[warning: 600 words of indulgent waffle on identity politics]

I've never been good at pseudonyms, collective identities, self-reinvention. Nonmetheless, I consider them a Good Thing at a fundamental level. Your identity, or mine, is the accretion of social conformism, gender roles, the acceptance of our own position in society. You can try to unpick it, layer by layer, but the chances are you'll never get to a 'real you'.

Or you can take the shortcut: choose another identity, put it on, change it once it's no longer useful. Be Luther Blissett, be Spartacus. Be your friends, or your enemies, or some combination of them all.

steerpikelet just gave a wonderful interview, where she defends political action without a true name:

Anonymous is its own separate thing, an anarchic and brilliant thing, but the wider concept of anonymity itself as a political statement - whether online or offline - is gaining more and more ground as a way of rebelling against a political culture that not only seeks to root out unsavory elements with surveillance but which mandates individuality as a form of rigid conformity. Think about it: it you grow up being commanded to self-actualise, to be the best individual you can be, to define yourself by buying things, to be yourself and find your special centre and compete with your neighbors and colleagues, then choosing to be anonymous is an inherently revolutionary act, quite apart from the organising possibilities the phenomenon offers. Plus, there’s a growing sense that there is a great deal of power in the collective, in sharing a sense of solidarity, symmetry and protection in anonymity.

It's perhaps not a coincidence that Laurie writes this in an interview with a comics blog. If there's one area that comics have picked over in every possible regard, it's the secondary identity. Start with a world that has Clark Kent/Superman as the mainstream, where almost every hero wears a mask or leads a double life. Then in the 80s, along come Alan Moore and friends, devote their considerable talents to picking apart every aspect of the superhero identity. The Guy Fawkes mask now identifying Anonymous is just the smallest part of this.

The climax of this tendency, to my mind, is Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. A cell of superpowered freedom fighters draw their personalities by lot; each necessary identity is filled by a different person each week. Characters live under layers of assumed identities, brainwashing themselves at each level to forget the next layer. Heroes and villains turn out to be the same groups, veiling their consciousness in order to play out their roles. The end result is reminiscent of, say, Shaiva Tantrism. By the end, it seems that everybody is part of the same identity: a character in a dream, a player in a video-game, the 'fiction suit' with which God walks the earth, or part of a hyper-dimensional being.

Yes, this is part plot device, part stoner esoterica. But it's also a guide to discarding the unwanted parts of your past, and to acting as a group not based on prior hierarchies. And, as Laurie suggests, to dodging surveillance. When government and corporations devote so much energy to tracking and correlating our behaviour, it becomes almost a matter of duty to thow a spanner in the works. That is to adopt some identity not linked to a passport and a birth certificate. To dream a fiction suit, be it, share it, discard it, and move on to the next identity.

Does the cost of policing affect what laws are enforced?

I'd (naïvely?) imagined that there would be some kind of institutional firewall in place, analogous to the division between advertising and content in a newspaper, or the various Chinese Walls inside financial firms. That is, that decisions on which types of crime to pursue would be separate from decisions about how to pay for it.

Is that not the case? Brooke Magnanti (belle de jour) writes:

Another way in which opposing sex work brings financial benefit is through the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Police know, for instance, that if a brothel owner is prosecuted, since running a brothel is illegal, any money and property retrieved from the 'crime scene' becomes theirs. When police resources are limited, does the temptation of profit possibly influence victimless crimes being prosecuted more vigourously than they otherwise would?
...
It's impossible to know for certain, but one can imagine plenty of situations in which police - with restricted time and money - must make choices: unknown violent criminals who may be difficult and expensive to catch, or women technically breaking the law standing right in front of you, with cash assets?

Similarly, there's a debate about the cost of evicting travellers from Dale Farm:

The cost of evicting travellers from Europe’s largest illegal camp could spiral to £18million, councillors have revealed.
The occupants of Dale Farm in Crays Hill, Essex, have threatened violence if bailiffs move in, pushing up the bill to remove them from £3.5million just 18 months ago.
Basildon Council has set aside £8million for the operation – almost a third of its annual budget – while Essex Police has a £10million ‘worst-case scenario’ fund.
...
Despite the huge cost, Tony Ball, leader of the council is determined to press ahead if the families choose not leave by their own accord.
Mr Ball said: 'No one wants a forced clearance of this site and we have spent ten years asking the travellers to work with us to seek a peaceful resolution.
'However, it is important the law is applied equally and fairly to all people and if we do not take action in this case, we would have little moral right as a planning authority to take action against future unauthorised developments.

So it sounds like the cost of enforcement is taken into account in policing decisions, whether at the level of the police themselves or their political masters. Is that the case? If I break the law in some way that's expensive to identify, can I expect to get away with it?

I thought the nuclear industry had the best PR money could buy. Maybe not in Japan. Here's a spokesman of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, managing to make his employer sound as uncaring as possible. He's talking about the workers inside fukishima, exposing themselves to high radiation levels:

Some people call them heroes. But we don’t think they are heroes. They are doing what they should do as TEPCO employees.

[via the BBC Global News podcast today, though the interview seems a few days older, and is also in the Economist]

Juan Cole has a rundown of Top Ten Achievements of Mideast Democracy Protests this Weekend. I'm in a state of perpetual astonishment at how fast things are changing. I keep on realising I've not read about a country for a couple of days, and it's had another wave of protest or resignations.

My personal favourite of the weekend is Number 4:

4. Egyptian protesters stormed the HQs in Cairo and Alexandria of the State Security Police, the dreaded secret police who used arbitrary arrest and torture to keep strong man Hosni Mubarak in power for decades. They said they had been afraid that security officials would shred documents implicating them in crimes, and they carried off many documents. Some were former prisoners who had been tortured in the cells of the building they invaded.

This is the about the point where you know the system is going to fundamentally change, not just continue with different men at the top.

The best historical comparison (this side of 1789, at least), is perhaps the raiding of the stasi headquarters in 1990. It's not just that they broke through a barrier of fear and collected evidence of torture. They also halted the wholesale destruction of files that was in progress. That's going to form the basis for some kind of reconciliation with the past, and/or prosecution of those involved in crimes.

It's also pretty important for the world beyond Egypt. Over the coming weeks, we're going to see a flood of information coming from these seized documents. We've already had German technology being used for torture and for bugging Skype communications. It seems fairly likely we'll get something about extraordinary renditions. Maybe information from Egypt will tell us here and the US some of the secrets we couldn't get from our own politicians.

And that's just one of ten.

In Britain, there's currently a certain amount of self-criticism over the UK's rapprochement with Libya over the past decade -- how our demands were about terrorism and biological weapons, how our desires were for weapons and oil deals, and how anything involving human rights or democracy within Libya was left out of the picture.

In Germany, there's been nothing of the sort. When the German press has blamed anybody outside Libya, they've blamed the US -- which is somewhat unfair, given that in this instance America has cleaner hands than any European government. There's been occasional criticism of Britain, France, Italy and the EU, but almost none of Germany itself.

This is odd, given that Germany has by my reckoning been one of the main forces supporting trade, business and even military links with Gaddafi, and has been no more obviously concerned with the ethics of it than any other country.

I spent part of last night going through German newspaper archives, picking out past reports on German relations with Libya -- be they around oil or engineering (common) or human rights (very, very rare). Here's just one instance from the pile of notes.

Let's go back to 2004. The EU arms embargon on Libya had just been lifted, thanks to lobbying by Germany, France, Italy and the UK. Denmark and Sweden had mentioned human rights, but the general feeling was that, by abandoning its biological weapons program and renouncing international terrorism, Libya had conceded on all the truly important issues.

Just days later, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder landed in Tripoli with an entourage of 25 businessmen. In passing he praised what he called the 'political change' in Libya. But his main reason for visiting was the promotion of German business. Openly so, and with the support of much of the German political spectrum, from his own center-left SPD, through the pro-business FPD to the conservative CDU. So he shook hands, made introductions, closed deals. He was photographed in an elaborate tent, and at an oil well, looking equally out-of place in both locations.
What didn't emerge until four years later was that, alongside oil and engineering negotiations, Schroeder was fixing up a deal whereby elite German commandos would train the Libyan security services.

This caused controversy when it emerged in 2008. Not as military support for a dictator -- the €43m of German jamming equipment bought by Libya in the last 2 years has raised few eyebrows -- but because it was being provided by German security personnel, and thus involved sharing state military know-how with a potential enemy.

In fact, the Byzantine structure of the deal shows everybody knew they were bending the rules to breaking point. The German officers would receive €15,000 each, paid by a private security firm which in turn got a €1.6m cheque from Libya. They would take time off from their elite anti-terrorist unit. Their superiors thought they were vacationing in Tunisia, though the German embassy in Libya knew their real purpose. The officers set up shop in a barracks in Tripoli, where for 6 months they taught their Libyan counterparts how to storm buildings, board ships and operate out of helicopters.

Training can't be identified in the same way as you might see 'Made in Germany' on a used shell. But it's no less real; we can be sure that a hundred or so of the Gaddafi loyalists struggling to keep control of Tripoli have been trained by the German security forces.

[this is a modified cross-post from Ethnography of Light, a group-blog run by a few friends in Berlin. If you feel like browsing through there, do click through on the links. Much of the best stuff -- like this collection of poetry -- is hidden behind not-very-prominent links to Google Docs]

Worrying what's going to happen in Egypt today. Still think that, without anybody for Mubarak to talk to, it's most likely to end in a really nasty way.

Some people have been suggesting phoning random Egyptian numbers with encouragement. There's something appealing about that, however much it smells of "let's you and him fight". I suspect I'd only do it if I had some longstanding connection with Egypt, but then I'm not a big fan of the phone in the first place

Other than that, I imagine the only useful thing to do is bug our own politicians. Ideally, asking them for something concrete -- like threatening specific responses if Mubarak starts seriously shooting people later today.

Anybody else have smarter ideas? Since I imagine any spare attention I have tomorrow will float towards Egypt anyway, I may as well try to do something semi-useful with it.

I know nothing about Egypt. Or Tunisia. Or Sudan. Or Lebanon. Or Albania. Or -- there's a lot of news happening at the moment, isn't there?

But here are some of the articles I've found about Egypt that get beyond "woo! riots!":

Al-ahram on the significance of the date:

Police Day [Jan 25] is meant to mark the day when the police forces took to the street in Ismailia to fight the British Occupation.
...
"The decision may be controversial but I think it was a good choice," says Essam El Erian, the media spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's largest opposition group. "Six decades ago the police did their patriotic duty and fought the British occupation, now we ask them to also fight against a corrupt government that has rigged the elections."

Marc Lynch on the Arabic media:

During the key period when the protests were picking up steam, Al Jazeera aired a documentary cultural program on a very nice seeming Egyptian novelist and musical groups, and then to sports. Now (10:30am EST) it is finally covering the protests in depth, but its early lack of coverage may hurt its credibility. I can't remember another case of Al Jazeera simply punting on a major story in a political space which it has owned.

Simon Tisdall on protest tactics -- how this is what happens when you don't go through the same ritual demonstrations:

Egyptians have been here before. The so-called Cairo spring of 2005 briefly lifted hopes of peaceful reform and open elections
....
But Tuesday's large-scale protests were different in significant ways, sending unsettling signals to a regime that has made complacency a way of life. "Day of Rage" demonstrators in Cairo did not merely stand and shout in small groups, as is usual. They did not remain in one place. They joined together – and they marched. And in some cases, the police could not, or would not, stop them.
....
an ad hoc coalition of students, unemployed youths, industrial workers, intellectuals, football fans and women, connected by social media such as Twitter and Facebook, instigated a series of fast-moving, rapidly shifting demos across half a dozen or more Egyptian cities. The police could not keep up – and predictably, resorted to violence.

And, since they seem to be mentioned almost nowhere else, Global voices lists the demonstrators' demands

• To raise the minimum wage limit to LE 1200 and to get an unemployment aid.


• To cancel the emergency status in the country , to dismiss Habib El-Adly and to release all detainees without court orders.


• Disbanding the current parliament , to have a new free election and to amend the constitution in order to have two presidential limits only.

Also, Anonymous are in the thick of it. Again. They've apparently turned LOIC on Egyptian government websites. This is after Tunisia, where they were about the first outside group to get involved. Meanwhile in Spain, having contributed to the December protests which prevented passage of an anti-download law, they're back at it as the government takes another shot at it.

It's like the gang of bored teenagers on the street corner has turned into a politicised mob.

Obligatory riot porn: Stopping a water cannon, Tiananmen-style. And something less violent

Afghanistan. Still a war there. And every time you look away for a while, the news gets a bit worse.

Here is a horrifying story of bombing an Afghan village into oblivion. Except the writer isn't horrified; in her eyes, this is a perfectly sensible military tactic. She's incomprehending when one of the villagers "in a fit of theatrics" accuses the commander of "ruining his life". Because blowing his home, and his neighbours' homes, and their farmland, is a trivial thing to get annoyed about.

There are outraged posts and further information popping up online.
One of the best responses is from Joshua Foust, writing at Central Asia blog Registan. As he points out, this isn't an individual outrage. It's a standard tactic, something that the soldiers involved now barely see as controversial:

I cannot comprehend why the deliberate destruction of villages seems to be an official, sanctioned ISAF policy in the South. Is is abhorrent, an atrocity, and there is no excuse for it (nor are there words for the anger it’s stirred in me, reading about it from afar; I suspect Broadwell would sniff at me to stop whining as well, were we to discuss it in person). This should outrage and infuriate everyone who reads about it. But, and this is where I move from rage to despair: how could we ever possibly hope to stop it?

The suffragettes were seriously into jujitsu.



It makes sense. They were neophile radicals with a legitimate reason to fight the law; who better to learn martial arts?

But it's also somewhat impressive, given the time-frame: they were really among the first in England to take up the practice. Asian martial arts had received some discussion there in the 19th century, but the first dojo didn't open until 1899*, and a decade later there were still only a half-dozen trainers.

One of them was Edith Garrud. That's her above, demonstrating how to take down a policeman.

Because this wasn't just about muggers and drunken husbands; the suffragettes needed self-defence against the police. So Garrud trained the 'Bodyguard Group' of 25 'Jujitsuffragettes'. Their main aim was protecting the movement's leaders from police violence and from arrest. Meanwhile Garrud's dojo also became a refuge for suffragettes.

Here's how it's described by a descendent of one of the group:

The 25 Bodyguard members were armed with Indian rubber clubs, hidden within their long skirts, & trained in jujitsu, a Japanese system of wrestling that works well against stronger opponents... Although they couldn't out-muscle the policemen, they could outwit them. On several occasions they staged exciting rescues. Twice a decoy maneuver led the detectives to carry off the wrong Mrs. Pankhurst. But the sad truth is that, more often than not, the women suffered dislocated joints, broken bones & concussions.

And here's how Punch saw it:


* This first teacher was E.W. Barton-Wright. Barton-Wright was an engineer who had spent 3 years in Japan (typical nerd-martial artist crossover!). On his return to London he started teaching what he called 'Bartitsu'. This mixed jujitsu with kick-boxing and stick-fighting -- the idea being that you should be able to fight off muggers with your umbrella and perhaps a well-thrown coat.

Bartitsu was quickly forgotten, but not before Conan Doyle had mentioned it as the skill which enabled Sherlock Holmes to overpower Moriarty, as they fought above the Reichenbach Falls. In the 80s, Holmes aficionados and martial arts historians figured out the connection, paving the way for a revival in the past decade. It's surely only a matter of time until the steampunk crowd discover it, and people start feeling nervous when they meet somebody in Edwardian dress down a dark alley.

More: Martial history magazine; "The Jujitsuffragettes"; Clarkes World; Suffragettes in an airship. And thanks to Dmytri for telling me about it all.

LJ memes, I discovered today, have a pen-and-paper forerunner from the 19th century. 'Confessions' were series of meme-like questions ('your favourite book?', 'your greatest regret?') -- often in book form, so you could inflict the questionnaire on multiple friends and collate the answers.

Sadly, the only online traces I can find are from when Famous People got involved. Marx's daughters liked them, so we have a set of answers from daddy, and another from an impressively bad-tempered Engels. Vanity Fair doggedly maintains one once answered by Proust, and Mark Twain* was typically caustic about a printed variation on the theme.

All those examples are fairly dull, to be honest. But there must be thousands more buried in obscure archives, and among them presumably some with interesting questions and/or answers. It'd be a nice small project for somebody to dig a few out, transcribe them, and reanimate them for the web. Think of it as the meme equivalent of Jurassic Park.

Also: 'asking friends a list of questions' is the kind of fad that must have been tried in lots of different contexts. What other forms did it take, in other times and places?

* Mark Twain:

Nothing could induce me to fill those blanks but the asseveration of my pastor that it will benefit my race by enabling young people to see what I am, and giving them an opportunity to become like somebody else. This overcomes my scruples. I hâve but little character, but what I hâve I am willing to part with for the public good.

[further teleological Victoriana: readthroughs, wargames]