Brüsseler Spitzen

Hier in Österreich weiß man ja spätestens seit dem berühmten Schüssel-Sager, wie gut sich juristisch gebildete Politiker im Internet auskennen.

Jetzt dürfen wir uns auch darüber freuen, dass das, was wir schon immer gehofft haben, wahr ist, nämlich, dass sich Brüsseler Spitzenbeamte in den letzten 2 oder 3 Jahren Auseinandersetzung mit der, räusper, digitalen Welt und all den Kon- und Divergenzen doch sehr weitergebildet haben. Anlässlich der Enquete (siehe gestern) sprach Philip Lowe, auch ein Generaldirektor und zwar der für die Kompetition zuständige, zu Harald Fidler und der gab es weiter.

Lowe: ....Aber es gibt insbesondere im Internet rein kommerzielle Dienste, die Österreich dem ORF verbieten will. Chatrooms ohne Zusammenhang mit Sendungen - "nicht sendungsbezogen" - zum Beispiel, oder Onlinespiele.

Warum und dass Nachrichten ein unkommerzieller Dienst sind, das sehen wir ja ein und drum wurden sie von den diversen Staaten schon seit dem 17. Jahrhundert auch meisten irgendwie unterstützt und sei's nur durch die zwangsweise Senkung staatlicher Transportgebühren.

Aber dass das Spielen durch eine uns bisher nicht bekannte Magie des Onlinewesens rein kommerziell wird, da haben wir jetzt etwas gelernt.

Bis hierher können wir noch folgen. Wie aber die öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten durch nicht sendungsbezogene Chaträume, und dass muss ja praktisch schon vor Einführung von Instand Messaging geschehen sein, potentielle gewinnträchtige Geschäfte der Zeitungsverleger verhindert hat, da werden wir wohl in diesem Leben nicht mehr durchsteigen.

Jedenfalls sieht es so aus, als ob gegen das Trio infernal aus europäischer Medienpolitik, privaten und öffentlichen Medienhäusern so oder so kein Kraut gewachsen ist. Zieht Euch warm an, amerikanische Jungunterunternehmer!

PS: Können nicht bitte endlich mehr Leute die richtigen Dummheiten, Peinlichkeiten und Kommerztrotteleien im ORF, im Privatfernsehen und allen anderen Medien angreifen anstatt ... oh sorry, we said that already?

PPS: Nur kurz noch. Wir wissen nicht, ob Lowe seine Aussagen in inglese oder tedesco gemacht hat. Da könnten natürlich Übersetzungsunschärfen passiert sein. Dann wareten, so zu sagen, unsere Ausführung quasi hinfällig.

Saving Local Content in the UK

Thankfully British media authority Ofcom has summarized on one single webpage how they will save local news and bloody underwear content in the regions of the nations that constitute the United Kingdom.

The Problem

Without this balance, there is no incentive for commercial public service broadcasters to retain their public service licences. This is particularly the case for ITV plc. The licences it holds retain significant public service obligations, including the regional obligations rooted in Channel 3s original federal structure. If the obligations of ITV plcs licences significantly outweighed their benefits, ITV plc could feasibly surrender its public service licences and pursue an entirely commercial strategy using broadcasting spectrum through an alternative multiplex (such as SDN, which it owns). In such a scenario, much of ITV plcs public service content would be likely to be lost completely, including regional programmes.

The Solution

In formulating proposals based on this underlying analysis, we listened to what ITV network audiences told us they valued most namely regional news gathering and programmes transmitted at times when most people were watching. Accordingly, we concentrated the declining available benefits of public service status on maintaining journalistic resources in the field, maximising the level of localness in programmes and maintaining the volume of public service programmes broadcast in peak-time, when most people watch.


The consequences

While RTL Germany, depending on the interpretation of different sources has harvested a loss of 60 to 90 million Euros in the first two quarters of this year and Swiss Public Television has lost money in the league of ORF rather uninformed members of the elite sit in the Austrian parliament and discuss the differences and commonalities of airlines, broadcasting and the web. At the same time the real discussion takes place at the responsible ministry department where officials fix details with the emissary from brussels to find compromises of the sort only lawyers and justices have the sick knowledge to really appreciate. Small wonder, the population never checks, the union has more benefits than disadvantages.

Careers in TV are at stake. That used to be hot but only for birdies any longer. Where have you gone Mr. Idle, we need you, now. Please repeat: These enquiries led to certain changes at the BBC.

Hmmh

Hey hey,
my my,
solidarity will never die!

U will fare better if u will believe this.

In other words, u better believe it will be so, for, if u don't it will be "else".

And we are fair enough to give a warning: We have ways of making u believe!

Diamat Revisited

Die dialektische Methode lässt sich missbrauchen und ist oft mißbraucht worden. Manchmal mag man sogar geneigt sein, mit Kants Bemerkung übereinzustimmen, nach der die Dialektik eine ars sophistica disputatoria ist, also Geschwätzigkeit. Diese Einstellung hat Kant jedoch nicht davon abgehalten, selber dialektisch zu denken.
Gegen Hegels dialektischen Idealismus als einen philosophischen Versuch, Gott durch andere metaphysische Begriffe zu ersetzen, ist viel einzuwenden, und Marx' Übertragung der dialektischen Methode des Materialismus ist ein Fortschritt, aber keine Lösung. Die Mischung aus wissenschaftlicher Forschung und Wunschdenken, die seinem System zugrunde liegt, ist ebenfalls kein dialektischer Realismus.
Fritz (Frederick S.) Perls, 1946

Ob Perls das Syntagma ars sophistica disputatoria in der Bedeutung, das es für Kant hatte, ganz korrekt übersetzt hat, bleibe dahingestellt. Uns würde da noch was anderes einfallen. Macht aber nichts, denn es tut der Gesamtaussage keinen Abbruch.

Der historische Materialismus mag ja jetzt tot sein, der dialektische ist es sicher noch lange nicht.
Unbekannter Kirchenmann, 1993

Wir stimmen dem im Großen und Ganzen zu. Wir stimmen auch dem hier nicht wiedergebbaren ambivalenten Unterton der Aussage zu. Wir finden es zugleich bedauerlich und erfreulich, dass der Diamat weiter lebt. Amen.

Fighting Unethical Behaviour: Victories are for Losers

Fighting unethical behaviour, which this staff here is heavily involved in, does not seem to be such a good receipt for a peaceful life and happiness in these days.

Why then, you will ask us, and we have to ask ourselves, do we still do it. Which are the reasons and what be the open or hidden benefits? Is this fight of any importance? Do we suffer from unconscious masochism? Or are we just simply a bit maladapted? Have we participated in all too few ar all too many workshops. Are we the victims of classical self-deception? Have we betrayed ourselves out of the benefits of all investments in therapeutic work and coaching? Slow down! Everything in order now.


The Source of the Fighting

The daily renewed desire and resolution to go on and fight unethical behaviour flows quite naturally from a desire to lead lives at a relatively low degree of alienation*. That means, we like to agree with the goals and the process of our work, be it on th job or at home. It means, we want to get along well with our associates and co-workers. In means we want to enjoy our leisure time without having to becom beings that we are actually not, but have to act as in order to participate in the activities of our friends and theirs.

In the second half of the 19th century many people would still have agreed that this goal of less alienation on one's life made perfect sense. The same people would probably have agreed a lot less on how to reach that low degree of alienation. Still, even a very reflective and strongly individualized person could find a party or group with mostly the same goals and a sufficient consensus on the methods and stratagems to get there.

The first world war shook the basics for this considerably. We can judge this quite easily and precisely because we have so many records, not only in print, but als in the arts, of audio and film where the rise of alienation and universal conflict in the so called first and second worlds (USA, CCCP, Germany, France, UK, Austria, United Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Poland, Japan etc. ....) is more than amply documented. Still, in Europe, the US and elsewhere new hopes where born and many people engaged for progress and the amelioration of life.

Lost Assumptions

The so called second world war and its widely perceptible and unignorable climaxes, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, in a century that until then had verily not lacked in atrocities, jolted many people profoundly. Not least those who had liked to call themselves humanists, by which they seem to have wanted to say, they believed in man and woman, in mankind's inner forces and potentials more than they believed in a bad demiurg's world and a life that was in no way handable without strict guidance from the heavens.

The shock that the world-famous German "Kultur" did practically nothing to hinder the German government and those parts of the German, Austrian, French, Polish, Lituanian, Kalmyk and so on peoples that supported it, to murder 6 million Jews, 200 thousand Sinti and Roma, we do not know how many handicapped people and political opponents and on and on, was, by itself probably quite impossible to digest for generations to come. It would sink down into the unconscious like lesser burdens before.

Let us now leave away the deaths of all the people who fought, got traumatized or simply became casualties of that thoroughly senseless but apparently unavoidable and productive war. Let us also let be all the quite incredible cruelties in remote and distant places, for example those the Japanese committed in China and what Greeks, Turks and Armenians had done to each other a mere 30 years before.

The bang that ended all this came when the US-American government, arguably the most humanist governments of all, maybe not of all times and places but for sure in this world and 1945 who had already burned down the city of Dresden in a firestorm and had layed to waste the homes and lives of most of its inmates, decided it was time to really take guidance from above into their own hands, not wait for God's thunderbolt any more, and did not only drop Little Boy on Hiroshima but as if to confirm what they had done, also dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki 3 days** later. That particular act of grace got even the last of the humanists to give up on their belief in humankind and give up on the buried rests of their belief in God simultanously.


Crisis

You might be to young to have exoerienced any of the more direct effects of this. If you want to check over on what we declare here read any humanist novel from the fifties an you will perceive this effect hard at work. A more sensitive nature like for example Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno had already written a sentence like "Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen." and other
"reflections from damaged life" a good year before and when all of the damage was not even known in its fullness.

What did that mean? It meant you could either go suicidal, go on vegetating hopelessly or you had to accept alienation as a fact of life and property of mankind if you believed in it or as the long term punishment of God or the Universe, a theorem that already had been known and accepted by many for a couple of thousend years. It meant the grand project of Humanism and Enlightenment was over. And we mean, OVER!


After Effects

Slow and sophisticated adaption to alienation set in at once. Its old European ways had been disqualified. All the little disguises, dissimulations, all the nlittle and big lies, all the harmless and harmful stupidities had experienced a change of direction and style not to be underestimated. They became new, postwar, sustainable, postmodern and posteverything.

And, as we said, the previous basic assumptions of being able to lower the grade of alienation and finally, having hope to be able to escape it in this life on the coziest and greenest of all planets we know, were more or less all gone. With assumptions and goals practically always the stratagems and tactics and the methods of reaching those goals become useless and disappear. Go they do, down into the oubliette.


Stable Prerequisites

Still, human genetics and human memetics have not really changed through those events. Mass traumatization had happened before. Not on that scale. It will happen again. But life goes on. Survival is imminent. Desires stay the same and so the inner core for them. Here at tiny, we are still seriously opposed to Buddhism and its wrong teachings. What is in order?


Inventory and Conclusions

First we take an inventory. The desire to lead a "richtiges Leben" is still here. We can clearly feel and recognize it. We can also reflect it and, by way of Descartes' main theorem means we exist. We exist mean we are alive. We are alive, by way of Darwin's main theorem, means, we are well adapted. What is wrong? Unethical behaviour is wrong. We had known that before, intuitively. Why then, all of the ugly reflection. 2 legs are better than one.


Back On The Track

We can conclude that fighting ethical behaviour is still a valid method to increase the numbers of moments, hours, and even days of happiness we can justly expect in this life, and, for all who believe in it, the sweet hereafter.

Fighting unethical behaviour, far spread as it is, from this position is by no means a trivial venture. Let us have a closer look.

Biologically we seem to be well adapted. But are we well adapted socially? On first sight this does not seem to be the case. As mentioned in the presuppositions our desire is to live at a rather low grade of alienation. Looking around we get the impression that the majority of people in western Europe, North- and Middle America, the coastal provinces of China and a couple of other places we know rather like to live at a higher and rising level of alienation.


Nontrivial Difficulties in the Detail

Porn is on the rise, more on more modes of human life are turned into commodities, the fetish character of all those commodities obviously abounds. Movement and effort of the body is exercised under the command of a person you have to pay for commanding instead of the person or her sponsors paying you for the labour. Outside small elites in disgusting labs and political think tanks that are locked into headaches generation office cages thinking and is discouraged daily.

Being your own man or woman is denounced as being antisocial. A fiction of success is proliferated through a large majority of media with an attention span of one day. Marketing has never been as ridiculous, mendacious and hypocritical as just now. Every Poll tells us people think the management above them is incompetent or even malignant. Selfish in any case. Up to the government? Of course. Sometimes a queen or king or president is exempt.

The Short Perspective

It seems on short sight, there is no hope this fight can in any way succeed. It would seem we would even earnestly impede our advancement if we do not adapt socially and stop fighting a senseless cause. Have we not preached against unwitting masochism for years and years?


The Longer Perspective

Yet there is something to remember. Time. Tides may turn. Given enough of your lifetime, alienation will eat you up from inside. Now, that we have to lead this lives up to 80 years or more, now that cardiologic medicine is so good that not even drinking and smoking can guarantee any more for a timely farewell, everybody is well advised to think of one's old age and the long term inner effects of alienation and unethical behaviour. Would you want to feel eaten up inside from 70 to 90? We have seen enough of those bitten and eaten up people. Suddenly hypocritical religiousness in the last 10 years of life. Unexpected gnawing fears of eternal flames. Repeated fits of swamping paranoia. Being so afraid and full of unconscious conscience to voluntarily delivering yourself into luxury concentration camps in southern France as legions of rich Americans do. Luxury does not make you happy by itself and concentration camps those settlements stay, barbed wire, guard personal and all.

All of this sucks. Yuck. Waeh.


The Long Perspective

Be that as it may. We feel no need to decide wether the believers in an afterlife, the believers in many lives and the nothingness thereafter or the believers in the big sleep are right. Before the solution to this question will be revealed to us, there is still live down here below to live and master. We, for one, want the rest of it to be good, funny and enjoyable. And we want to flake out in a good mood, no matter if we will then awake the next day and wherever or not.

So what then, we hear many of you asking. So this, we answer. We will go on fighting unethical behaviour and we will go on to aspire to a low grade of alienation. We know what an how we feel. Many people will help us. Groundless solidarity will help us. We will not lose in the end.

Not losing is a lot better than winning. Victories are for losers. Every victory is a Pyrrhic victory. Think of Caesar, think of Bonaparte. You'll find a new certainty.

__________________
* We will not define alienation properly here. We use it in the most common sense, in the vague meaning of feeling like an alien to oneself, one's fellows, the world and its processes.

** Do we agree with the bombing decisions of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations? Do we think they were necessary to win WWII?. We are still not completely sure. We tend to agree with bombing Germany and Japan as such. We tend to think, that it was necessary to convey to the German and Japanese people and not only to their soldiers that fighting on and going on to meditate fighting back later made no sense. We are less sure about the atomic bombing. But the again, the atomic bombing would never have unfolded its effect of forcing formal military peace between the great powers for 64 years now without a tough demonstration. Difficult. But we are pretty sure, the confirmation thing with Fat Man was unnecessary and cruel.

On the other hand and second thought though it definitely is a merit and sign of reasonableness of US administrations from Truman to Nixon and Soviet administrations from Khrushchev to Gorbatchev that they always kept their general staffs and joint chiefs from ever using atomic force again.

Bags full of Brass

Hier in Mitteleuropa trägt fast jeder Mensch einen großen Sack voll mit Frechheiten mit sich herum. Eine Menge gekaufte, ein paar geschenkte und viele, viele, die einem ungewünscht und unverlangt aufgedrängt wurden.

Was machen die Leute damit? Na, wieder los werden, so schnell wie möglich. Wie? Verkaufen, verschenken und natürlich auch anderen ungefragt aufdrängen.

Nur blöd, wenn sich's wer nicht aufdrängen lässt. Noch blöder, wenn jemand eine geschenkte Frechheit unbeachtet zur Seite legt. Und am allerblödesten, wenn ein ins Auge gefasster Kunde trotz aller Verkaufsanstrengungen und liebevollster Umgarnung einfach nicht kauft.

Unsere armen Politiker können ein Lied davon singen. Die meisten anderen Leute kennen das auch.

Completely Good or Completely Bad

In troubled times, people tend to suddenly re-discover history and turn their minds back to it. A close historical parallel to the near-civil war now threatening to engulf France is formed by events in Spain during the years 1492-1612. Those events repay close study.
.....
As Machiavelli says, defeat is the result of men not having the courage to be either completely good or completely bad. Reports coming out of France suggest that its government has not yet made up its mind on this point, and indeed it may still be too early to decide which course is the most appropriate. Clearly, however, if France and perhaps other European countries as well are to escape civil war one of the two will have to be chosen. And the longer the decision is postponed, the more difficult things will become.

Just 2 remarks from our editorial staff:
It is true that people rediscover history in troubled times. Remember the obsession the Nazis took with it. But their example also shows that exact and openminded study is needed. Nothing worse than superficial and unbalanced study and knowledge of history.

Allthough most of the time the only symptom of ist that can be seen in public these days are the many history titles in large book stores, quite large groups inside the political-economical elits, the christian as well as the muslim, jewish, confucian, hindu and buddhist worlds just drip with historic awareness. One should never forget that fact. I doubt if that's for good. I rather see half-conscious resistance against globalization.