Anfang ist dröge, wird schnell besser.
Nachtrag: ORF “Im Brennpunkt” zum Thema: click
Dont worry, she’s an expert
23. Dezember 2021
‘Feminist’ foreign policy — what does that mean?
Annalena Baerbock is Germany’s first female foreign minister. According to the new government’s coalition agreement, she wants to pursue a “feminist foreign policy.” But opinions differ as to what that actually means.
You mean foreign policy, the thing thats intentionally decoupled from personal egos, day to day politics and societies morals, because otherwise it didnt turn out great?
How about we soak that in a concept that is intended for morals based class warfare, I mean betterment?
The first group seeks a peaceful, utopian version of foreign policy at all costs; while the other is primarily concerned with getting more women into positions of power in public diplomacy, the military and civil society.
What could go wrong?
“Feminism tries to smash structures that rely on violence,” she told DW. She cites the fight against terrorism as one example: 90% of terrorists operating worldwide are men.
Sorry I asked… Won’t ask again.
So is this really how you’d have a leading country in the EU operate in the following years?
The concern is that the chancellery will continue to take care of the “big players” like the United States, China, France, the EU and Russia, while leaving smaller fish to the Foreign Ministry.
She criticized former Foreign Minister Heiko Maas for allowing himself to be, as she put it, “demoted” in this way. She hopes that Annalena Baerbock will bring more strength to the Foreign Ministry, and not just hand everything over to the chancellery.
Masalla, however, does not think this will happen, and predicts that the chancellery will continue to focus on the “big players.” He believes that the old division of labor will continue under the new government, and that Annalena Baerbock will simply have to get used to it.
Ah, it’s all in the details, isn’t it?
“Peaceful, utopian version of foreign policy” is mainly for the smaller countries I presume.
src: click
*rolleyes*
17. Dezember 2021
At this point, you could teach world politics to a toddler. Literally.
Background: click
Hold the Line - Maria Ressa’s Nobel Price Speech
11. Dezember 2021
Ever wanted to see a Nobel Peace Price speech, where the audience reacts shocked, to the point where their mouths remain open physically - and then still has to clap, because, you know… protocol? Maria Ressa delivers.
What happened? Oh, people in the west that visit Nobel piece price laudationes just got confronted with a journalist from a country where facebook changed the political and journalistic landscape. In large parts, because of a personal impunity deal between Facebook and the president of the Philippines. Ressa spoke about a society in which fake news could be used as political tools, without restrictions. Here are some quotes:
Ressa stressed most of all how journalists have lost their role as the professional “gatekeepers” who worked to make sure the flow of public information was factual, edited and in keeping with journalistic principles before being published. Now technology and especially social media can allow an unedited flow of information, with Ressa slamming their “god-like power that has allowed a virus of lies to infect each of us, pitting us against each other, bringing out our fears, anger and hate, and setting the stage for the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.”
She specifically mentioned Brazil, Hungary, France, the US and her own Philippines, where elections next year can be heavily influenced by social media. She noted how “American internet companies” can “make more money by spreading hate and triggering the worst in us.”
Attacks on her own newssite Rappler [source of the video] “began five years ago,” she said, “when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today it has only gotten worse, and Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill.” She maintains that online violence has become real world violence.
She called social media, meanwhile, “a deadly game for power and money” in which “highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will.” It has also ruined the business model for established media, Ressa believes, as “destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a threat to markets and elections.” Facebook is now the world’s largest distributor of news, yet “lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media.” Journalist-gatekeepers have been replaced by these “American companies controlling our global information ecosystem, biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are, by design, dividing us and radicalizing us.”
Ressa hopes the world can act as it did after the atomic bomb attacks on Japan that ended World War II: “We need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values to prevent humanity from doing its worst.” She called for “shifting social priorites to rebuild journalism” while “regulating and outlawing” the big tech firms and “surveillance economics that profit from hate and lies.”
She was referring to how companies like Facebook and Google gather data on human behaviour and sell it to the highest bidder. It can then be used as a weapons, like meddling in elections.
src: click
So what will be happening now? Well, judging from the circumstance that Frances Haugens message in Germany was largely moved to an online only clip in the comedy format ZDF magazine royale, I’d say a whole lot of posturing, followed up by a whole lot of nothing, like the Forum Alpbach approach of staffing callcenters with trained ‘broaden online speech specialists, financed by the private sector’, and ‘easy counter’ meme creation later outsourced to fiverr. ([Interpretation] Fiverr was promoted in this Alpbach 2018 session (Our work in our future), as a ‘great and cost-effective tool’ even for the scientific sector.)
Full disclosure: Why am I actually that invested? Well I strongly suggested, that micro targeting in political advertising on facebook had to stop - with the european commission having to be engaged in making this a reality, in an Alpbach seminar in 2018. Which today - finally is a position held by stakeholders at the european level.
In Alpbach, I was met with this familiar blank stare that always warms your heart to the point it stings a little, only to then be followed up with the high intensity question ‘But how is social media microtargeting different from what the european postal system is doing in distributing advertising’? On which the professor holding the session promptly stopped the person asking it from from trying to get answers out of me - because ‘look at the time..’.
Small unimportant anecdote, I would have forgotten by now - were it not for the ‘introduction into polite society’ event a few days later, called ‘The future of data economy’, where Trevor D. Traina, the new US ambassador to austria at that time, prompted by two questions in a row ‘If it wouldn’t be overdue to regulate big tech companies’ (the second one asked by yours truely, to drive the point home, that this was important) responded with “I’ve got this. [Question asked for the entire panel to answer.] You see, this is why we’ve got the free market - this is like with Firefox, where a competitor could come along tomorrow, innovate, and then change the landscape entirely - so no regulation is needed.”
The other people on the panel (see click), including some very distinguished guests and young experts in the field were very helpful, by literally attempting to stare holes in the ceiling of Elisabeth-Herz-Kremenak-Saal at that point of the evening.
Two days ago, I then couldn’t help to notice that the way out of this that Forum Alpbach and the Mercator foundation (as well as probably Mr. Traina himself) could agree on, would be to fund a few callcenters worth of microjobbers that would then be paid to “broaden online discussions, using science”, and “distribute preproduced ‘easy counter’ memes in image form” for the general public engaged in democratic debate online.
My respect for political and intellectual elites grew three sizes that day.
Sorry for the filler, back to the topic at hand:
“These were strong speeches that gave everyone a lot to think about,” Støre told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) on his way out of the prize ceremony. “It also makes an impression that these two travel home with great uncertainty over what will meet them there.”
Great uncertainty indeed, but not so much over what will meet them there.
The limits of communication
10. Dezember 2021
The concept of “economic hitman-esque” debt-traps (unrepayable infrastructure loans, with the lender countries industrial sector netting the actual building contracts), that had been remodeled by the chinese into gifting infrastructure outright, and then granting themselves operating rights, if certain conditions aren’t met according to a predefined contract, has now morphed into *pause*
“The Global Gateway Strategy”
“[…] smart investments in quality infrastructure, respecting the highest social and environmental standards, in line with the EU’s democratic values”
“[So] Europe can build more resilient connections with the world.”
Environmental? Resilient? Yes, because it’s mostly targeting data and healthcare infrastructure, if the debter country chooses, out of their own volition, to use the funds in that way. Europe would only be suggesting as much. At a third of the volume China is investing in belt and road, only a decade later. Partly using already preallocated funds.
DW has their youngest Brussels correspondent on the case right now. (See video.)
The strategy is “of particular importance in Southeast Asia,” where the EU has been a strong partner for the region, said Igor Driesmans, the EU ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc.
Driesmans said the Global Gateway will build on a strategy for cooperation with countries in the region, including the 2018 EU-Asia connectivity strategy.
There is also the potential for the EU’s Global Gateway to partner with the United States’ global investment proposal, Build Back Better World.
src: click
To get more information on Build Back Better World in Gaza/Westbank, for example, please read: click
