Memes

Via the Wu Ming Foundation, here's A Book Bloc’s Genealogy, detailing the spread of Italian students' use of oversized book covers at protests against cuts to education funding. You never like to see police brutality, but there is something mordantly amusing about the idea of some rozzer beating up a copy of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.

Wake the @$!%# Up

Via Weird Universe, a list of fourteen annoying strange alarm clocks.

This one will make you get up in the morning, whether you like it or not. The Sfera mounts to the ceiling above your bed, when it goes off in the morning you simply reach up and touch it to go off. Here's the sneaky part, it then retracts towards the ceiling and goes off again, getting a little higher each time. It will keep doing this until you finally find yourself standing on the bed trying to turn it off.

Mmh hmmh.

Not listed is the carpet covered version of the one that rolls away and hides under your bed (the carpet making it harder to find by touch), or the one that reads your brainwaves in order to wake you at the point of your lightest sleep.

George Orwell advised leaving this Marcus Aurelius quote prominently displayed in your bedroom:

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present- I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm? - But this is more pleasant.- Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?

If that doesn't help, he went on, try hiding your alarm clock behind something heavy, like your wardrobe.

Fahrenheit 451

A blindingly obvious resonance I'm unlikely to be the first person to have spotted:

As it was announced ... at a "fathers' night" meeting on the Rumson High School PTA, the event was to involve a two-day drive to collect comic books "portraying murderers and criminals"... A group of forty Cubs would tour the borough in a fire truck, "with siren screaming, and collect objectional books at homes along the way." Then the mayor would lead the boys in a procession ... to Rumson's Victory Park, where [he] would present awards to the scouts and lead them in burning the comic books. The Cub who had gathered the most comics would have the honour of applying the torch to the books. When the national office of the Cub Scouts of America declined to support the bonfire, ... the Rumson event was revised to conclude with the scouts donating the comics to the Salvation Army for scraps.

From The Ten Cent Plague by David Hadju, citing various news stories from January 1949. Bradbury's famous book, in a shorter version then titled "The Firemen", was first published in Galaxy in 1951.

(A coda from two pages later in Mr Hadju's book, in reference to another youth-led comics-burning protest:

As the students collected comics for the bonfire, some of the boys kept them categorised by genre... Crime comics went in one box, superhero titles in another, and jungle books, with their covers of heroines swinging from vines in leopard skin bikinis, went in a pile that several of the young crusaders hid under a step in the boys' lavatory.)

Claus? Is that German?

So, what did the Lapp Sasquatch bring you this year? Apart from some super-old links, that is.

Cause

Of course, the thing that amuses me most about the Americans' regularly scheduled fracas over whether slavery was the cause or not of the Civil War is the impressive determination demonstrated by all sides to avoid contemplation of the possibility it had anything to do with the War of Independence.

Reconstruction

Four days after South Carolina seceded on Dec. 20, 1860, the state adopted a second document titled “Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” Loewen considers the record, central to his new collection, one of the five most important documents in the history of the country, launching as it did a seminal chapter in America’s ongoing struggle to define itself.

“So why does nobody ever read it?” he asked. “Everybody knew [secession was] about slavery. This document is all about slavery.”

In it, South Carolina laments the election of a new president “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” State leaders indeed sound incensed about “states’ rights,” but not in the way most people think today.

“They are against states’ rights,” Loewen said. “And they name the states and they name the rights that really upset them.”

Specifically, South Carolina spells out grievances with 13 Northern states that had passed local laws that “render useless” the federal Fugitive Slave Act. South Carolina is miffed at New York for denying slaveholders the right to transport slaves through its territory, and at Ohio and Iowa for refusing to surrender escaped slaves charged with crimes in Virginia. It’s angry at several Northern states for giving freed blacks citizenship and even the right to vote (a decision that was then the responsibility of the states, not the federal government). These northern laws were essentially an attempt to hold federal slave policy at bay — using states’ rights.

James Loewen interviewed, among others, by Emily Badger, on the reasons for Southern secession and the attempts to rewrite history in the Reconstruction period and after.

In the post-Reconstruction era of national “reunion,” Yale historian David Blight says the country came back together around the idea of the common valor of soldiers on both sides of the war, around a common economy and around the imperial adventures of America as it began to grow into a world power.

“But primarily — and this is complex — but primarily the country reunified ultimately by the 1890s and the turn of the 20th century around white supremacy,” Blight said, “around the Jim Crow system, which took deep hold in the South but also in the North.”

Some historians call this era the most racist in American history — even more so than the age of slavery. This racism, and the new narrative of an unfortunate war between brothers, took hold in popular fiction, in presidential speeches, in monument building. The story of the emancipation of 4 million slaves — and of the 200,000 blacks who fought for the Union army — “all but vanished from the national story by 1900, 1910,” Blight says. For several decades to come, most children would not even read much about it in their textbooks.

The ſ-Word

LibraryThing detects an unfeasibly large amount of sailor talk in the 18th century.

Moderation

When South Carolinians decided unanimously in their secession convention to leave the Union, the Charleston Mercury declared: "The tea has been thrown overboard. The revolution of 1860 has been initiated." One of the delegates admitted that the convention worked "to pull down our government and erect another." In Louisiana, a broadside declared: "We can never submit to Lincoln’s inauguration; the shades of Revolutionary sires will rise up to shame us if we shall do that." Many Southerners saw themselves as carrying the banner of their ancestors who had fought a revolutionary war against a tyrannical king; by rebelling against the United States, secessionists believed they were engaged in a revolution to restore the principles of 1776. When Texas left the Union on Feb. 1, 1861, the secessionists there proudly announced that "for less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England."

But talk of revolution was dangerous. Alexander Stephens, who would become the Confederacy’s only vice president, warned that "revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them, seldom end them." ... By the time the Confederate government was formed in Montgomery, Ala., in February 1861, many Southerners - like Jefferson Davis, the new Confederate president - jettisoned the extremist rhetoric and espoused moderation, denying at the same time that secession constituted revolution. "Ours is not a revolution," Davis maintained. "We are not engaged in a quixotic fight for the rights of man; our struggle is for inherited rights." He claimed, in fact, that the Southern states had seceded "to save ourselves from a revolution."

...

... Confederates cringed at the persistent description of their revolution as a revolution ... and turned instead to defending their actions by arguing that secession was, in fact, legal and not revolutionary at all. Harking back to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, written by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in response to the Federalist Party’s enactment of the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts, Southerners advanced the idea that the Union under the Constitution consisted of simply a compact among the states and that any state, by means of its retained sovereignty, could divorce itself from the Union if it ever desired to do so.

Glenn W. LaFantasie on 19th century insurgency in Salon.

Guidance

For the next three years, Americans ostensibly boycotted the tea of the East India Company, Britain’s licensed monopoly provider, though in practice they drank what they liked. Indeed, for consumers, anger over the tea tax had never made much economic sense. For one thing, many drank Dutch-supplied tea, which was smuggled and therefore tax-free... Meanwhile, the tax on legal tea was largely offset by a tea-tax refund passed the same year. But in 1772 that tax refund shrank, making British tea more expensive and enhancing smugglers’ price advantage. Tea piled up in the British warehouses of the East India Company, which owed money to the British government and also needed to ask it for a loan. Someone had an idea: why not raise cash by dumping the company’s surplus tea on the American market? Parliament agreed to help by restoring the old refund in full and by allowing the company to export tea directly rather than through merchant middlemen. With the new measures, the price of legal tea was expected to halve. Consumers would save, Parliament needn’t lose quite so much on its bailout of the East India Company, and smugglers would be driven out of business.

Boston’s big businessmen felt threatened. Not only might smuggling cease to be profitable but, if the experiment of direct importation were to succeed, it might cut them out of the supply chains for other commodities as well. Clearly, it was time for Sam Adams and William Molineux to rile up the public again. At the start of November, 1773, a public letter summoned merchants expecting tea consignments from the East India Company to the Liberty Tree. When they failed to appear, Molineux led five hundred people to the store where the merchants were huddled, and its doors were torn from their hinges. A second letter warned the consignees not to take it for granted that the colonists would remain "irreconcilable to the idea of spilling human blood." Amid the populist fervor, only a few noticed that the working-class Bostonian stood to gain little from the protest...

...

George Washington disapproved of the Tea Party, and Benjamin Franklin called it "an Act of violent Injustice on our part." But the Revolution was not yet in the hands of the Founders, although it had left those of the merchants, who now dodged and stalled as the people - passionate and heedless of economic niceties - called for a ban on all tea, even what was smuggled from the Dutch...

Britain overreacted, closing the port of Boston, restricting town meetings in Massachusetts, and giving the King the power to appoint the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature. British troops arrived in Boston in May... A few merchants still hoped that Boston might pay for the tea and reconcile with Britain, but they were too intimidated by the outbursts of popular anger to give voice to their proposal at a Boston town meeting.

Sympathy for Massachusetts broke out in other colonies, and radicalized colonists across the region threw off the guidance of the merchant class. "These sheep, simple as they are, cannot be gulled as heretofore," the wealthy New York City lawyer Gouverneur Morris wrote to a friend. "The mob begin to think and to reason."

Caleb Crain on 18th century insurgency in The New Yorker.

Text

'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan' prompted Doubleday in 1970 to pulp its first American edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ronald Reagan's presidency remained a complete mystery to most Europeans, though I noticed that Americans took him far more easily in their stride. But the amiable old duffer who occupied the White House was a very different person from the often sinister figure I described in 1967, when the ... piece was first published. The then-novelty of a Hollywood film star entering politics and becoming governor of California gave Reagan considerable airtime on British TV. Watching his right-wing speeches in which he castigated in sneering tones the profligate, welfare-spending, bureaucrat-infested state government, I saw a more crude and ambitious figure, far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 movie The Killers, his last Hollywood role...

[Preparing for an obscenity trial against a bookshop owner, a] defence lawyer asked me why I believed 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan' was not obscene, to which I had to reply that of course it was obscene, and intended to be so. Why, then, was its subject matter not Reagan's sexuality? Again I had to affirm that it was. At last the lawyer said: 'Mr Ballard, you will make a very good witness for the prosecution. We will not be calling you.'

...

At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of my Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was distributed to delegates. I'm told it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological paper on the candidate's subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think-tank.

From J. G. Ballard's note to chapter 14 of The Atrocity Exhibition, in the expanded and annotated edition, Harper Perennial, 2006.

Reading

I can't believe I missed this tidbit from WIIIAI's round-up of 100 year old news on Monday:

Some people are complaining about the language spoken in moving pictures. Lip-reading deaf people. Evidently the actors in silent films cursed. A lot. A teacher of the deaf and dumb explains that "these shows are the chief source of amusement for the deaf, and they are prevented from enjoying them because they are able to understand what is being said by the characters on the screens." Tell me about it!

Wetter As It Dries

Tea towels get their name because, back in the day, they were delicate linen cloths that the lady of the house would use only to dry her fine bone china tea service.

In The Kitchen Linens Book, Ellyn-Anne Geisel writes that linen is the best fabric for tea towels (or "dish towels", as Americans call them), because it can absorb 20% of its weight in water and doesn’t leave lint on dishes.

Historically, women made their own tea towels - often embroidering them, or buying cheerful iron-on transfers, the first of which were marketed as early as 1879. Now tea towels are more commonly made from cotton, or a blend of cotton, linen and viscose - a man-made fibre manufactured from wood pulp, which speeds water evaporation.

Crikey! provides a little historical background to the Palace's decision that no folk-art will besmirch the nuptials of William and Kate.

History

"[T]he Suharto regime is the best of possible alternatives, and we will do nothing to destabilize it."

"[W]e have counseled moderation, but have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to employ it to restore order."

"The bombing must continue and must intensify until the Yugoslav leadership realizes they have to change their positions."

- the late Richard Holbrooke, peacemaker.

White Alsatians in the Snow

These would be Neil Gaiman's sheps. Aren't they delightful?

Courtesy

Antony Loewenstein on the courtier nature of journalists:

Such obedience doesn’t come naturally; it takes years of practice. Annual events such as the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue - a secret gathering of politicians, journalists and opinion-makers - consolidate the unhealthy, uncritical relationship between Australia and America. Many corporate journalists have attended, including the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher and former Labor MP and ABC reporter Maxine McKew. It aims to consolidate American hegemony rather than challenging it.

It’s largely a one-way street. Australians display loyalty to an agenda and the Americans are allegedly thankful. As US participant Steve Clemons wrote in 2007:

Phil Scanlan, founder of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, is proud of the fact that in 15 years, no-one has leaked any of the internal conversations of the conference. I won't either... unless I get permission from one of the speakers or commentators to do so which is allowed by the rules.

A Few Wik Links

(Sorry about that.)

Welcome to the Internet Wars - Bernard Keane on Payback.

Foreign Policy has a dedicated Wikileaks blog.

Via which: CJR's article about Australian press coverage, possibly only notable for its extraordinary banality (the article, not... well, both, really).

Trivia

This was a comment left at Larvatus Prodeo but it's so freakin' long I might as well post it here as well. (I also backdated it to Thursday. Hah!) Note how wonderfully my command of English prose is enhanced by typing in the small hours.

The late Chalmers Johnson put together a sort of hypothetical National Intelligence Estimate for Harper's a few years ago. In one of the footnotes he wrote:

National Intelligence Estimates seldom contain startling new data. To me they always read like magazine articles or well-researched and footnoted graduate seminar papers. When my wife once asked me what was so secret about them, I answered that perhaps it was the fact that this was the best we could do.

We see something similar in those cables from the ambassadors to State, which are the ones the press seem obsessed with. The apparent expectation is these will be interesting or revelatory because the local operatives have super-secret-special sources and gnarly powers of analysis, but in fact of course they are usually local press reports cobbled together with a bit of gossip. The press focus on them is partly precisely because they're entirely trivial, and partly because the press holds to the bizarre fantasy that the in-going cables provide a window on reality, a source of information both true and not otherwise available. (In the Oz media's case there's also the usual pathetic cultural cringe at work - oh, look what the Americans are saying about us!)

The "Rudd Slammed by US" beat-up is a classic case. Even the SMH's own article included the quote pointing out the characterisation of Rudd as a control freak came partly from media reports, belying the notion that these cables vindicated the media's bullshit narrative that Rudd lost the leadership because of his personality flaws and not because he was proposing policies that pissed off the mining lobby. That the Herald decided this self-exculpatory grift would be the first thing they revealed about the cables in their possession speaks volumes about their degeneration as a news organ, particularly given that they buried the lede - that the US charge d'affaires had sources within DFAT - in paragraph 16. Though, in fairness to them, the next day's story was about similar "secret sources" (interesting euphemism).

The fact is it's not what the embassies are saying to head office that matters, it's the information we're getting about the memos coming the other way. There has been some coverage of this stuff, but not enough, and once reported it's mostly only being repeated by non-mainstream outlets. [But I repeat myself.]

Bernard Keane layed it out today in Crikey. As a result of working with legacy media organs to increase publicity of the publishing of leaks (because hacks are too obsessed with His Girl Friday nonsense like "scoops" to report on the material simply published on the website and available to everybody) Wikileaks have risked the nature of the material being twisted to suit the trivial (and, in the case of the New York Times, pro-imperial) agendas of the mainstream outlets. The obsession with Assange himself is a product of a similar strategy. Having a public face for the organisation was also adopted as a method of publicising the organisation's work - although also to stop idiots claiming falsely to be the group's spokesperson - which strategy has worked, but at the cost of feeding the media's infantile mania for celebrity and, more unfortunately, creating an (albeit blackly hilarious) spasm of magical thinking from state entities and their authoritarian fans. "Hey, if we take out this white-haired freak we can kill the Internet!"

So: summing up - don't judge the importance of publishing the leaks by the trivial press coverage; and don't judge that importance by the glorified press clippings and scuttlebutt being sent from the periphery to the hub - what matters is what we're learning about the marching orders being sent from the hub to the periphery. And there's much more to come.

(Update: Links in Rudd-related paragraph fixed.)

Hotline

Hmmm, perhaps the Oz government aren't the jellyfish I've assumed:

The US embassy further recounted that after Israel initiated its military offensive in Gaza in December 2008, Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem contacted Mr Smith at his home in Perth to ask for Australia’s public support. Despite the obvious diplomatic and political sensitivity of the issue, ”Rotem told [the embassy] that Smith’s response was that he was on vacation, and that the ambassador needed to contact deputy prime minister Gillard, who was acting prime minister and foreign minister at the time.”

"Wozzat? You want our support for immolating Gaza? Mate, I'm down at the beach with the wife and sprogs - go talk to someone who cares."

(Age link via Mr Loewenstein.)

First Amendment-Inspired Subversion

David Samuels in The Atlantic:

But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that "the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day" while depicting Assange as a "self-aggrandizing control-freak" whose website "lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media." Channeling Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks' activities - formerly known as journalism - by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion."

If you've read any of Mr Coll's thoroughly duchessed Ghost Wars, you will find his craven defence of our masters' right to lie to us entirely unsurprising.

Mr Samuels then goes on to make the same point about the slurs mainstream hacks have been throwing at Mr Assange, but I prefer Jack Shafer's rendition:

Oh, sure, he's a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies. And he often acts without completely thinking through every repercussion of his actions. But if you want to dismiss him just because he's a seething jerk, there are about 2,000 journalists I'd like you to meet.

Returning to Mr Samuels:

The true importance of Wikileaks -- and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder -- lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload sensitive data. The importance of Assange's efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks investigation The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500 young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the country's political leadership.

But what does that matter now that he's cruelly exposed our infrastructural soft underbelly to Osama Bin Blofeld's fanataninjas?

Stir

Craig A. Monson interviewed about his book Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy:

MONSON: These were women who were relatively well educated, from aristocratic families, locked up behind a wall where they are invisible, and they are given a certain amount of autonomy....One can see how they would have developed a certain amount of independence and created their own culture.

IDEAS: There’s one story about the nuns of San Niccolò di Strozzi who in 1673 burned down their own convent. Why arson?

MONSON: There are three ways of being released from obligation of monastic enclosure: pestilence, war and fire. Pestilence and war weren’t quite in the picture. So fire was the alternative. Apparently they voted...that they were going to do this.

King's English

Wu Ming 1 talks about translating Stephen King:

King's style looks simple, but it is actually very difficult to translate. As an author, he's very fond of puns, neologisms, idioms, local slang and so on. He plays with all the singularities of the English language, precisely the stuff that can't be translated in any way! This is typical of, er, "monoglot" writers, by which I mean those writers who don't care about what happens to their works when they're translated into other languages.

...

If you're a careful, attentive reader, you can tell one kind of writer from the other simply by reading. There's a prose that's translation-conscious, and a prose that is not. It can be a very subtle difference, but you can detect it. ... King's English is very much self-contained, very much grounded in Americana. King's stories are usually set in places and milieux that are both quintessentially American and very particular, very singular, like some island off the coast of Maine, the New England countryside, etc. There are idioms, details, objects, and customs that can't be found anywhere else...

[W]e Wu Ming are extremely translation-conscious, while writing we always think: how will this be translated into English, or French, or Spanish? Sometimes we place landmines into the text, bombs that will explode only during translation. For example, in my novel New Thing, there are hidden rhymes that will appear only when those pages are translated into English

Traditions

At Mondoweiss, David Shasha discusses the origins and history of the Hanukkah holiday:

[T]he rabbis could not eliminate a holiday which had popular roots among both the Jewish masses and the priestly elite. Hence, they developed a hagiographic tale of a cruse of oil that was found amidst the Temple relics that was the only "pure" oil that could be used to light the Menorah, Hebrew candelabrum; according to the rabbis the oil, a one-day supply, lasted for the eight-day rededication ceremonies...

The story of the cruse of oil knowingly obscured the historical underpinnings of the holiday which, in addition to the Book of Maccabees sources, appears in Josephus' Jewish Antiquities Book 12, Chapter 7. Our historical sources tell us nothing about the cruse of oil but do tell us a good deal about the Maccabees and their war against the Syrians.

Commenter "bob" links to an article from 2005 on the same subject by James Ponet at Slate:

Read in its historical context ... the Hanukkah story is really about a revolt against the Hellenized Jews who had fallen madly in love with the sophisticated, globalizing superculture of their day. The Apocrypha's texts make it clear that the battle against Hellenization was in fact a kulturkampf among the Jews themselves...

... Armed Hasmonean priests and their comrades from the rural town of Modi'in attacked urban Jews, priests and laity alike, who supported Greek reform, like the gymnasium and new rules for governing commerce. The Hasmoneans imposed, at sword's edge, traditional observance. After years of protracted warfare, the priests established a Hasmonean state that never ceased fighting Jews who disagreed with its rule.

Two narratives then emerge: Hanukkah as a Zionist commemoration of the Maccabean warrior tradition and, simultaneously, Hanukkah as an assimilationist "Jewish Christmas". It seems something of an arduously contradictory burden for a little holiday to bear.

Advisement

As yet another (but nonetheless unnecessary) reminder of how different the real world is from the ponyverse, it seems the US Ambassador to Honduras carefully advised his government that the June 2009 coup was indeed a coup and "clearly illegal, and ... totally illegitimate", which advice the Obama administration then cheerfully ignored. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même hopey-changey chose.

Ratchet

Today's "well, exactly" comes courtesy of Doghouse Riley:

Lemme just ask a couple questions about this civilization, whose very existence hangs on the ability of some House of Saud fuckhead to be duplicitous in absolute privacy. First, how come all its sacred principles operate in one direction only? Why is there one set of ethics for how people are supposed to relate to governments, and no set of ethics for how governments treat people? Where were you, Mr. Brooks, when my phone company turned over my top secret messages to the government, and when the government forgave it for violating my rights in doing so? Where was Zbegniew Fuckink Brzezinski? Lemme jog your memory: on the other side.

Three Things: the AUSFTA; Water Myths; American Liberalism

John Quiggin on the Australia United States Free Trade Agreement:

On at least one occasion, the extra bite of the AUSFTA proved counter- productive to the goal of limiting public intervention in the economy. Snowy Hydro, an electricity generation company jointly owned by the Commonwealth, NSW and Victorian governments, was a candidate for privatisation. In view of the political unpopularity of privatisation, it has been common for governments to attach a range of conditions on employment and ownership. Under the terms of the AUSFTA, however, the capacity to impose such conditions is strictly limited. Ranald notes that a proposed limit, restricting foreign ownership to 35 per cent of shares, was judged to be in contravention of the agreement. The inability to impose such conditions, and thereby allay some sources of public concern, was one reason for the abandonment of the proposed privatisation.

Andrew Dragun on Australian water myths:

What our early leaders did was to create a massive water surplus in the cause of nation building which could only be disbursed and thus justified by essentially giving the water away. In the early days of irrigation, the prices for water captured only a small fraction of the operating costs of getting water to the irrigators, and for a range of institutional reasons it has been difficult to increase those prices since.

Roger D. Hodge interviewed about his book The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism:

My use of the term “class warfare” in the book was meant to be somewhat provocative, since this is typically the most damning charge that our economic royalists can come up with to counter any proposal that threatens their economic and political prerogatives. It also happens to be an accurate, if somewhat melodramatic, term for what happens in any society. Marx was obviously correct to point to the struggle between the rich and the poor as one of the motive forces of human history, but his Hegelianism led him to imbue historical change with metaphysical significance and to posit the working class as the trans-historical carrier of human freedom. It is ironic that workers should be obliged to bear such a load.

The Atlantic republican political tradition that informed the minds of the revolutionary generation also understood history in terms of the struggle of rich and poor, the few and the many, the nobili and the populi. This is an essential attribute of the Roman republican heritage, as Machiavelli makes clear in his Discourses on Livy, in which he observes that it was the productive tension between the patricians and the plebs that preserved Rome’s republican institutions for so long. So-called class warfare, in this view, is necessary for the health of the state, precisely because it makes explicit the natural conflicts that arise between groups with fundamentally differing material interests. By rendering those conflicts transparent, Roman institutions helped preserve civil peace.

James Madison believed that differing economic classes must of necessity grow up in any civilized nation, and that these classes would naturally pursue their own self-interests. The principal role of modern legislation, Madison wrote, is the regulation of these various and interfering interests. What is dangerous, from the Madisonian point of view, is when one narrow interest captures the institutions of the state and uses the power of government for its own purposes, to the detriment of other groups. Madison, in keeping with republicans such as Machiavelli and James Harrington, argued that a moderate balance of wealth must be maintained, that too great a distinction between the rich and poor would naturally lead to the decay of republican governance. Judging from the stench of corruption rising up from Washington, I’d say he was correct.

Laff

It's stuff like this that reminds me why I need to spend more time at McSweeney's.

The Red and the Blue

Via Sociological Images, David Sparks' video of isarithmic maps of presidential voting.

Whiggism

Alex Pareene is counting down America's thirty worst pundits. Here's one of the representative quotes he chose for the post on Peggy Noonan:

I am inclined toward the long view. The life of people on earth is obviously better now than it has ever been -- certainly much better than it was 500 years ago when people beat each other with cats. This may sound silly but now and then when I read old fairy tales and see an illustration of a hunchbacked hag with no teeth and bumps on her nose who lives by herself in the forest, I think: People looked like that once. They lived like that. There were no doctors, no phones, and people lived in the dark in a hole in a tree. It was terrible. It's much better now.

Paragraphs like that don't just write themselves, folks.

Iron Law of Institutions - Management Variation

3QD featured the Tablet interview with Chompers. From the comments thread there comes a link to this interview at TruthOut, more standard subject matter for the Prof than the Tablet piece but nonetheless interesting:

During the Depression and the War, there was a real radicalization of the population -not just here but all over the world. And the post-War system was designed to reflect that. That's why you get welfare states developing in the '50s - a lot of popular pressure you couldn't escape. Changes have taken place since then and there's actually been a return to an extreme form of predatory capitalism, which means that not only will I close my business or move if I don't like what you do, but something else that's been happening, which is interesting. In the financial institutions, which by now dominate the economic system, the management level repeatedly acts in ways which will destroy their own institutions if it'll increase their benefits, and benefits are not small. You know, you take a look at the revenue of, say, Goldman Sachs - a very high percentage of it just goes to payment of management and bonuses. There was a time traditionally - say, GM in the 1950s - it was trying to develop a consumer base that would be loyal and lasting and they were thinking in terms of an institution that would remain and grow and thrive in the society. By now, a lot of the investment firms - bankers, hedge funds - are perfectly happy to destroy what they're in and come out with huge, tremendous benefits. That's a new stage of capitalism.

Travælling!

Is Melbourne possibly taking the lead in the development of significant regional variations in the Australian dialect?

The tendency to pronounce “el” as “al” has been heard before in places like New Zealand and Norfolk Island. Linguists call this the /el/-/æl/ sound change, and from a physiological point of view it’s not such a strange occurrence — when the tongue moves to form an “l” sound this encourages a change to the vowel that precedes it. But this is far from the whole story.

There’s a related but contrary process called /el/-/æl/ transposition. This is when people say words like “alcohol” and “alpine” as if the first syllable was “el”.

According to a commenter, this makes the pun in TISM's album title Machiavelli and the Four Seasons rather more obvious ("Machia Valli"), but if that's the case the Melbournian /el/-/æl/ swap has been around since at least 1995.

Technical paper (in pdf form) here.

(Do Melbournians still say "Travelling!" when in a hurry to somewhere? Or have they wisely stopped?)

Nivi’im

Via Verso Books weblog, an interview with Noam Chomsky in Tablet, featuring some interesting discussion of his early life and influences, in linguistics and politics:

Did you read Nivi’im, the prophets, with your father in Hebrew?

The word "prophet" is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.

I don’t want to say it was all beautiful. Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful. You read Sakharov, who is sometimes appalling. Or Solzhenitsyn. And the nivi’im were treated the way dissident intellectuals always are. They weren’t praised. They weren’t honored. They were imprisoned like Jeremiah. They were driven into the desert. They were hated. Now at the time, there were intellectuals, "prophets," who were very well treated. They were the flatterers of the court. Centuries later, they were called "false prophets."

People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor. You’ve got to serve power. You can’t argue that the policies that Israel is following are going to lead to its destruction, which I thought then and still do.

The interview is surprisingly reasonable, which is to say not remotely as awful as one would predict after reading the sneering bien pensant gibberish of the introduction. Also best to steer clear of the attached comments thread; Romantic ethno-nationalists in the throes of Tu Quoque Tourette's are never a pretty sight.

Everyone Loves a Royal Wedding

Then and now.

Update: Mwahahahahah!

Hearing Yourself

From Language Log

It is possible to convince people of the truth of certain empirical claims about their own pronunciation. It involves recording them and making them listen to the playback. The linguist David Crystal was doing a workshop for British teachers and found that one of them regarded intrusive [r] as an abomination. That is, she regarded it as utterly wrong and unacceptable and coarse to pronounce the idea of it as the idearof it, as millions of British speakers do. So he had her say a few phrases like the idea of Africa and Asia on the other hand, and played her back. There were some clear cases of intrusive [r], and when she listened she could hear them herself. For a moment there was silence, and then the woman simply burst into tears.

David Crystal tells that embarrassing story with no relish at all.

Jeepers!

Oh no! This colossal stern-faced hippie will destroy us all!

[L]ocal priest Reverend Sylwester Zawadzki... told reporters: "This is the culmination of my life's work as a priest. I felt inspired to fulfil Jesus' will, and today I give thanks to him for allowing me to fulfil his will."

This would be Jesus' will for the second tallest concrete Jesus in the world (sorry, kids, pedestals and headwear don't count) to be near Swiebodzin, Poland. Suck on that, Rio!

The Swiebodzin statue, like the others, is wisely situated far away from residential areas. If there's one headline leaders of the church don't want to find themselves reading of a morning, it's "Hundreds crushed to death by giant Jesus".



"Just ignore him, otherwise he'll follow us all the way home."

Updated to replace image lost to linkrot.

The Experiment Requires

In the course of On Being's program* featuring an interview with torture expert Darius Rejali, Krista Tippett plays an extract from recordings of Stanley Milgram's famous experiment on obedience, of one of those who refused:

Man Two: Look, I don't know anything about electricity. I don't profess any knowledge, nor will I go any further until I found out if the guy's OK.

Man: It's absolutely essential that you continue.

Man Two: Well, essential or not, this program isn't quite that important to me that I should go along doing something that I know nothing about, particularly if it's going to injure someone. I don't know what this is all about.

Man: Well, whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on until he's learned all the word pairs correctly.

Man Two: Well, you can sure have your $4.50 back. I didn't want it anyhow. I intended to give it some charitable organization. But I wouldn't go on with it.

Man: The $4.50 is not the issue here. That check is yours …

Man Two: Yeah, I realize that.

Man: … simply for coming to the lab. It is essential that you continue the experiment.

Man Two: No, it isn't essential. Not one bit.

Man: You've got no other choice, teacher.

Man Two: Oh, I have a lot of choices. My number one choice is that I wouldn't go on if I thought he was being harmed.

Fossicking through the show's related webpages and weblog, I discovered this episode of the ABC's Radio Eye program which interviewed various people associated with the experiment including four of the "teachers" who were asked to administer the electrical shocks in the interests of science. Fascinating stuff.

HERB WINER : The learner may have gotten the first one or two correct but it became quite obvious that he was a very dim witted learner and so each failure I imposed a shock and the level started to rise very rapidly. And I could hear him, his cries of pain and requests, “stop this, cut it out, this hurts” and similar expressions and at the same time the experimenter standing above me was instructing me very seriously that I had to go on. I became increasingly uncomfortable as we went up to about a hundred volts and I became increasingly agitated and concerned and of course the experimenter dealt with all objections with one or more of several phrases, like “you must continue”, or “the experiment requires that you continue,” or “you have no choice.”

...

BILL MENOLD: I didn’t know what I was doing, and you know, I thought one of three things is happening either this guy’s unconscious, he’s dead or this thing is a complete sham. I mean I had thought, while my thought process was still working, there was a concern that I had that I was being set up because you don’t do this - this isn’t the way the world operates but the conflict within me to know which one of those was right was unbelievably stressful, as I said I couldn’t, I was not functional. I really had lost it intellectually, or emotionally or whatever… And I didn’t know what I was gonna do and I stopped at one point and I said I’m not going to continue with this because I don’t know what’s going on and I’m not taking responsibility for this and that’s when this facilitator said don’t worry about it Yale University is taking full responsibility. You just conduct your part of the - he was just an authority figure and he was just, “this is your job just go ahead and do it we know what we’re doing don’t get excited here, just continue with the experiment.” And I did. I was totally out of any world that I’d ever known. I was tormented internally. I was a basket case.

Naturally, you quickly find yourself musing on the recursive nature of the whole thing. Although Milgram and his staff expected the vast majority of participants to refuse to continue with the shocks, they must have realised the potential for significant emotional stress to the subjects, and, indeed, reported on the distress that did occur, in their results. And yet the experiment continued, in the interests of science, and I wonder if the experimenters saw the element of introspection in what they were doing, the fact they were learning about themselves. I suspect they did. One can only hope. Should you continue causing this distress, Stanley? It is essential that you continue.

* Via Mondoweiss. Mr Weiss and Ms Tippett say half the subjects refused to continue the shocks, which given the small sample size is probably fair enough, although the actual figure is 14 out of 40.

A Golden Anniversary

Geoffrey Robertson recounts the history of the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial:

In 1960, in the interests of keeping wives dutiful and servants touching their forelocks, Lady Constance Chatterley's affair with a gamekeeper was unmentionable. The prosecutors were complacent: they would have the judge on their side, and a jury comprised of people of property, predominantly male, middle aged, middle minded and middle class. And they had four-letter words galore: the prosecuting counsel's first request was that a clerk in the DPP's office should count them carefully. In his opening speech to the jury, he played them as if they were trump cards: "The word 'fuck' or 'fucking' appears no less than 30 times . . . 'Cunt' 14 times; 'balls' 13 times; 'shit' and 'arse' six times apiece; 'cock' four times; 'piss' three times, and so on."

"And so on"?

I think Mr Robertson somewhat overeggs the pudding as to the class-war aspect of the prosecution, and on the social impact of the "Not Guilty" verdict, but his railing against "the striped-trousered ones who rule" (quoting Orwell) is half the fun of the article.

Strange then that he only alludes to but does not quote the notorious and greatly mocked passage from the prosecutor's opening address that did so much to cement the notion that censorship is the process whereby the better class of person decides what the lower orders may read. The London Telegraph's commemorative piece has the glorious words:

'Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?'

Brilliant in its way; a timeless classic.

Watching The Clock

At the LRB blog, Jonathan Romney reviews Christian Marclay's videomontage The Clock.

Marclay has taken thousands of fragments of footage containing images of clocks, watches and other timepieces, and edited them into a 24-hour collage (the gallery is normally open only in the daytime, but the installation can be seen at weekends in its round-the-clock entirety). The time references on screen are synchronised with the real time of projection, so that if you walk into the gallery at 5.47 p.m., say, the clock or watch on screen will read 5.47. That is, the film itself functions very accurately as a clock.

...

Overall, we seem to be watching a huge, madly diffuse multi-stranded narrative with a cast of thousands - an epic drama about simultaneity, in which no narrative can ever reach completion. Micro-narratives emerge, not always linear. One is the story of a man bound and gagged, forever sweating nervously as he contemplates a time bomb. Another follows Jack Nicholson’s ageing process, from young rake (whose singing in Ken Russell’s Tommy apparently adds to the torment of the time bomb victim) to the haggard doyen watching the clock in About Schmidt (2002).

Marclay’s collage teaches us things we might have overlooked about times of the day. Between three and four in the afternoon is a period for slumber: alcoholic screenwriters and maverick cops wake around now, while others start dozing at their desks.

There's an accompanying "catalogue" book. I guess we can't expect a DVD.

Umpteenth Time's the Charm

Newsflash: Democratic candidates lose votes by failing to persuade people likely to vote Democratic to vote for them:

"In my case, it's simply a matter of the Democrats not voting," Grayson, who was defeated by Republican Dan Webster in Florida's 8th District, said. "We don't have the final numbers from Election Day yet, but in the early voting, when you compare the vote this time to the vote in 2008, the Republicans dropped about 20 percent, and the Democratic vote dropped 60 percent."

Clearly the solution is moving even further to the right.

Hyperbolic Discounting

James Surowiecki reviews The Thief of Time, a book about procrastination, in The New Yorker.

The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy...

Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time - in particular, from a tendency that economists call "hyperbolic discounting." A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing...

The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run.

You'll be pleased to discover this post contains no joke about how long it took me to cite this article.

Get Thee to the Moon

The only children's book written in second person, future tense*. Which is odd, because it's a stylistic device that probably only works on children.



Hah!

*Until I hear otherwise.

In Late News...

... as in, I'm late to it, the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages have returned to their traditional "All Demented Fantasy All the Time" state. Mr Frank's first column at his new digs at Harper's will be published in December. I'd say I can't wait except I'm guessing Harper's has a paywall too - although not one that funnels money to Rupert Murdoch, so that's still an improvement.

Conquest

The individual who then consciously opted into resistance was a man who accepted his own freedom: call it existential liberation.

This freedom was reinforced by liberation of a more paradoxical kind... The individual was also liberated, like it or not, from the pretext and from the sui generis constraints of democracy as we know it, from the illusion that the act of voting now and again is anything other than symbolic abdication of political freedom. It may seem inappropriate when talking of individual freedom in the context of German occupation to quote from Tolstoy on Russia in the nineteenth century, but his words may help to define the kind of freedom which was discovered in a country suddenly plunged into despotism:

Those Englishmen who come to Russia feel much more free here. At home they are bound by laws which they make themselves through their representatives, and which they obey, imagining all the time that they are free men. Now in this country it is not I who made the laws: consequently I am not bound to obey them - I am a free man.

This may seem like Tolstoian pervesity, but there is more than a slight echo of these words in Sartre's famous beginning to 'The Republic of Silence':

We have never been more free than under German occupation. We had lost all our rights and first of all the right to speak; we were insulted to our faces each day and we had to stay silent; we were deported en masse as labourers, as Jews, as political prisoners; everywhere we looked, on walls, in newspapers, on the cinema screen, we were confronted by the same vile and insipid image of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to have: because of all this we were free. Because the Nazi's venom infiltrated our very thoughts, each just thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to constrain us to silence, each word became precious as a declaration of principle; because we were hounded, every gesture had the weight of a total commitment.

Under occupation this peculiar freedom - and its associated responsibility - was given to the individual.

From Stephen Hawes, "The Individual and the Resistance Community in France", in Resistance in Europe: 1939-45, ed. Stephen Hawes & Ralph White, 1975.

Resource

The Paris Review has posted its archive of author interviews online, 1953 to now, Achebe to Yourcenar.

Teachable Moment Fail

I just took a look at Larry "Vote for Dukakis and This Scary Black Man Will Rape Your Children" McCarthy's ad explaining how finance sector bail-outs and health care reform will enslave Americans to the heathen Chinee.

Opening line:

Why do great nations fail? The Ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, the British Empire...

/me holds breath

... and the United States of America.

Ah well. Self-knowledge is always a hard ask.

Deep Dish Ones

Some things just make the world a better place.



Tentacle Potpie from Not Martha via Laughing Squid.

Fiche

Another matured cite:

From this practice of making notes on separate slips of paper there emerged what became the historian’s indispensable tool until the electronic age: the card index. By using cards of uniform size, punching holes in the margin and assigning different categories to each hole, it became possible, with the aid of a knitting needle, to locate all cards containing material related to any particular category.

These various techniques were codified in the guides to research which proliferated with the rise of academic history-writing. In one of the most influential, ...the authors warn that history is more encumbered with detail than any other form of academic writing and that those who write it must have those details under control. The best way of proceeding, they say, is to collect material on separate slips of paper (fiches), each furnished with a precise indication of their origin; a separate record should be kept of the sources consulted and the abbreviations used to identify them on the slips. If a passage is interesting from several different points of view, then it should be copied out several times on different slips...

Prescriptions of this kind reached their apotheosis in the little essay on "The Art of Note-Taking" which Beatrice Webb included in My Apprenticeship (1926). It propounded the famous doctrine of 'only one fact on one piece of paper'. ... [T]he late John Burrow records his perplexities when this injunction was conveyed to him by his graduate supervisor, George Kitson Clark: 'I brooded on this. What was a fact? And what made it one fact? Surely most facts were compound. How would I know when I had reached bedrock, the ultimate, unsplittable atomic fact?'

From Keith Thomas' essay on research methods at the LRB.

Nightfall

From George Russell's review of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox:

In her final chapter Brox relates that due to electric light pollution, "two-thirds of all Americans and half of all Europeans can no longer see the Milky Way, our own galaxy, in the nighttime sky." According to her the sight of it has become so unfamiliar to people that during the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, "emergency organizations [...] received hundreds of phone calls from people wondering whether the sudden brightening of the stars and the appearance of a 'silver cloud' (the Milky Way) had caused the quake."

(Mr Russell seems to like it but, judging by the peanut gallery at Amazon, Brilliant appears, unfortunately, not remotely as good a book as its subject matter deserves.)

Anti-mavenism

This is lovely - a Stephen Fry podcast re-made as a typographical animation:


Via Language Log.

Teratogenic

China Miéville interviewed at Crikey! blog Literary Minded:

I think the early 20th Century was the high point of absolutely explosive creation in the monstrous. But I would say, at the moment – particularly at the level of vampires and zombies – it’s very tired.

I think probably the ’20s was the anomaly rather than now; I think it was more of a question of that being a particularly fecund time than this being a particularly degraded one. And I think there’s probably more teratological innovation going on now than there was in the 1880s for example. I think it’s very culturally specific and at various moments there’s a kind of upsurge of creativity and others there’s not, so I think at the moment things are roughly sort of in balance, you know - we have a lot of very, very tired stuff, there’s still some things that are interesting, but most of the time monsters disappoint... why there is such an obsession with sparkly vampires, or whatever it might be, I mean that’s a whole other question – then you have to get into the specifics of each case. And these things are very fashion driven, so, angels are something they’re trying to do at the moment. Angels are very trendy. So overall I think this day and age is kind of middling, in terms of monster creation.

Crossposted, for those of you who prefer your interviews in an article form, all proper, like, at Socialist Alternative.

For the Record

Your required daily dose of the blindingly obvious:

Despite Gates' ongoing assertion that "the initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security" and that "there is still concern Afghans named in the published documents could be retaliated against by the Taliban," even the DoD and NATO admit that the WikiLeaks release "did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods" and that "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak." Nonetheless, the accusation that WikiLeaks and Assange have "blood on their hands" was -- as intended -- trumpeted around the world for weeks without much question or challenge.

Courtesy of Mr Greenwald.

A Sad Pack of Dogs

A tad old, this Bruce Page article still pertains:

Today [May 2009] the Sun (three million) and Mirror together sell about four million, as against the Mirror’s 1960s five-million peak: a secular decline of 25 per cent (continuing still), while Britain’s population grew 25 per cent. The News of the World, finding no parasite-host in its Sunday marketplace, has declined more simply, sales having halved under Murdoch control. Rupert the circulation mastermind is a myth as frail as Keith the upright war reporter.

Mostly, his newspapers are a sad pack of dogs, especially the New York Post and The Times of London – absurd vanity sheets by any defensible rules, much as Newscorp’s accounts veil their losses...

But dogs have their functions. First, even in decline, the British tabloids generate vast cash flow, essential to Newscorp’s financial vitality. Second, all the papers, profitable or not, are business accessories of a unique type. They have always been politically deliverable: enabling Murdoch to extract from governments in Australia, America and Britain free passes against regulation, designed to sustain media diversity and independence — printed and electronic. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were his best-known playmates, but leaders of the Australian Labor Party (specially inclined to fancy that they were exploiting Murdoch) must not be forgotten.

Newscorp’s rise to television power was a major subplot in the four-decade deregulation epic, now tardily recognized as an unshackling of Caliban. Its dynamics explain Murdoch’s unremitting circulation losses. To be deliverable, a newspaper (or TV show) must be predictable. Then you may manage (even stabilize) its decline, but you mustn’t expect organic growth. If you’re doing fealty to a bunch of politicians, nothing sucks worse than your staff exposing their misdemeanors – even accidentally – however beguiling for the readers. There are some rib-tickling instances in Harry Evans’ account of editing The Times while Boss Rupert courted the Thatcher administration. Papers actually were selling fast – but numerous editions agonized Downing Street. Agony communicated itself to Rupert, and firing Harry was the only cure.

The extent to which the powerful could rely on other media bosses predictably to deliver their assets is often exaggerated. Certainly, the old monsters like Hearst, Northcliffe and Beaverbrook were driven by unpredictable – indeed, barmy – passions of their own. But Rupert is the supreme pragmatist. Barking right is the default state of his own politics: however, these can be readily overwritten any time there’s a deal to do. It may be worth discussing whether he really likes running moribund newspapers. But the commercial point is that politicians love them.

This represents an important qualification of the "newspapers make a profit by selling readers to advertisers" rule: sometimes it really is only about (perceived) political influence. See also this FAIR article, also a tardy citation, reporting on Murdoch's sale of right-wing fanzine The Weekly Standard.

Prohibited Degrees of Affinity

Something else from the pile:

Religious belief, campaigns and causes might also produce tightly knit coteries and a preference for marrying within the circle. The Evangelicals of the Clapham Sect, inspired by William Wilberforce, lived almost as a commune. They mimicked kinship bonds, called each other brother, and bequeathed the idea of intermarriage to succeeding generations. ... Competition for pious daughters was intense. Sisters were in demand too, although this raised problems. When a wife died, her sister was often the preferred replacement, except that canon law forbade marriage with a deceased wife’s sister on the grounds that man and wife were one, so a sister-in-law was a sister, hence marriage would constitute incest. This logic gave rise to one of the great Victorian public debates. To begin with, nobody was quite sure what incest was. In 1847, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate "prohibited degrees of affinity", and for the next six decades the argument raged. The radical John Bright appealed to common sense: on every "natural" ground, he urged, the marriage of first cousins was more objectionable than marriage to a sister-in-law. (On the evidence here there was a good chance the deceased wife’s sister was a first or second cousin anyway.) The Bible gave contradictory guidance. Leviticus seemed to ban sisters-in-law, but then there was Jacob, married to two sisters, Rachel and Leah, who were also his cousins. It was not until 1907 that a Bill was passed permitting a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister (although not until 1949 his divorced wife’s sister). Meanwhile, natural scientists and medical men raised questions about inbreeding, and by the 1920s eugenicists routinely condemned cousin marriage. By then, families had shrunk and the First World War had wiped out a generation of male cousins.

Norma Clarke reviews Adam Kuper's book on the Victorian bourgeoisie's habit of marrying their cousins.

Already Existing Leftism

Kim Stanley Robinson on science, democracy and capitalism:

[W]ithin capitalist society, science has struggled from its beginning as an alterity, an already existing utopian community, because its distinctive power in the real world has managed to create a counter-hegemony to capitalism itself. Science is a praxis - it’s what theory or the humanities always call for, sometimes as if it is entirely absent. But it’s already being enacted, in inevitably compromised ways, because of the overarching structure of capitalism within which science has always moved. Science has always had to seek funding, and capitalism has always tried to buy science and to own the results of science - to aim science’s creation of ability and capital in certain easily owned directions, and to own that capital...

Why is this ideology, the scientific method, so different, and so powerful in its real world effects? ... [I]ts constant efforts to test its assertions against perceived reality ... in order to see whether the assertions actually hold up to tests of various kinds. The move to quantification came from an effort to ask questions that were amenable to this kind of test. But the method can range beyond the quantifiable, and often does. There is a utopian underpinning to these underlying questions of value that science attempts to answer along with the more obviously physical and quantifiable questions. Who are we? What might make us happy? Does this or that method work in making us healthier? These too have become scientific questions, with distinctive answers born of science’s desire to create testable assertions and tweak them in repeated reiterations and revisions.

They’re not the same answers created by capitalism to these same questions, where desires and habits are encouraged that lead to profits for a certain portion of society, but deteriorating health and happiness for most people, and for the biosphere.

...

How do we liberate science from capital? We believe what science tells us, as our strongest method and ideology, instead of believing advertising and the consumption habits of our culture and our time. That in itself would make a huge difference. It might move us to support democratically a government that became increasingly scientific, and the utopian project would then proceed on a collective basis. Science would be aimed at different goals and technologies than it is now, and the public would own the resulting capital, with life’s necessities all conceptualized and legalized as “public utilities” and private capital finding its power reduced to something like a kind of superstructural efflorescence, a playground for the space beyond the necessities. If that change could be made nonviolently it would be an amazing accomplishment, and yet because of the existence of democratic governments and the supposed rule of law, it is theoretically possible. But it takes a different view of science than the one ... that one sees expressed pretty frequently in left and progressive circles. What if science and democratic government are both leftist praxis itself, both “already existing leftism,” struggling with capitalism as best they can? I think it helps to think of them this way, and I think the evidence is there to support the notion.

From an interview in Polygraph extracted at Gerry Canavan's weblog.

The Germans Have a Word for Everything

It's "alles". *snickers evilly*

Tom: You know, Bart, the whale isn't really a fish, it's a mammal.

Pepi: (overhearing) Is that true, Uncle Homer?

Homer: Pffft. No.

Apparently, here Homer is exercising his umwelt, the human tendency for instinctive taxonomy. OK, so that's a reductio ad absurdem. This isn't. See also.

You Ain't Seen Me, Right?

In the wake of the outing of Grog, there's been a bit of chat about the principles of anonymous sourcing. As usual, this debate is framed by the mythology that commercial media journalists have the job of informing their readers and viewers, rather than to provide the content that attracts the kind of people their customers want to advertise to. Fairly obviously, keeping the actual business model in sight makes the real world behaviour of journalists much more explicable than in the comforting fairy story about fact-hungry newshounds, and leads us back to recognising that the Australian's lack of interest in Grog's anonymity is hypocritical when contrasted with their concern for preserving the anonymity of their sources, and the two are not distinguishable by the importance of the latter.

It is not surprising that the declared ethical rules with regard to anonymous sourcing are so often ignored; the value of the source's anonymity to both the source and the journalist is too great. Before we start, though, let's draw a line between genuine whistle-blowers and dissenters facing significant sanction for leaking information to the press, and the self-serving individuals not facing such sanctions who make up the bulk of people you'll find the media granting the boon of anonymity. Journalists stressing the importance of protecting their sources tend to be careful to avoid making the distinction. The origin of the legitimate concern both a whistleblower and the relevant journalist will have to preserve the whistleblower's anonymity is obvious; the problem is that those who face a meaningful risk from exposure make up a tiny fraction of the anonymous sources you'll see cited in mainstream journalism.

So who are the more usual anonymous sources? Generalising slightly you have two basic types: there's the anonymous government official or corporate flack who provides information in agreement with a position already taken publicly by his superiors (think of Judith Miller's sources from Dick Cheney's office whose anonymous briefings validating the claims made by the Bush administration to justify their war could be used as independent verification of those claims, as Cheney himself did on one occasion on Meet the Press with no comment issuing from Ms Miller as to why the apparent verification was spurious), and then there's the political player pursuing a strategy of massaging press coverage in a way that will further his career, say, by whispering about party room dissatisfaction with the current leader to his favourite spear-carrier in the commentariat.

These people crave anonymity for only two possible reasons: they don't want to be publicly associated with a lie, and they don't want the public to be able to assess the credibility of the information being provided by knowing its source. That's the sum of their motivation, and journalists must be able to recognise that, at the least, a request for anonymity in these cases is prima facie evidence that the information provided will not be true and that maintaining anonymity gives the information credibility it does not deserve.

Now, journalists have an obvious incentive to acquiesce: if they refuse to pass on the information anonymously, the leaker will just go and whisper to someone else. The journalist will lose access to the source, probably permanently, and be left nothing of use to help fill those yawning blank spaces between the ads. Of course, if the point of journalism was to be accurate and informative, that motivation would make no sense, as what use is maintaining access to a source of falsehoods? But under the "providing audiences to advertisers" business model, accuracy, like relevance, is a very low priority.

That said, what's often forgotten is the other motivation journalists have to act to protect the anonymity of their source: the protection of the news values of the story itself. "Man on VP's Staff Confirms VP's Story" is not news; "Anonymous Intelligence Sources Back Up Administration Claims" is. "Leadership Aspirant Bad Mouths Current Leader" isn't much of a story either; well, he would, wouldn't he? "Leaks Allege Party Room Rebellion" is the story you want, much better than the alternative above or the even more accurate possibility "Politician and Pet Journo Meet for Lunch." It's almost never mentioned, but the desire to create news where none would otherwise exist is probably the most compelling motive journalists have to allow their informants to stay in the shadows.

Back before The National Enquirer became a slightly sleazier version of People magazine, swapping its alien abduction and cryptozoology stories for more mainstream chaff about the illicit affairs and pregnancies of celebrities, and the occasional "political story", the rather odd phrase the current editor uses to describe illicit affair and pregnancy stories about celebrities who happen to be politicians, it was an established joke that the Enquirer's fantasies were, in fact, technically true, because they never printed, say, "a woman gave birth to Elvis's clone after being impregnated by Reticulan Greys" without adding the qualifier "claimed Brandine Clontarf of Fugue, Idaho". Which, if you'll forgive the windy set-up, made the Enquirer a more accurate news source than pretty much anything in what we call the mainstream media because at least their sources weren't anonymous.

Fighting Words

At Overland, Chris Flynn posts on current US military slang, mostly gleaned from the Sebastian Junger documentary Restropo. It's interesting to see that apparently American soldiers are still using World War 2 slang FUBAR and SNAFU, and the similar FUGAZI - "Fucked Up, Got Ambushed, Zipped In (as in, zipped into a body bag)" - dating from the Vietnam War. More recent slang includes a few SF references:

Ackbar defines a person who acts heroically in a trying situation, keeping their head to organise others. (This is based on the character of Admiral Ackbar from Return of the Jedi, who leads the Rebel Alliance in an assault against the Death Star.)... Death Blossom is used to describe how Afghani Army forces react in combat, by shooting their weapons randomly in all directions rather than aiming at a specific target, often resulting in friendly fire casualties. (This expression has its provenance in the 1984 science fiction movie The Last Starfighter, in which a video game expert is recruited into an alien space fleet to fight an invading armada. ‘Death Blossom’ is his last resort weapon used to take out as many of the enemy as possible.)

I'm reminded of the scene in Ian McDonald's Kirinya where the protagonists observe American troops communicating in a guttural language they can't quite place until someone realises it's Klingon.

Chatter

Crikey's reposting of Ingrid Piller's piece about this ABCNews report on dodgy translators in Afghanistan reminded me of this quote from Clive Stafford-Smith's book over at Antipope:

Early in his captivity the US agents questioned him with the assistance of a translator who used a dialect of Arabic in which the word zalat means money; in Yusuf's Saudi dialect it means salad, or tomato. Yusuf reconstructed the interrogation as best he could remember it.

"When you left Saudi Arabia for Pakistan, what zalat did you take with you?" demanded the translator, suspecting that the money must have come from al-Qaeda sources.

"What? I didn't have any zalat when I went to Pakistan." The 14 year-old was confused. He had been through a difficult time since his seizure by the Pakistanis. He was prepared for any trick the Americans might spring on him, but all this talk about tomatoes was beyond him.

"Of course you had zalat. What do you take me for? An idiot!" The translator flared into hostility.

"I didn't! Why would I?"

"Of course you did. Now tell me, where did you get the zalat you took with you?"

"I didn't take any zalat with me. I didn't!"

"Aha! So you got zalat in Pakistan when you arrived?"

"Well, yes, what zalat I wanted, I could get there. That's natural." Yusuf was trying to be conciliatory, though the conversation continued along this strange line.

The translator seemed suddenly excited. "Where could you get zalat in Pakistan, then? I want a list of places. Details. Descriptions, places. Details."

Yusuf wanted to keep him in a good humour. Trying to remember Karachi, he began to discuss places in the market where one might buy salad. With each description of a market stall the translator turned to the American interrogator, who took careful notes.

That evening Yusuf ... talked through his bizarre interrogation with other prisoners, turning over each of his recollections.

Finally one of the older prisoners solved the puzzle: "You were talking about tomatoes. They were talking about money. That's what it must have been."

A Christian Science Monitor report, also cited by Ms Piller, mentions cut-price interpreting that lead to misdirected mortar rounds, making Mr Stross's line about the possibility of Yusuf's 'intelligence' resulting in drone attacks on greengrocers seem decidedly unfanciful.

Text

From Thomas Jones at the LRB:

One of the reasons breaking up with someone by text message or on Facebook may not be a good idea is the difficulty of judging tone. Take the sad case of Halle and Doug (‘Halle’ is the pseudonym of one of Gershon’s interviewees). While they were going out, they had a running joke, conducted largely by text message, based on the apparently laughable notion that Doug secretly fancied Rianna, one of their classmates whom Halle, for no very clear reason, especially disliked (it perhaps wouldn’t have been hard for anyone apart from Halle, and possibly Doug at first, to see where this was going). So when Doug texted Halle to say that he wanted to break up with her because he was in love in Rianna, she assumed he was joking. It took several more texts to convince her he wasn’t. Once she was convinced, however, ‘That was it. I haven’t talked to him since.’ It was the texting as much as the fancying of Rianna that she couldn’t forgive him.

By sending a serious message using a medium they’d always previously used for joking around, Doug was breaking his and Halle’s personal set of unspoken rules – transgressing their shared ‘media ideology’.

It seems I'm wrong when I describe the internet as the place irony goes to die: you can be ironic in a purely text-based medium, as long as you are never anything but.

Life

Mr Rundle being interesting:

The right has become increasingly hardened against voluntary euthanasia over the last two decades, as it has become increasingly addicted to the notion that a state-enforced social conservatism can put some limits on the nihilistic processes of the market, and the disarray that creates.

By enforcing ‘traditional’ values — even when they’ve ceased to be values held by a majority — you can then go hell for leather in uprooting every other aspect of people’s lives. That allegedly creates a stable society. I think it creates an asocial nightmare, red-bull-vodka-CCTV and tasers world, but there you go.

In such a culture — where any notion of the human, inviolable or genuinely conserved is traded on the open market — abstract notions of traditional value must be instituted. One of them is the idea of ‘life’. Whether applied to abortion, euthanasia, disability or a hundred other issues, ‘life’ becomes this abstract quality detached from the process of living by actual beings.

The US is the home of this, and the Tea Party is its ideal political expression — along with the junk laws whereby an embryo acquires full human rights, standard discontinuation of care becomes murder and so on. A fanatical commitment to ‘life’ becomes a way of affirming it, where every other social process — work, consumption, media — treats people as objects rather than subjects.

I suppose this differs from the more traditional association of "free" market philosophy and authoritarianism; the merely mechanical relationship between implementing policies that heighten social deprivation and consequent social unrest and criminality, and responding to those with increased state repression (or, as they said about Thatcherism, taking money away from social welfare and giving it to the police). What Rundle describes seems more of a rhetorical sleight of hand, a more robust version of the nanny-police statism of New Labour, where ASBOs and ubiquitous surveillance went hand-in-hand with a relaxed attitude to economic inequality, as the Blairites decided that enforcing pro-social attitudes by law was a meaningful alternative to government itself ever acting in society's interest - not a particularly innovative ruling class grift, and in any case merely a subset of the eternal preference of politicians to appear to be solving problems while avoiding the danger of actually solving any.

Form

Rudy Rucker posts quotes from Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing (well, he did a month ago). My favourite:

1942, age 30. Turing joined the Home Guard so he could learn to shoot. "[Turing] had to complete a form, and one of the questions on this form was: ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?’ Well, Turing, absolutely characteristically, said: There can be no conceivable advantage in answering this question ‘Yes’ and therefore he answered it 'No.' ... And ... he was duly enrolled, because people only look to see that these things are signed at the bottom. ... He learned to shoot, but he refused to attend parades, and the apoplectic chief officer confronted him, and Turing said, "You know, I rather thought this sort of situation could arise... If you look at my form you will see that I protected myself against this situation."

Tags

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set via 3QD:

You are walking down the street and there, at your feet, are two cobblestones that have been replaced with tiny memorials to people once living there, who were shipped off to Auschwitz and killed. Here's a memorial to Peter Fechter, the East German kid who tried to get over the Wall and was shot dead by border guards. Here are bullet holes in the side of a building from street-to-street fighting that doesn't seem all that long ago. Here's the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church far in the former West of the city, bombed to smithereens by an Allied air raid and left that way as a memorial. See the empty hole where the rose window once stood? Is there an emptier hole, a more desolate monument to destruction, in any city on the planet?

Every street in Berlin is ghosted. Every memorial is plastered in 20 layers of tragedy, heroism, and shame.

...

Behind a badly kept fence is a chunk of the Berlin Wall standing alone in the middle of an unused parking lot. Covered in the graffiti of its time, it is slowly being worn away by the elements there, in its final resting place with the weeds, amongst the ruins of a dying neighborhood. How can any work of sculpture, how can any installation ... compete with that?

Which would not be what we speak of when we speak of augmented reality.