Lame ducks & hidden agendas
August 25th, 2010
I wish my vacations could have ended better. Don’t get me wrong, we spent a wonderful time for two weeks and are safely back home (and at the office). It’s the recent news that are really disappointing to me on so many levels.
- The Hungarian President ruling over France -I guess it is now a correct qualification of Nicolas Sarkozy based on the distinctions between French citizens he would like to make- has managed to stir quite a bit of outrage these days. The problem is that the case is a bit more complex than what it seems. For several years now, taking the metro in Paris or walking on frequented streets, you couldn’t have missed the presence of Roma begging or playing music. Earlier this summer though, an incident between cops and a few Gypsies (not to be mixed with Roma, as they have been French centuries ago) prompted our beloved Hungarian President to demand laws that could lead a fresh French citizen to have his/her nationality withdrawn. The absurdity and dangerousness of such measures set aside, the whole move was, according to some presidential majority representatives, an electoral maneuver designed to lure extreme-right voters back to the President’s camp. I predict this strategy is doomed to fail, as 30 years of recent French political History have shown. On top of that, the methods of the French police to arrest the Roma and shove them in an airplane are not just outrightly scandalous, they are also useless: not only are Roma European citizens, they’re also migrant, poor, and many of them are locked inside mafious organizations that will put them back on the same streets they just left. But no attempt to fight this sort of crime ever emerged from the brain of our genius -and Hungarian (& partly Greek)- President. In fact, many people were wondering why the police was not doing anything to stop some of these Roma and take them away from the streets. When metros and public spaces are filled with CCCTVs you have to wonder what was going on… and in fact, their sudden arrest and expulsion of 100 people was a sheer act of disingenuity from a government that acted as if it had just discovered the issue one week before. That’s what I call a lie, as these Roma were literally kept on the back burner in case their public arrest might serve for political purposes. How convenient.
- How convenient here again: Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, gets charged with rape accusations, arrested by police and … the police withdraws the charge. “Strong social pressure” is the way a lobbyist once described these sorts of interesting events to me. If you thought the CIA could do something more effective than that, think again: they could not even predict 9/11.
- On a different level, but very much disingenuous: Oracle sues Google over alleged patent infringements on Java. This does not just highlight the absurdity of software patents once again, it shows an incredible lack of understanding on how ecosystems and FOSS work. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m confident that Google has money to pay its lawyers, and so does Oracle, but why wasting so much money? Time to land back on earth, Iron Man…
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Created by Philip Norton