous tics, murder snails and vegetable prices," said one influential commentator I ran into on my way into work the other morning.

"I want the headline news on the six o'clock news to be about a farmer's ruined cabbage field... I want the talk of town on warm summerdays in Oslo to be the  price of prawns...I want the men I'm struggling to get a grip on to be ordinary men, not psychotic killers," one blogger wrote on Monday.

Other bloggers have voiced similar sentiments.

It's not only the terror attacks on 22/7, though they have dominated the news ever since that day.

Norway's seen two fatal boating accidents in July too, and it's such a small country that even those affected lots and lots of people.

Not to speak of how such accidents always feel so meaningless and unnecessary.

But I'd never thought I'd see the day when people actually are begging for a return to the much derided silly season, though a part of me can undertand the sentiment.

Having said that, even thought headlines about fruit and vegetable prices was a sign of cultural decay when I grew up, I've since come to understand that these price fluctuations tell us a lot both about hyperlocal and international affarirs. 

"As above, so below," the mystics used to say.

I myself am no mystic but this summer has reminded me that even the focus and absence of a country's silly season can tell us a lot about a country and the state it's in: the small things in life - or the absence of them - often mirror the bigger ones.

How the wheel turns: from 9/11 to 22/7

Just how will the wheel turn, how will the public debate shift, after the terror attacks of 22/7? Food for thought from Björn Stærk:

...After the terror attacks in Norway on July 22, perpetrated by a fanatical opponent of multiculturalism and the Islamization of Europa, it happens again.  The wheel turns.  We won’t pretend that everything has changed, no more than everything changed on 9/11.  The threat from Islamist terrorism is the same.  The immigration challenges of Europe are the same.

But reality has shifted sufficiently that you cannot mindlessly apply the same old models to the new situation.  And, this time, the pundits who reveal themselves to be most out of touch may well be precisely those right-wing critics of immigration and Islam who took the lead after 9/11...

Would you believe, after 22/7 lots of people have called Norwegian news sites asking that their anti-Islamic comments be deleted?

Photo from Flickr: "Prayer Wheels" by Eric Montfort", republished here under a CC-licence

Oslo terrorist attack just a marketing ploy to promote the terrorist’s anti-Islam manifesto?

Anders Behring Breivik might have killed close to 100 people to market a manifesto partly copied from the Unabomber.

I didn’t know whether to cry or throw up while reading the manifesto published by the man who has admitted to the twin terror attacks on Oslo Friday.

When people started discussing and publishing excerpts from the manifesto – which also includes a detailed description of the attack, how it was planned and a diary leading up to 22/7 – on Google+ last night, there were those who said media would be playing into Breivik's hands by covering it.

There is some truth to that as the author of the manifesto more than hints that the atrocities that left at least 77 people dead were just a marketing ploy for his 15000-page manifesto.

Still, I believe transparency is more productive than secrecy in such instances, and we need to understand the terrorist's motivations in order to expose his contradictions and fallacies – even though it requires more than a degree of sobriety from the media when covering it.

As a blogger it’s my gut reaction to always link to my sources, but in this case I’ll leave it up to those interested to look up «2083. A European Declaration of Independence».

In it the author describes the necessity of using "terror as a method to wake up the masses" to the silent Islamification of Europe - aided, abetted and legitimized by “multiculturalist traitors”, cultural Marxists (or relativists) and feminists.

I was called up yesterday and asked if I could possibly put together an analysis in 2,5hrs of the attacks in Norway for Mail on Sunday (which was a challenge I couldn’t resist: the article can be found here).

That was before we knew of the manifesto.

Now, having read it, I guess I should be gratified by just how spot on my analysis of Behring Breivik’s motivation was:

This was an attack on Norway’s Labour party, which members are described in the document as some of the worst cultural Marxists aiding and abetting multiculturalism and Islamification.

The author also pays tribute to folks like Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders and BNP - and Tony Blair is describe as one of the most dangerous cultural Marxists' of them all.

The manifesto’s author quotes a wide range of sources – including Theodore Dalrymple, Melanie Phillips, Mark Twain. Every time a writer I like, such as Mark Twain, is mentioned I just felt like screaming:

“No, not in my name – don’t use this as support for your crazy arguments.”

The document is an awful muddle of reactionary Conservatism, Christianity, anti-Islam, anti-Marxism, philosophy and practical advice to would be terrorists, but most of it is both eloquently and lucidly written.

Part of what is so sickening is how every argument he touches on, even the few I agree with, becomes contaminated by his madness.

For instance, I’m not a big fan of Marxism, the ideology, but the context he puts this all into, and the actions he recommends based on his conclusions, makes me physically sick.

What we’re presented with is a manifesto for a terrorist BNP, a terrorist movement akin to Al-Qaeda only that it will fight for a nationalist, Christian-Conservative society free from Moslems, Feminists and Cultural Marxists.

The author believes this will be accomplished by 2083.

However, by comparing the two manifestos, right-wing news site Document.no revealed that huge chunks of the "2083 manifesto" probably is copied from the manifesto of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski....

This story just keeps getting more and more surreal.