"Perception Is Truth..."

people often say. No, it isn't. Truth is truth, and unless your perception coincides with what is true, then your perception is, quite simply, wrong.

This phrase, "perception is truth", was the maxim of my previous boss; outwardly, and being charitable, it is a nice, liberal, inclusive, all-encompassing idea. It's like the liberal idea of tolerance...which turns out to be fundamentally ILliberal: tolerating every opinion, every viewpoint, means de facto giving them all equal weight, equal validity which, in effect, means abandoning all criteria for judging between different opinions, and becoming unable, simply, to sort out the wheat from the chaff. When it comes to opinions about mayonnaise, it doesn't really matter; however, when it comes to anything substantial, the implications are enormous. You must (logically) en up tolerating the intolerable, accepting anything...even to the point of accepting those views which seek to suppress yours and you. "How do you see things? Let's listen to you and we'll talk about it." If other people en masse 'perceive' you to be wrong, then clearly you have a problem; if they 'perceive' you to be correct, it is because you are telling people what they already believe about things they already accept.So, it turns out, only certain 'perceptions' are 'truth.'

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2005/percipi-est-esse/

In reality, it is a placebo, a way of inducing acceptance of the status quo. What is my perception of what is happening in Greece? In Thailand? It turns out that my perception of these events, if it doesn't accord with what economists want my perception to be, then I am somehow mis-perceiving; my viewpoint, my opinion, is still valid, of course, still welcomed, my voice is still listened to...but wrong. If, however, my perception does fall into line with what the clearing banks and the credit agencies, the IMF and the EU say, then I am seeing things clearly. John Pilger, then, must quite simply be wrong, but isn't it great that he's allowed to express his opinion. John Stuart Mill would be proud...

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/05/greece-pilger-britain-imf

Eons ago, the Scottish Philosopher David Hume explained what he called the 'is/ought gap': facts are facts, and values are values. Ethical principles cannot be decided by appeal to empirical reality. Morality, in short, cannot be made a slave to what actually is the state of affairs in the world. The point of ethics is to determine what OUGHT to be the case, not to reflect what IS the case; once you even begin to allow facts to determine ethical principles, then you are caught up in the same logic as that expressed above, viz., that you have to accept that whatever IS happening must, by dint of the fact that it is happening, OUGHT to happen. Simply, however, irrespective of how things are, certain things are wrong, and certain things are right. No matter how many Palestinian bodies the Israelis pile up, killing is still wrong; statistics are not going to settle the issue. One life taken or a thousand will not change the morality of the issue. What is sauce for the goose, however, is sauce for the gander: state execution (with or without a 'fair' trial) is wrong, no matter how much under pressure Hamas feels it is, no matter how many Israeli collaborators they uncover. No matter how large the debt run up by the Greek government, an office worker in Lamia is still not responsible for it. Whether that debt is one euro or a billion, "austerity measures" that 'target' this office worker are wrong.

However...all of this is just my perception. It turns out that I have been listening to the Rong Radio Station....

Beirut...with rose-tinted musical spectacles....

No Comment Needed...

For Sale...

The other day I had a Couch Surfing guest for a couple of nights. I have never Couch Surfed myself (I prefer certain comforts, especially those with four or five stars attached to them...) but I occasionally enjoy hosting visitors for a number of reasons. One of those is that you are able to see your city through their eyes for a while. This guest didn't particularly want to do much except to just be in Beirut, and so one afternoon we went for a long walk: beginning in Hamra, over to Raouche, behind Verdun, down to Downtown, across to Achrafieh, Mar Mikhael, and then back again. A good five hours of treading the pavement.

Beirut is, in short, a horrible building site. Whatever it had of any beauty is now, definitively, gone. The old building behind my house (dammit, outside the back balcony of my bedroom) is now gone, replaced by a Caterpillar crushing machine and, quite soon, non-stop construction. The noise pollution is the worst I have ever experienced it, and it's all of the same ilk - jackhammers, stone-crushers, drilling. I don't even notice the traffic noise and the ceaseless car horns any longer.

And I just know that...

THIS....











....WILL BECOME THIS....












It is said that Beirut is "booming", that it is "coming into its own" again, that it is, like a Phoenix, rising from the ashes and undergoing a renaissance. Well, so it is, and it is becoming unbearable. If you have bottomless pockets of cash, and a penchant for doing nothing other than going from identikit trendy restaurant to identikit trendy bar before rounding off the evening in an American-style shopping mall then you can, for a while, forget about all of the construction work defacing the city.

This choice is, however, Sophie's Choice.

Funny Farm

Virtual Tourism

It is what it is, as they say...I just found this mildly amusing. Sitting in a cafe watching the world go by on holiday in Istanbul, I saw the above couple, also on holiday. She is checking the recently-taken photographs of Istanbul on her camera, he is reading the 'Time Out' guide to Istanbul. It reminded me of Baudrillard, and here is the precise quotation that this image brought to my mind:

"Today, when the real and the imaginary are confused in the same operational totality, the aesthetic fascination is everywhere. It is a subliminal perception..of deception, montage, scenaria..Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality..The principle of simulation wins out over the reality principle.." (Simulations).

In a cafe, In Istanbul..looking at pictures of Istanbul, reading a book about Istanbul.

It reminds me also of a snatch of dialogue from the film 'Total Recall':

"Come to Rekall lncorporated...where you can buy the memory of your ideal vacation...cheaper, safer and better than the real thing."

Some, it seems, prefer the Rekall solution - they don't want to be on holiday, they just want to HAVE been on holiday.

Neuromancer Cyber-Life, Christmas 2009

("My God, what a terrible programme"; "Sorry, force of habit.")

I remember years ago reading a series of novels by William Gibson and, even more recently, a series of novels by Richard Morgan. Both were set in bleak, post-apocalyptic dystopias featuring a cast of characters with extra-genetic modifications to their bodies enabling them to download tetrabytes of whatever directly into their brains (and so on and so forth...). They were the literary (superior) equivalents of 'Bladerunner', 'Matrix' and 'The Thirteenth Floor.' Well, it would be ridiculous to say that I'm still waiting...I live in Lebanon, where government-backed monopolies and corrupt network administration mean that I can't even get a decent internet connection most of the time. The two (two!) mobile phone network providers have got the market sewn up, iPhones (if you can get them unlocked) can never be upgraded because they will freeze and so are little more than fashion accessories and, in terms of the internet, there is a plethora of pay-as-you-go options at $50 dollars a time (for 2GB at best), a handful of wi-fi hotspots around the capital (Beirut) but, with the regular electricity interruptions, maintaining a connection is fraught with difficulty.

I woke up this morning and the electricity was off (6.00-9.00, 9.00-12.00, 12.00-15.00, 15.00-18.00 are the cycles, and my building has no generator: I don't mind because at least that means one less machine pumping out unfiltered petrol fumes into the environment), so I had to content myself with reading a book until it came back on when I could check (in no particular order)

* The Guardian;
* this blog;
* my flickr page;
* my hotmail, gmail and work e-mail accounts;
* my Twitter page (together with Ninjalabz);
* Facebook;
* a collection of local newspapers, citizen journalist pages (Demotix, Now Public) and a few blogs.

which took time. The loudest noise in The Guardian (bye bye Copenhagen...) was being made about the success of a Facebook/Twitter campaign to get a particular song by a certain band into the 'Christmas Number 1' slot in the UK charts, solely in order to defeat another song/artist on the sole grounds that the latter was a 'manufactured' event created as a result of participating in some TV game show or other ('X Factor' or 'Britain's Got Talent' or whatever).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/dec/20/rage-against-machine-christmas-number-1

Following it were several opinion pieces, an endless list of opinions on the subect, fact and counter-fact (Rage Against The Machine are also operating under Sony BMG so the villain of the piece, one Simon Cowell, will still make piles of cash/No he won't, he's a non-executive director, and anyway RATM will donate the proceeds to a homelessness charity....and so on). I then switched on the radio (BBC Radio Five Live), and it was the subject of conversation there also.

Meanwhile here in Lebanon, a Syrian bus carrying workers going back to Syria was this morning shot up and one passenger was killed, whilst a Cloud search on Ninjalabz revealed that the biggest story of the day was about the death of some actress or other.

Inbetween times, I had always wondered why Twitter was not so popular in Lebanon as Facebook (with some honourable exceptions). It is, of course, to do with what people use it for; I have noticed that, in Greece, Twitter is a great way of organising demos, providing information about the location of riot police and so on during said demos, publishing real-time photos and links; Facebook, on the other hand, and to quote the satirist Jeremy Hardy, "is the modern equivalent of sorting out your sock draw" - it tells me who is, and is not, happy about the snow, the weather in general, their impending new baby, whether they had a good time last night, where they will be meeting up for a night out, and how many presents they have received on 'Farmville' or who they are playing online poker with. Most of all, probably, Twitter just doesn't allow people to post photographs of themselves at last night's party or to go on and on about how happy or not they are. After all, 160 characters just doesn't cut it, does it?

I suspect that, if Gibson and Morgan were to write their novels now, they wouldn't be full of surreptitious references to Baudrillard and Sadie Plant and Slavoj Zizek; instead, we'd all be wearing dark glasses with the Facebook 'live feed' being projected behind our retinas, and the National Inquirer entertainment section being fed into our cerebral cortex.