A Novel in Three Links

This + this + this = an opportunity to change the way we communicate, and to change history as well.

The freedom that we experienced on the Internet of the ’90s is waning. Governments and commercial interests take ever-increasing steps to circumscribe people’s ability to communicate digitally. The only way to change this tide from ebb to flood is to fulfill a promise that was first made in the ’90s.

We need to disintermediate the network. It’s an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.

As long as the cables, wires and frequencies over which we communicate are susceptible to being controlled, curtailed or even disconnected when the things we say -or the way we say them- become upsetting, we will find ourselves increasingly confined.

As I said during an Internet policy session yesterday, if you ask anyone –anyone– whether there should be limits on Behaviour X on the Internet, the answer will always be a resounding Yes. That’s not a problem in and of itself, because X is usually anti-social and contrary to the public good. The problem is that anything capable of curtailing Behaviour X can be brought to bear on Behaviours A through W as well.

The only way out of this is to provide the technical means to do what we have always done in democratic societies: Keep our private discussions private and our public discussions free.

For the former we at last have all the ingredients we need:

  1. Gigabit wifi – We can finally start thinking about getting decent performance out of wireless data transmission, meaning that we can worry a little less about putting a lot of people onto a single wifi network;
  2. Wireless Mesh Networks – Enough with the telcos; we can now start looking at creating ad hoc, self-organising networks, relegating the role of the data carriers to one similar to power and water utilities;
  3. Secure Voice Communications – Security expert Moxie Marlinspike (yeah) and a crew of like-minded individuals have floated a very useful service recently, allowing secure VOIP and SMS communications between phones. By building encryption into the bones of the app, they’ve created software that looks and acts exactly like normal calling and texting. The only difference being that, if the other person is using their RedPhone service, the entire communication remains a secret shared only by the two of you.

The idea behind these things have been floating around for some time (the protocol underlying RedPhone has been with us since 2006), but now they’re all here in usable form.

I’ve said it before: The story of freedom of Internet freedom and online privacy will be the defining social conflict of our generation. As the peoples of the Middle East are discovering, the narrative of freedom is suspenseful, dramatic and exciting in the best and worst ways.

Whoever manages to blend these three technologies together seamlessly and easily enough for anyone to use them will assuredly be one of the main protagonists in this unfolding drama. They may not garner the celebrity of a Jobs or a Gates, but they will have the impact of a Gandhi or a King.

Infowar – A Case Study

[This weekend’s Opinion column in the Daily Post]

The recent decision by the Mubarak regime in Egypt to cut off all Internet access for its citizens is a textbook example of using a silver bullet to shoot oneself in the foot.

The whys and wherefores of how they’ve gone about doing so provide a useful opportunity to understand the paradox of control over the Internet and the costs involved when governments and other actors indulge their desire to dam the torrent of information that flows across their networks.

In order to do that, we need to dispel a rather pesky myth.

Perhaps the most dangerous misconception of the Internet is its survivability. It’s true that, as one information activist put it, the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. But that statement is predicated on the actual presence of an Internet in the first place.

That may sound like a silly statement, but the Internet might not be as enduring as many assume it to be.

While many of the software and communications protocols that define the Internet are, by design, remarkably resistant to outside control, the physical networks through which our data passes are not nearly so robust.

James Cowie, a network analyst from Renesys Corporation, has written excellent analyses of state intervention in national communications both during the post-election strife in Iran and more recently in Egypt. Using forensic evidence gathered in real time, he constructs a vivid scenario: In contrast to Iranian authorities, who elected to use physical choke-points in the communications infrastructure to reduce the flow of information to a trickle, Egyptian authorities appear to have instructed all national Internet Service Providers simply to cut all communications with the outside world.

Starting at midnight (Egyptian time) on the 27th of January 2011, Egypt’s largest ISPs began disappearing from the Internet. Within a period of about 13 minutes, they simply stopped delivering data to and from their customers.

Cowie writes:

“[T]his sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air. Not an automated system that takes all providers down at once; instead, the incumbent leads and other providers follow meekly one by one until Egypt is silenced.”

How did this happen? Every large ISP participates in a cooperative system called the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. BGP allows them to discover how traffic destined to a remote network should be directed. Simply put, each ISP announces which address blocks it supports. These blocks can represent tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual machine addresses.

Designed for simpler times, BGP is a trust-based protocol. It relies implicitly of the good faith of all participants to continue working. This makes it remarkably vulnerable to the machinations of states or organisations whose interests don’t align with others’. Back in 2008, Pakistan Telecom caused a furore when, for a little over 2 hours, their bungled attempt to use BGP to block YouTube domestically resulted in the site disappearing from much of the Internet.

Just last year, a change to BGP traffic announcements resulted in about 15% of all Internet traffic being routed through networks in China for a brief period. This resulted in breathless speculation that the disruption was not accidental. Some claimed that it amounted to a reconnaissance in force, as it were, a probing of the global Internet to determine its resilience in the face of attack.

Intentional or not, these disruptions to the BGP apparatus make it abundantly clear that choke points exist on the Internet and that they are remarkably easy to subvert.

Debate continues to rage in technical circles about what can be done to mitigate BGP’s innate deficiencies. Changes will doubtless be necessary. But the liability wouldn’t be so grave if our physical communications networks weren’t so hopelessly centralised.

Egypt offers us a particularly vivid example of this. A country of over 80 million people, it has only a half a dozen or so large Internet providers. Only one of them, the Noor Group, initially resisted the demand to drop services. Some have speculated that its continued online presence was due to its extensive list of blue chip clients, including many banks and the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

Ultimately, though, it was a limited victory. Noor advertised only 83 of the roughly 3500 data routes in and out of Egypt. They were eventually forced off the air a week after their IT confrères.

In Iran, population 72 million, there are only 5 significant international links, all of which flow through a single Government-run office. Such centralisation makes it easy for the state to exert its influence.

(One European-owned company, Vodaphone, washed its hands of the decision to cut service to its Egyptian customers, claiming that the Mubarak regime had the legal right to issue the order. This rhetorical line apes the rationale provided by Nokia-Siemens when it was discovered that their equipment enabled Iranian authorities to block most traffic and eavesdrop on the rest.)

The Internet as a principle –that is, the idea of an open network allowing free communication regardless of source or sender– is not as popular as some might believe. It made its way into the commercial world more by stealth than by deliberation. Telcos didn’t really understand the Internet as a service; they just knew they had to offer it in order to compete.

One thing was clear to them: The sum of all services across a global network was clearly more valuable than those offered by a single provider. Equally attractive was the perception that these services came more or less for free with the connection.

But the seductive power of the Net hasn’t changed attitudes entirely.

Telecommunications companies, with a long legacy of market-controlling behaviour, still build and deploy their infrastructure using centralised models. Recently, some of them have begun lobbying for the right to exert control over the data that passes over their networks, potentially penalising services that compete with their own. Comcast, one of the largest ISPs in the US, recently got approval to acquire NBC Universal and its content-creation ecosystem, giving rise to fears that they might leverage their control over the information pipeline to dictate what passes through it.

Put simply, carriers would love nothing better than to go back to the telephone service model, where fees are based on where you are and who you talk to, with no conversation possible unless you’ve paid your toll.

The principle of an end-to-end network –that is, one that allows direct, unmediated connections between two parties– militates strongly in the opposite direction. Its appeal is remarkably seductive, leading most Internet users to view with displeasure the telcos’ (or governments’) desire to mediate communications.

Renesys quite rightly remarks that if cuts to Egypt’s Internet had lasted much longer, the reduction in commercial activity could have been catastrophic for the nation.

Furthermore, Cowie remarks, it wasn’t only Egypt’s pipelines that were at risk:

“[T]he majority of Internet connectivity between Europe and Asia actually passes through Egypt. The Gulf States, in particular, depend critically on the Egyptian fiber-optic corridor for their connectivity to world markets.

“Are the folks at Davos thinking about this? They should be.”

In a perfect world, consumer choice and basic business commonsense would always win. But the problem is that centralised networks not only cost a lot of money (placing their design and construction into the hands of the most powerful), they make a lot of money, too.

In monetary and political terms, the wealth of the network itself tends to pool rather than to flow.

A fundamental change has already overtaken the public’s perception about the value and nature of digital communications. Passive consumption of news through the television is considered passé, or at least diminished in relation to the sharing of photos, videos and words across the Internet.

As individual control over the flow of information rises, central control wanes. And this, obviously, is the crux of the dilemma facing businesses and governments across North Africa and throughout the world. They are belatedly coming to realise that they are fighting a many-headed hydra. As they cut off one avenue of communication, another rears its head.

But that hydra has a body, and the body is the network itself.

As this column goes to press, it appears that Egypt’s decision to cut off the Internet failed in every important regard. One protester is reported to have said, “F*** the internet! I have not seen it since Thursday and I am not missing it.… Go tell Mubarak that the people’s revolution does not need his damn internet!

I would be amazed, however, if this fact led other governments to act differently, should they find themselves in a similar situation. Indeed, the US Congress is currently considering legislation that would provide the President with an ‘Internet Kill Switch’ for use in case of emergency.

Likewise, I see no evidence that the ultimate futility of attempting to control the flow of information will change attitudes in the board rooms and offices where our increasingly centralised networks are planned. For telcos, the challenge is merely technical.

For the Internet –as it was originally intended– to become fully realised and fully resistant to coercion, the devices and infrastructure through which our data travels will need to reflect the same principle of decentralisation as the software and protocols we use today. That implies the construction of communications devices that are very different from the locked-in, network-centric phones, tablets and computers we’re familiar with. I can think of no short-term scenario in which the development of such products will take place in any significant way.

For some time to come, we will continue to live in a world in which the powerful continue to load silver bullets and take aim squarely at their own feet.

No Silver Bullet

[Originally written for the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

The recent prisoner escape has –quite understandably– raised emotions among Port Vila residents. Our collective inability to end this chronic threat has led many to call for drastic action in order to resolve the problem once and for all.

If only it were that easy.

Much has been said on the topic, most of it in the heat of the moment. As difficult as it may be when we feel our loved ones are threatened, we need to step back from our emotions so we can properly evaluate the situation.

Let’s consider some of the pronouncements that have been made in the media over the last week or so:

1) Prison escapes are getting worse, not better. Correctional Services is a failure.

Unproven. The frequency of prison escapes has dropped in direct relation to the Government’s commitment of funds and resources to Correctional Services. There’s every reason to believe that escapes will decrease even further once a proper correctional centre is built.

2) Escapes diminished drastically after the VMF were tasked with rounding up prisoners.

Patently false. The largest escape in the history of Port Vila’s history was motivated in part because of the role the VMF played in prisoners’ regular and brutal mistreatment. Joshua Bong was unable to stop a mass escape even when told by the prisoners themselves when the breakout going to happen.

The escapes stopped (until now) only after a thorough-going revamp of procedures accompanied by the construction of a more secure and more humane facility.

3) None of this would have happened if we hadn’t let foreign influences dictate to us.

This is Vanuatu’s problem. Placing the blame on others’ shoulders is intellectually lazy and un-productive.

Prison reform was not foisted upon us. This path was freely chosen by the Government. Not to put too fine a point on it, if both parties were as committed to the process as New Zealand is, it might have been implemented –properly– 5 years ago.

We need to recognise that New Zealand agreed to partner with the Government in reaction to the prisons’ sieve-like security post-1980. We also need to ask ourselves why a programme that is effective in New Zealand consistently fails in Vanuatu.

If reports are correct, the direct cause of the prisoners’ escape was the fact that they were left unsupervised for at least 30 minutes because a guard wanted a cup of tea.

While kastom-based village justice programmes have proven useful in rehabilitating many offenders, a minority of our prisoners are dangerous and probably beyond rehabilitation. I challenge anyone to come up with a more measured and pragmatic plan for them than that which has been proposed.

4) Prison guards should have firearms.

This suggestion flies in the face of prison doctrine world-wide. Guards who interact directly with the prison population are deliberately not given firearms because those weapons can be captured and  turned against them, making the escapee(s) even more dangerous.

Ask yourself: How would you feel if you heard these same prisoners were loose in Port Vila and armed with pistols or assault rifles?

Reports have suggested that the guards allowed themselves to be intimidated by the mere threat of stoning. Clearly, steps need to be taken to ensure they don’t lose control of their charges so easily. But giving guards guns makes things worse, not better.

5) Escaped prisoners’ human rights should be ignored.

Let’s be honest: This is really just a polite way of saying that prisoners should be shot, or at least beaten at will.

Without going into the why’s and wherefor’s of this debate, let’s at least be clear about one thing: If the police or VMF are going to be given the power to summarily punish or even execute certain individuals, then they need some clear rules established concerning when, why and how this happens.

Nobody is going to argue that Kasimir’s rights outweigh those of our sons and daughters. But if we’re going to authorise his trackers to shoot him on sight, what’s keeping your son or daughter out of the crossfire?

When the bullets start flying, they don’t distinguish between Good Guys and Bad.

Moreover, does this death penalty (let’s call it what it is) apply to all escapees? Consider the real case of a young Tannese man straight from the island, jailed for theft. He speaks no Bislama or English and doesn’t fully understand why he’s been incarcerated. Were he to escape, unaware of the consequences, should we shoot him too?

If society is intent on putting aside people’s human rights under certain circumstances, then for its own sake it had damn well better be clear about what those circumstances are, lest the innocent suffer with the guilty.

Equally important, the responsibility for who gets to live and who dies is too great to be trusted to a few individuals, both for their sake and for ours. We as a society must own that choice.

Until the Law says otherwise, killing or beating prisoners after their apprehension is a crime.

6) Prisoners don’t deserve respect or kindness.

Anyone who’s heard the details of the crimes committed by some of these men would be hard-pressed to show even the slightest flicker of compassion. My honest reaction to the news that one of them had kidnapped a young woman from my neighbourhood, torturing and raping her for four days was… well, suffice it to say that I don’t know if he’d survive 5 minutes alone with me.

But before we indulge that desire to return an eye for an eye, we need to remember two things:

  1. Some prisoners truly are psychopaths and a danger to society. But they are the minority. Treating all of them that way becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kick the sweetest-natured dog often enough and eventually he will bite back.
  2. The unbearable, inhuman conditions described by the prisoners themselves led even remand prisoners to escape. Poor prison conditions only made them more desperate, more willing to go to any lengths to escape.

Treating prisoners humanely is a pragmatic concern, not a moral one. Simply put, a prisoner who is treated with a modicum of decency has less reason to run away.

I have no silver-bullet solutions to offer here. That’s because they don’t exist. We’re deceiving ourselves if we pretend they do.

It’s not my place to prescribe the choices Vanuatu society makes about its own offenders. All I’m suggesting is that, when we consider our options, we think them all the way through.

Dealing with its transgressors is one of human society’s defining challenges. It’s a thicket of thorns that has entangled us throughout history, one from which we can never completely emerge.

Human, All Too Human

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

A man paddles his canoe into Lolowei's harbour, sheltered by standing rocks on one side and this massive cliff on the other. A shocking story is emerging from the Northern Vanuatu island of Maewo. Last week, two brothers, fugitives from Kaiovo village, appeared at Lolowei Hospital on neighbouring Ambae island. One was treated for injuries. Witnesses said he claimed he had been stoned following a village meeting. The other walked onward to Tumsisiro, an Anglican mission, and requested sanctuary.

Before long, a caller from Maewo ascertained the brothers’ presence in Ambae, and a motor boat was dispatched. Reports estimate that up to a dozen men armed with axes and bush knives arrived at Lolowei. They proceeded to the outpatient clinic and promptly murdered the first brother. Stunned onlookers watched as they struck him dead, then dragged his corpse down to the shore, mocking and abusing it as they went. The second brother met the same fate soon afterward.

Within hours of the events, the story began to spread that accusations of sorcery and murder were the cause of this tragic episode. As with most such events, speculation is rampant and details are difficult to corroborate. One distraught Ambaean related a tale that seems to align well with others:

She told of a meeting held in Kaiovo to deal once and for all with the death of two local school employees, widely suspected to have been poisoned. At its climax, a local church elder announced that God had given him the names of the perpetrators. He had no sooner identified the two brothers and an elderly male accomplice than the local chief instructed the villagers to kill them.

Before the brothers could react, she said, one of the villagers picked up a large volcanic cooking stone and launched it at one of them. He missed, and the two began to scramble to their feet. Another stone quickly followed, striking one of the brothers and injuring him. They nonetheless managed to escape, leaving the older man to be beaten severely by the villagers.

Reports indicate that they obtained a canoe and paddled across several kilometers of open ocean to Lolowei’s tiny cove. It was there that their pursuers caught them up and murdered them.

Poison, witchcraft, religious visions and mob justice. One could easily dismiss these events as the actions of a backward, primitive people, benighted in superstition.

We should be careful not to mock too loudly, lest we mock ourselves.

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Global Village or Digital Island?

A mother shows her daughter how to textElectronic media have been with us for a couple of lifetimes now, and many of the lessons that once seemed revolutionary, even world-changing, have been reduced to mundane platitudes. Here in Vanuatu, however, we would do well to relearn them. A new report from the Pacific Institute of Public Policy gives us that opportunity.

Marshall McLuhan’s rise to prominence as a cultural icon parallels that of television. Today, just like television, he is as widely lionised as he is misunderstood. Like credulous children, we toss around the terms he minted without a moment’s reflection. ‘The media’ has become a shibboleth for corporate commentary on the events of the day, filtered arbitrarily through a lens that sees no further than the next ratings cycle.

McLuhan saw this trend and feared it. Contrary to popular belief, his famous image of a global village was a pessimistic, almost despairing vision. A flickering television screen replaced the campfire at the centre of the human experience, but those huddled around it, seeking meaning in its seductive gaze, were as brutish and unreflective as he imagined early man to be.

It’s a shame he wasn’t around to see the how the rise of personal communications has subverted this dark vision. A new PiPP report, “Social and economic impact of introducing telecommunications throughout Vanuatu”, demonstrates unambiguously that access to personal communications has the power to change lives.

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Noteworthy, Not Newsworthy

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Faces of VanuatuA friend of mine recently completed a photography project documenting the people of Dhaka, Bangladesh. These 265 mostly candid portraits capture what I like to call the miracle of the mundane. Without editorialising, they create a compelling polemic for the inherent dignity of every human being.

They’re noteworthy precisely because they’re not newsworthy.

If you were to ask me what animates me, what makes me take on the labours of love that fill my time to brimming, I would likely point to something like this. I’ve often been accused of being an idealist, but that’s only partly true. The ideals that I aspire to are simple:

We should have the right to a peaceful, respectful existence, with all the rights and responsibilities that this entails.

We should be able to choose which dramas and adventures we become involved in. Those we can’t choose should never grow so large that we lose all choice whatsoever.

One of the most alluring and endearing aspects of life in Vanuatu is our collective ability to drift along with few cares and few (sometimes too few!) responsibilities. The machinery of government grinds and chugs on by like a smoking bus with three cylinders firing, but aside from a bit of smoke and noise, leaves us largely unscathed.

Recent events, especially last Thursday’s tsunami warning, serve as a reminder just how fortunate we are. Within an hour of the alert being issued, news agencies the world over were contacting the Daily Post. Intent on the next human tragedy, they wanted to know: How much damage? How many dead?

The answer, happily, was that only one young girl was hurt when she ran in front of a moving truck.

Had a similar area in virtually anywhere else in the world been struck as we were by 3 earthquakes in quick succession, each in excess of 7.0, thousands, even millions might have suffered.

The simplicity of our existence – our lack of development – has in many ways saved us from the worst. If we didn’t have so little, we might have more to lose.

Life goes on today as it did the day before. We worry about where the next bag of rice is going to come from. We ruin our sandals in the mud. We bicker and fuss our way through petty jealousies. And we laugh at every opportunity.

In a place where the worst example of anarchy we can find is a dozen children playing on the beach, where the sum of our fears extend no more than a few miles from home, where even a hurricane is more frightening than deadly, we should really consider ourselves blessed.

But that should never make us complacent. For all its manifold blessings, Vanuatu society is still fraught with imperfection. Violence may not be institutionalised, but it is systemic. Too many women and children, safe from the predations of the state, are nonetheless victims in their own homes. Family, stronger here than in most other societies, is increasingly strained by distance and economic forces.

The difference between Vanuatu and its more turbulent Melanesian neighbours is as much one of luck as anything else. We all have corruption, venality, social and economic tensions and occasional violence. But for some reason, Vanuatu always pulls back from the brink.

How is this? What exactly is it that has allowed us to avoid the worst excesses of violence, economic and social dispossession? I honestly don’t know. If I were forced to answer, I’d likely wave my hands vaguely and mutter something about how people just don’t like things getting out of hand.

During the incipient insurrection some years ago between Police and Mobile forces, a besieged Police commander delivered an impassioned speech to the throng assembled behind the VMF picket. What began as an angry peroration culminated in a series of (ultimately tearful) apologies to everyone concerned for having caused such a ruckus. By observing the rhetorical standards of public oratory, the rebel leader defused his own obduracy.

We are a decent society, therefore, because we are used to acting like decent people.

Conclusions like this are dangerous. Too often, they lead only to self-satisfied complacency. As one chief explained it to me, it’s as if we are given the gift of a lovely garden with bountiful fruit trees. With such abundance, it becomes difficult to see the sweat and the toil that went into clearing the ground, the care and attention that allowed the tiny seed to become an adult tree.

It’s far too easy as well to assume that the tree will continue to bear fruit forever.

Thursday’s tsunami warning was a false alarm. But there is another tsunami approaching whose effects will be more widespread and, if we don’t prepare for them, more devastating than anything the ocean could do.

As development continues its inexorable spread through Vanuatu society, we must ensure that our politicians and policy makers never lose sight of individual faces of the people on whose behalf they were chosen to work.

They aren’t newsworthy, but they are noteworthy. They are us.

Communications as Survival

‘Storian hemi laef blong yumi’ – Telecom Vanuatu’s new slogan could not be more true.

In times of crisis, communication and coordination enable us to survive and to recover quickly.

When an earthquake occured between Samoa and Tonga early in the morning of September 29th, it created a tsunami that struck the inhabitants on the eastern and southeastern parts of the island within minutes. Sirens sounded and church bells rang all over side of the island, sending people fleeing to higher ground.

The latest reports from Samoa indicate that in addition to at least 149 dead, 640 families comprising roughly 3200 people have lost their homes and possessions. Most have yet to to return to their villages, and are without proper access to power, water and other basic amenities.

Food, water, clothing and shelter are all critical elements of the relief effort.

Equally important is the ability to communicate.

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The Coming Change

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Independent newspaper.]

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”Leo Tolstoy

On Wednesday this week at a quiet ceremony in Chantilly’s Resort, Minister Rialuth Serge Vohor presented six organisations with telecommunications operator licenses. His action marked the beginning of a new chapter in Vanuatu’s integration into the wider technological world.

The Minister’s speech touched on many aspects of the technical and social challenge ahead of us, but its illuminating principle was his lifelong conviction that Vanuatu should control its own destiny. Acknowledging and applauding the invaluable assistance provided by numerous donor and commercial partners from overseas, he nonetheless displayed great satisfaction at seeing local operations moving into the spotlight.

There was an air of quiet excitement in the room as, after patient months of waiting, representatives from the six groups, along with Digicel Vanuatu CEO Tanya Menzies, strode to the front of the room to accept the newly signed documents.

At the risk of sounding like a giddy shoolchild, I wonder if everyone realises just how fundamentally this moment is going to affect our generation and the next.

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The Black Widow

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

I heard a fascinating tale the other day. A woman of my acquaintance, happily married with children, had apparently been married twice already. Each time, the husband had become abusive and, each time, had died suddenly, without explanation. Word was that she was adept at ‘posen’ – subtle potions that kill suddenly, hours or even days after their ingestion.

Whatever his motivation, her current husband was the model of good behaviour; he never ‘passed behind’ (the Bislama term for adultery) and looked after the children as if they were his own.

Doubtless polished and embellished in the telling, the story remains, at its core, perfectly credible. Spousal abuse is rampant in Vanuatu society, and the police, courts and kastom do almost nothing to protect women. It’s not at all beyond imagining that a woman might take matters into her own hands and act to stop her own suffering using whatever means necessary.

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Begging the Question

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

I’m a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to language. It’s partly because I value clear expression, partly because it’s just my nature. One of my pet peeves is the habit shown by some to co-opt certain words and phrases in order to make themselves sound smart or virtuous.

One of the most common sins is the misuse of the phrase ‘begging the question’. Begging the question is what’s known as a logical fallacy – it’s something that sounds reasonable, but uses false logic to achieve its argument. Where begging the question is concerned, the logical flaw is in the assumption behind the question. The stock example of this tactic is of a courtroom lawyer who asks the defendant, “When did you stop beating your wife?

Now, you can see the problem here. There’s an unspoken assumption behind the question, one that we in Vanuatu know to be false: Quite obviously the defendant has never actually stopped beating his wife. The illogic is made even clearer by the laughable assumption that an abusive husband might somehow end up in court.

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