The Mass of X

That Time of Year

While we're being all link-festive, in celebration of Jack Womack month here's sixteen years worth of the man being interviewed:

• by Brendan Byrne at Rhizome, December 2011
• by Joshua Zachariah Ellis at Zenarchy, August 2008
• by Cory Doctorow at The Well, July 2001
• in conversation with Paul McAuley at infinity plus, May 2001
• by Jim Freund at Hour of the Wolf, October 1996
• by Dike Blair, August 1995
• by Darren Wershler-Henry, circa 1995

Mr Newman Being Interesting As Usual

Back in June, at Electric Sheep Magazine, a lovely interview with Kim Newman about his updated re-release of Nightmare Movies. Very interesting indeed. Listening to this cheered me up (a tad) after being fa-a-a-r too slow to get tickets to Neil Gaiman and the Fourplay String Quartet. Le sigh.

Also on Nightmare Movies, these interviews in Filmwerk and Dawn of the Dad. A new edition of Anno Dracula also came out in May. Here's Mr Newman on said tome at Geeknative, MTV Geek, Bookgeeks (rolls eyes) and Alternative Magazine, and at Blastr on 10 inspirational vampire novels, at Monsters & Critics on people borrowed for the book, and at Wired on alternat(iv)e histories in general.

But That's What They Call Themselves

Michele Bachman might be a demented cretin - hell, unarguably is a demented cretin - but people might want to acquire some capacity for nuance and detail in the use of political terminology rather than go about suggesting an inequitous, state-capitalist dictatorship can be sensibly described as "communist".

National parks are communist. Rich Shanghai developers using their contacts in government and the iron fist of the PSB to kick people out of their homes to make way for one of their lucre-spouting projects are not. If a corrupt nexus between businessmen and officialdom backed up with state violence is communism, then so was the Gilded Age.

Self-Determination

...I complain about the American style that nothing succeeds like success. That’s a very primitive way of looking at history, as between winners and losers. Sure, there are crackpot rickety states, but who’s interested in them? What they are really interested in is the successful cultures, the big civilisations, the mighty powers and so on. That gives a very false view of the panorama of the past. The past is full of everything. Great powers, obscure powers – which may have other achievements to their name. There are powers which last for centuries, but I found a republic which lasted for one day.

Goodness me. Which day?

March 15, 1939. The republic of Subcarpathian Ruthenia. It was the day that Hitler marched into Prague. The Germans swallowed Bohemia and Moravia, formed a protectorate and Slovakia became a client statelet of the Reich. And the third part of Czechoslovakia, this Subcarpathian Ruthenia, was left with nobody to tell it what to do. So it declared its independence at around 10 o’clock in the morning. And by the evening the Hungarian army arrived and swallowed it up.

Norman Davies at Five Books.

Ailments

It was in an SBS documentary about the vibrator where I first came across the story that said device was invented in the Victorian era in order to spare doctors the drudgery of administering a widespread cure for "hysteria" manually. This led to occasional jokey remarks on my part re the Victorian age: when orgasm for a middle-class woman was a medical procedure.

As I should have guessed, this notion, largely taken from Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm, seems to be a tad dubious, although that won't be stopping Hollywood making a film about it. (Starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. Surprised? No, neither am I.) Mind Hacks reveals the sad news and links to the relevant part of Victorian Sex Factoids that discusses the (probable) myth.

- Ideas about and treatment of hysteria that form the basis for the argument are based on outdated secondary literature, leading to misreadings...

- There was enormously pervasive horror around masturbation in Victorian Britain ... masturbation in women was still seen as either causative of or symptomatic of some kind of pathology, physical, mental, or moral.

- This is borne out by diatribes against contraception as 'Conjugal Onanism', which claimed that sexual stimulation of women without its culmination in (at least potentially) reproductive marital sex led to all sorts of ailments, including 'Malthusian uterus'.

Which extraordinary phrase is really the only reason I'm making this post. Well, that and the wonders it will do to my hitcount.

Incidentally - if you've ever wondered where the Victorians got their peculiar idea that "twanging the wire" or - erm... "adjusting the volume", let's say - was bad for one's health, here's Stephen Greenblatt reviewing Thomas Laqueur's book on the subject.

Icon

As I'm one of those "to the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth" tossers, here's Stephen Wright at Overland:

Our iPhones were made by real children. Really. Real children. Another human being really committed suicide because they couldn't tolerate another day making our fucking iPods. And so on. If I can look at my Apple product and not think 'Someone really suffered to make this' that’s because the Apple product itself has eclipsed the thought of the other in my mind; iPod, slave child - iPod wins every time.

The American actor Mike Daisey recently toured Australia with his show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Daisey, a long-time Apple geek, visited the Foxconn complex disguised as a US businessman, fake business cards and all...

Daisey points out that it was Apple’s choice to use Foxconn. Until the 90s Apple products were made in California. He also points out that the labour costs make up only a small part of the price of an Apple product. The production of Apple products by slaves isn't part of the natural order.

Here's Mr Daisey* himself, in the New York Times:

Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple.

I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, "It’s a kind of magic."

It's amusing, if not surprising, to note the gizmo-centric nature of the stoush at the Boings associated with the post about Mr Daisey's lèse-majesté, although some attention is paid to Apple's sweat-shop manufacturing and, to be fair, even Mr Daisey buries that lede. The ire directed in comments at those pointing out Apple's conformity to standard corporate behaviour brings to mind the longstanding joke that Apple consumers are better understood as a form of cult (I mean, seriously, kids - queueing for hours to score tickets to a rock show that might sell out featuring performers who may never visit again is one thing; doing so to be first to get consumer electronics that will retail in their millions, or at least until people stop buying them, is just fucking strange). I suppose no-one, least of all the glibertarian otakus who infest the threads at BoingBoing, wants to face the cognitive dissonance that comes with acknowledging your shiny new techno-bling is the product of sweatshop labour, or even that, at the end of the day, they're just things made by yet another massive transnational. (And, so I wonder, is Mark Frauenfelder's remembrance an example of the same, as he recounts a day spent, while making an ad for Apple, being treated with dismissive disregard by Apple staff, before revealing the punchline that Steve liked his bit best! Or is he just making the funny?) Hence their rage at being forced to note the global economic truisms, which, ironically, they'd give less of a shit about if they weren't so psychologically invested in the supposed transcendent coolness of the products.

* the performance artist (update 17/3/12).

Unblockable

'Haussmannization' – the mid-19th-century programme of urban renewal in Paris named after the prefect in charge of it, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann – was specifically aimed at making it difficult or impossible for protestors or revolutionaries to take streets via the barricade. If alleys and small streets were difficult for armies to navigate, wide avenues were seen as unblockable, as well as conducive to the rapid transfer of troops or police around Paris. Haussmannization was translated for more than 100 years into other places around the world, from modernized megacities to US university campuses in the wake of the 1960s protests.

Recent events in London seem to demonstrate that, due to various technological and ideological shifts, the days of the Haussmannized city street as a deterrent to protest are numbered. Barricades have given way to flash mobs, the targets have shifted toward the emporiums of consumerism, and the cat-and-mouse battles between the police and those who resist them take place nearly as often online as in the physical places of the city.

Michael Sayeau in Frieze, via Verso Blogs.

The Bank of England

Coinage is invented to pay soldiers, and markets that used them tended to crop up alongside military camps. Similarly the modern banking system arises to help fund European wars. Central banks, in turn, institutionalized that system, since the debts they manage are basically government war debt, and always have been—at least back to 1694, when King William II offered some London merchants who’d made a loan of £1.2 million to fight a war in France the right to call themselves “The Bank of England” and loan that money he owed them to others in the form of banknotes, thus bringing our current currency system into existence. Modern money is still basically government war debt.

David Graeber interviewed at Infoshop News.

The Media (Lack of) Enquiry

This month's statements of the blindingly obvious come from Mr Denmore and Mr Dunlop.

Quip

Institute of Public Affairs pillock Chris Berg's latest courtier-like defence of Rupert Murdoch's scrofulous media empire and attack on anyone advocating an enquiry that might seek to reign in Murdoch's near-monopoly control of Australia's news media, and, in consequence, his dangerous influence over the Oz political system, reminds us once again that "libertarians" really aren't interested in liberty: they just want to privatise tyranny.

Livable

A joke of my own divising:

Melbourne judged world's most livable city? Apparently the judges believe people need regular watering.

Pahahahahah! See what I did there?!

5 Things to Read

As this month's statement of the blindingly obvious has been a tad tardy, here's a smorgasbord of same:

Autumn of the empire - Joshua Clover

An era of industrial expansion and real growth bears the seeds of its own undoing; when it fails, the financial sector must leap in to generate the profits elsewhere. But these expansions of the financial sector are always temporary, if not indeed illusory. There is no financial expansion that is not a bubble. Credit is, for all the many mysteries and wonders in which it traffics, money spent now for work to be done later: a mortgage, a share of IBM, and the mezzanine tranche of synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligation are all, in more and less evident ways, “claims on future labor.” The moment that it becomes evident that all that productive labor is not waiting up around the bend, then nobody wants to give out any more credit. And the creditors want their money. And the investors want out of risk. Pop.

Strange death of American revolution - Jada Thacker

The origin of American civil government was not, as certain champions of Locke’s social contract would have it, to secure to each citizen his equal share of security and liberty, but rather to secure for the oligarchs their superior position of power and wealth.

It was for precisely this reason the United States Constitution was written not by a democratically-elected body, but by an unelected handful of men who represented only the privileged class.

Accordingly, the Constitution is a document which prescribes, not proscribes, a legal framework within which the economically privileged minority makes the rules for the many.

There is nothing in the Constitution that limits the influence of wealth on government. No better example of this intentional oversight exists than the creation of the first American central bank. ...

The bank was necessary in order to carry out a broader plan: the debts of the new nation would be paid with money loaned by the wealthy, and the people were to be taxed to pay the money back to the wealthy, with interest.

The 1791 Whiskey Tax – which penalized small-scale distillers in favor of commercial-scale distilleries – was passed to underwrite this scheme of bottom-up wealth-redistribution. When frontiersmen predictably rebelled against the tax, they were literally shackled and dragged on foot through the snowbound Allegheny Mountains to appear in show-trials at the national capital, where they were condemned to death.

Socialist bureaucrats were not the culprits here: the 16,000 armed militiamen that crushed the rebels were led in person by two principal Founding Fathers, President George Washington and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the author of both the central bank and the whiskey tax legislation.

(After the disproportionate tax drove small producers out of competition, Washington went into the whiskey-distilling business, becoming by the time of his death the largest whiskey-entrepreneur in Virginia, if not the nation.)

This should be a “text-book” example of how oligarchy works, but such examples are rarely admitted in textbooks. Instead, the textbooks assure us that the Founders established the nation upon the principles of “liberty and justice for all,” words that do not appear in any founding document.

Labor has neither the brains nor strength to fix its problems - Guy Rundle

Indeed part of the problem for Labor is that figures such as Emerson and Costa would prefer to win the argument in the party and lose the election, than the reverse. Their commitment is to the idea and practice of neoliberal economics, and they see the party as a host body for those ideas to propagate through. When such policies deliver a relentless decline in Labor's base, they blame the relatively marginal role of social issues politics associated with the Greens. Given all these factors we can say that Labor is not fit for purpose, and it seems prudent to work on the assumption that the rest of the 'teens is Tony Abbott and the Coalition's to lose (and if anyone can do that, it's Abbott).

In the battle for the right, the market always wins - Jeff Sparrow

It goes likes this. Conservative activists, often ordinary people from struggling backgrounds, get whipped into a lather by demagogic neocons over, say, the amount of smut and blasphemy screening in the movies. These activists duly campaign for conservative candidates, who, once elected, implement the neoliberal economics to which the Right is fundamentally committed.

Thereafter, the free market does what the free market is supposed to do: namely, freeing up corporations to make money. Hollywood, of course, knows it will sell more tickets to crass sex comedies than upright Christian narratives, and so, lo and behold, crass sex comedies are what it delivers.

Stretching charges of anti-semitism - Lawrence Davidson

And who, except of course the Zionists, says that Zionism is a desirable vehicle for the expression of this alleged right of self-determination?

Let us face it. Israel and its Zionist ideology were born of the will of a small minority of Jews, almost exclusively from Central and Eastern Europe, most of whom were secularists, and almost all of whom carried within their heads the poisoned perceptions of European imperialist bigotry – an outlook which still characterizes the state they set up.

That is why, in practice, Zionism has resulted in a prima facie racist environment in Israel. And now we are told that, according to the “working definition,” pointing out the link between Zionism and racism is an act of anti-Semitism!

Embedded

For the record, here's the long version of a comment left at Larvatus Prodeo, shortened there for brevity (I say "left"; LP blithely collapsed as soon as I pressed "Post"). Here, it should probably be even longer:

It amuses me that journalists insist on their special status because they supposedly tell the public about how the political system is operating and yet consistently fail to recognise their own role in that system. If Insiders, for example, was true to its name it would report as much about the spear-carriers in the commentariat as their favourite pollies; as much about the agendas driven at the behest of media magnates, corporations and other extra-parliamentary centres of power and their PR systems of "thinktanks" and astroturf, as about the soundbites coming from the politicians; and break the kayfabe about how information about politics comes to the journos in the first place. (I acknowledge it would be far too much to ask them to acknowledge the institutional features of media that makes it a factory of bien pensant* bourgeois orthodoxy.)

Of course, they - speaking of soundbites - won't even talk sensibly about the politicians' overt side of the propaganda system, never mind their own part in it: who pointed out, after Joe Hockey got all weepy in 2007 about the people he was going to have to sack, that these were ministerial staffers [an important source of leaks**], that is, political appointees there to serve the politician in a PR capacity, not the public, and yet paid with public money? Look how they complained about Rudd organising press conferences without inviting everybody rather than ask the more obvious question - why are you flying to the middle of nowhere to wear a silly hat and make an announcement you could have made by e-mail? These particular hands feed the media maw and it will not bite them. The media will complain about any form of government "waste" except that which provides copy.

Their keenness to provide political/official sources with anonymity is one example of their embeddedness. They will tell you they need to provide anonymity to keep the source friendly, thus allowing them access to the information they share with us. But the identity of the source is the most important part of the information as it allows the readers to assess the credibility of the story. Naturally the source doesn't want the audience to be able to properly assess credibility, any more than they would wish to be publicly associated with what is almost certainly a lie; but then neither does the journo: letting punters know the source is an excellent way of killing the story's news value. Thus they cheerfully set themselves up as PR conduits and avoid the tiresome and tricky chores of objective analysis. [Weirdly, this paragraph is one deleted from the LP comment, when it would be more use there than here, where I make this point on a regular basis.]

*I believe this phrase is Tony Jones' middle name.

**As we saw during the Children Overboard fiasco, the ministerial staffer's function as a conduit of information to the media is matched by their role as a filter between public servants and the minister, in case the public service attempts to make the minister aware of something it would be better for him not to know.

All of a Sudden

"Gay is one of the most beautiful words ... no-one should have the right to take that word off us."

Bob Katter, b. 1945.

Bringing Up Baby, 1938.

Those determined to live in the past clearly prefer to know as little about it as possible.

Temper

Glen Newey at the LRB.

Lewis Namier famously described 18th-century British politics as 'aristocracy tempered by rioting'.

...

Namier's bon mot could be rewritten for our times as 'plutocracy tempered by riot'. Consumerism holds up varnished designer tat as the sine qua non of civic respect. Its supporting ideology holds that monetary access to consumer goods flows from desert, the sort of thing stockpiled by politicians' beloved 'hard-working people and their families'. But everyone - not least Keele University cleaning staff, employed for over thirty years, who get up before six every morning to earn the minimum wage - knows that that is all balls. Acquisitiveness and arson are, as far as this goes, two sides of the same coin. Consumerism may be a mug's game; but acting as though it efficiently metes out rewards according to desert is a mug's game run by the mugs. Small wonder when the lid is taken off that those who know the system is a put-up job fill their boots.

Violent Youths

The Bullingdon Club -- a members' only dining society in the university preserved for the most privileged of (male only) students -- is known for breaking the plates, glasses and windows of local restaurants and drinking establishments and destroying college property in Oxford. (The U.K. newspaper, The Independent, described it as a club "whose raison d'être has for more than 150 years been to afford tailcoat-clad aristocrats a termly opportunity to behave very badly indeed.”) New recruits are secretly elected and informed of this by having their college bedroom invaded and "trashed".

The Conservative leader's affiliation with the Bullingdon and its elite and riotous reputation has at times haunted his political career. In the 2010 election, in which Cameron's Conservative Party won a majority in Parliament for the first time since 1997, his opponents and the media frequently brought up his Oxford past. A television documentary was devoted to one particular night in 1987 -- when both Cameron and the current London mayor, Boris Johnson, were Bullingdon members – during which club members were arrested for causing havoc in Oxford and broke a restaurant window. Cameron claimed he went to bed early on the night in question, but the Financial Times reported in 2010 that he was "most definitely" at the party. An old Bullingdon friend told the paper that Cameron's determination not be caught was "extraordinary."

Hee hee hee hee hee.

Apples and Syringes

In the Herald, Gerard Henderson again demonstrates the function of hiring numbskull right-wing pundits for small-l liberal broadsheets: to publish stuff that the pwoggy readership can enjoy getting indignant at, which at the same time presents no intellectual challenge to refute:

It's understandable that Labor is aggrieved by the criticism of its carbon tax and national broadband network in such News Limited papers as The Australian and The Daily Telegraph. Before the 2007 election, the Coalition felt aggrieved by criticism over the AWB food-for-oil scandal and the "children overboard" controversy.

Undoubtedly Gerard thought that equating two ALP policies with two Coalition scandals, characterised by corruption and ministerial duplicity, made his point admirably, never mind considering how The Australian and The Daily Telegraph spruiked the Children Overboard lies immediately before the 2001 election when good journalism might have made a difference.

Of course, if you really want to annoy pwog broadsheet readers you hire right-wing columnists who aren't easily refuted cretins (yes, they exist) or - so very much worse - someone to the readership's left. Ooh, they hate that!

Library Stamps

Alan Bennett on libraries in the LRB:

Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I’ve written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking in character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

That someone’s working library has a particular tone, with some shelves more heterogeneous than others, for example, or (in the case of an art historian) filled with offprints and monographs or (with an old-fashioned literary figure for instance) lined with the faded covers and jackets of distinctive Faber or Cape editions, does not seem to occur to a designer. On several occasions I’ve had to bring my own books down to the theatre to give the right worn tone to the shelves.

In The Old Country (1977) the books (Auden, Spender, MacNeice) are of central importance to the plot. I wanted their faded buffs and blues and yellows bleached into a unity of tone that suggested long sunlit Cambridge afternoons, the kind of books you might find lining Dadie Rylands’s rooms, for instance. Anthony Blunt’s bookshelves were crucial in Single Spies, the look of an art historian’s bookshelves significantly different from those of a literary critic say. All this tends to pass the designer by. One knows that designers seldom read, but they don’t have much knowledge of Inca civilisation either or the Puritan settlement of New England and yet they seem to cope perfectly well reproducing them. An agglomeration of books as illustrating the character of their owner seems to defeat them.

(Some might find Bennett's assessment of the literacy of art designers unduly harsh, although it's not his main point. I, on the other hand, was reminded of Harlan Ellison's story explaining why the entrance to the city on the edge of forever was strewn with broken masonry and truncated Greek columns: apparently the designer had decided that "runes" was an idiosyncratic spelling of "ruins".)

Karma

From Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (yes, that Nick Davies):

In his highly revealing biography, The Murdoch Archipelago, the former Sunday Times journalist Bruce Page goes back to January 1968 to provide an early and vivid example of how the man works. Murdoch then was still in the early stages of building his empire from his base in Adelaide and, in search of a political ally, he had started dealing with the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, 'Black Jack' McEwen. In January 1968, Black Jack found himself at the centre of a crisis.

The Prime Minister, Harold Holt, had drowned while swimming from a beach near Melbourne. Black Jack was suddenly elevated to the post of Acting Prime Minister. However, he knew he couldn't keep the job, because he led the Country Party, which was the minority partner in a coalition government. The bigger party, the Liberals, would choose a new leader, on 9 January. The choice was between two men: John Gorton and Billy McMahon. Black Jack wanted Gorton, a weak boozer of a man. So he had to stop Billy McMahon.

Black Jack publicly declared that his Country Party would refuse to serve under Billy McMahon but mysteriously refused to explain why. Secretly, in his role as Acting Prime Minister, he called in the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and urged him to investigate a close associate of Billy McMahon, named Max Newton. Black Jack claimed that Newton was a subversive, secretly working to sabotage the Australian economy on behalf of the Japanese. It was a lie, but the head of ASIO agreed to open a file and see what he could find. He found nothing. Nevertheless, the mere existence of the ASIO file was enough for Black Jack.

Four days before the leadership vote, on the evening of 5 January, as Bruce Page recounts, Black Jack called Rupert Murdoch to his suite in the Kurrajong Hotel in Canberra and handed him a dossier on Max Newton's supposed treachery on behalf of the Japanese. This was a double delight for the young media proprietor. It was not only a chance to do a favour for his political ally. It was also a chance to hurt Newton, who had formerly been one of Murdoch's editors and had made the bad mistake of publicly describing him as 'a whippersnapper from Adelaide'.

Later that evening, Murdoch phoned Newton, and said simply: 'This is the whippersnapper from Adelaide. I suggest you read my paper tomorrow.' The paper was the Australian. The next day's story did everything that Black Jack McEwen had wanted, destroying the reputation of Max Newton and, with it, the chances of Billy McMahon winning the vote to become Prime Minister. The headline read: 'WHY MCEWEN VETOES MCMAHON: FOREIGN AGENT IS THE MAN BETWEEN THE LEADERS'. And it told the story of Max Newton, the supposed secret agent of Japanese subversion. It was entirely false, though it is always possible that Murdoch himself believed it. There was no reporter's byline on the story. It was the owner's own work, dictated by the politician who was his ally. Four days later, with the rest of the Australian media crawling all over Murdoch's exclusive, Billy McMahon lost the election, and, just as Black Jack wanted, John Gorton became Prime Minister.

A year later, in January 1969, Murdoch tried to make his first big move out of Australia, bidding to buy the News of the World in London. But he was trapped by Australian currency regulations, which prevented him exporting his money to the UK. Black Jack McEwen came to his rescue, summoning the servile John Gorton to his hotel suite to sign an authority which would allow Murdoch to get his cash out of the country. Gorton asked if he had any whisky. As McEwen later recalled: 'The papers were signed. Rupert and I were out in the garden. Gorton went off with his Scotch. Rupert went off to buy his newspaper.'

Given this story is extracted in its entirety from the Bruce Page book cited, which I also own, I should probably have quoted Mr Page, but it's the book by Mr Davies I'm reading at present, and thus the one available to scan. I should also use this as an opportunity to review Mr Davies' book but so far I'm only eighteen pages in. Up to now it's been a bit of a curate's egg but I expect it to improve.

Old News

Although the accusations of moral bankruptcy and peddling "tittle tattle" are accurate enough they still remain vulnerable to the old lie: this is what the readers want. But, as I point out with tedious regularity, the function of journalists in the commercial media, both "tabloid" and "quality", is to create content that will attract the kind of readers (the product) preferred by advertisers (the customer), and, usually, the customers' preferred product is one that is insular, self-centred, trivial and ill-informed. To claim your dreck, whether tabloid sleaze, corporate propaganda or bien-pensant bourgeois wankery, is what your readers want is like the corrupt pieman proclaiming "Of course I use rancid horsemeat. That's what the pies want!"

Confidential-source Status

At Inside Story Matthew Ricketson writes about the issue of anonymous sources. He looks at the Simon Overland fiasco and the Plame affair, quoting from Norman Pearlstein's memoir on the latter:

Pearlstine writes, “The more I learned about the use of confidential sources, the more I came to understand how their misuse was undermining the press’s credibility.” ...

“We need to distinguish between ‘anonymous’ sources, whose names we leave out of stories, and ‘confidential’ stories, whose names we won’t disclose in litigation,” he concludes. “We must also be more honest with our sources, and we must be vigilant to make sure our sources are honest with us. Reporters must explain that they cannot promise more than the law allows, and they shouldn’t make promises that are against the public interest. Journalists aren’t above the law, and we have to stop acting as though we are.”

How do we distinguish between day to day anonymous sources and those to whom we should promise confidentiality? “The source who seeks confidentiality should typically be risking livelihood, life, or reputation, and there should be no other way for the reporter to get the information than from the source… Confidential-source status should never be granted to government officials who are trying to spin a story, especially if they are breaking the law when they do so.”

Though a credible analysis, I'd still like to see some recognition that granting anonymity is usually about protecting the value of a story that would, without anonymous sources, not be news.

Petitio Principii

From Kenneth Davidson on PPPs for hospitals:

Under the national public-private partnership guidelines used by the Victorian government, a so-called "public sector comparator" is constructed to give a "truer" basis of comparison between public and private funding of projects. The key assumption in constructing any such comparator is the claim that the actual interest paid by the government underestimates the real cost of public financing. These costs include claimed inefficiencies inherent in government contracting - such as cost overruns. Other assumptions include the claimed ability of private partners to take over "risks" otherwise embedded in public ownership.

Ah, so that's how it works. In order to demonstrate that public-private partnerships are more efficient than purely public operations it is first necessary to assume that public-private partnerships are more efficient than purely public operations.

Irrelevantly, you'll note I have preferred the reasonably accurate Latin translation of the original Greek in the title; only mavenistic idiots say "begs the question".

Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

You can tell it's a Canadian riot because people cleaned up afterward and it involved performance art.

Oh, look - The Hun found a local angle.

Initially I thought the couple were involved in a play on the Beatles song title above; specifically the frequent expropriation of the "it" there to refer to street protests (not McCartney's intention - according to The Pede it was about a couple of randy monkeys.) But that's probably just me overthinking things again.

Yawn

Good God, this month has been tedious.

Coventry

[T]he last two speakers of Ayapaneco, although neighbours, are not on speakers. For one thing, they speak different versions of the language and don’t accept they way the other talks. In any case, they don’t like each other; no one, including them it seems, can remember why. So Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velazquez, living 500 metres apart, do not use the language that only they can speak, because the great thing about language is that it is for communicating with other people.

Watching The Clock II

In the New York Review of Books, another article about The Clock.

Repetitions occur, and appear to be meaningful. If we see a lot of James Bond and Columbo it is because time, staged time, is their natural milieu. Fake clocks drive their narrative worlds: countdowns and alibis, crime scenes. This may also account for the frequency of Denzel Washington.

The Clock makes you realize how finely attuned you are to the rhythms of commercial (usually American) film. Each foreign clip is spotted at once, long before the actor opens his mouth. And it’s not the film stock or even the mustaches that give the game away, it’s the variant manipulation of time, primarily its slowness, although of course this “slowness” is only the pace of real time. In commercial film, decades pass in a minute, or a day lasts two and half hours. We flash back, we flash forward. There’s always a certain pep. “Making lunch” is a shot of an open fridge, then a chopping board, then food cooked on the stove. A plane ride is check-in, a cocktail, then customs. Principles dear to Denzel - tension, climax, resolution - are immanent in all the American clips, while their absence is obvious in the merest snatch of French art house. A parsing of the common enough phrase “I don’t like foreign movies” might be “I don’t want to sit in a cinema and feel time pass.”

Declare

Incidentally - it was news to me, when I researched how to cast a valid vote prior to the state election, that you could indicate preferences above the line in the Council election, a reform I'd been in favour of for a while (though I can see why the major parties weren't falling over themselves to publicise the change). Though unexpected, that was not, however, the weirdest feature of the NSW system - this was.

If you go to the candidate lists you can access the pdfs of their declarations that they have never murdered a kiddy. Coz you've got to the draw the line somewhere, right?

Above the Line

"In all fairness, and for true democracy, allow everyone to have their name above the line."

Erm.

Two or more candidates may form a group. Where there are 15 or more candidates in a group, they can request that a group voting square be printed on the ballot paper to be used for ‘above the line’ voting. A group of 14 or less cannot request a group voting square.

Where 15 or more candidates from a registered political party request to form a group on the ballot paper the party name or abbreviation will be printed below the group voting square. The party name or abbreviation will also be shown ‘below the line’ below each candidate’s name.

If there are less than 15 candidates the party may still request to form a group on the ballot paper, however they are not entitled to a group voting square and the party name or abbreviation will not appear ‘above the line’. Candidates’ names will appear ‘below the line’ with the party name or abbreviation.

...

A group of 15 or more candidates not nominated by a registered political party may form a group on the ballot paper. They can request a group voting square be shown ‘above the line’, however the group cannot be identified ‘above the line’. The word ‘Independent’ cannot be shown below the group voting square or against candidates’ names ‘below the line’.

...just in case you were wondering what she was on about.

Not that there's any good reason any group of fifteen people who can get their shit together to register as a group ticket on the Legislative Council ballot, but can't get their shit together to register as a political party at least twelve months prior to the election (which in New South Wales is held after a fixed term), shouldn't be allowed a group name, except, of course, that if they were, almost none of the minors would bother registering as a political party.

In the Area Under "Do Not Write In This Space" He Wrote "OK"

My attention is drawn to the Australian Electoral Commission's report on informal voting in the 2010 Federal election. Note:

In the 2010 House of Representatives election there was a national informality rate of 5.55 per cent. This was the highest informality rate recorded since 1984, and represents a substantial increase from the 3.95 per cent recorded at the 2007 House of Representatives election.

...

More than half of all informal ballots in 2010 had incomplete numbering or were totally blank (27.8 per cent with a number '1' only, 2.6 per cent with other forms of incomplete numbering and 28.9 per cent blank).

Ballots with "incomplete numbering" are, of course, ballots where the voter has clearly indicated at least their first choice but failed to preference all of the other candidates. It's clear who these people were voting for, but due to the regulations put in place by the Coalition government these votes are not counted. Instead of the previous AEC approach - counting any vote where the intention of the voter was clear - the Tories insisted that valid votes must follow exactly the voting instructions provided. Their reason for so insisting is pure politics, nothing but an attempt at voter suppression, based on the assumption that people likely to make errors are either less educated or of a non-English speaking background - i.e. more likely to vote Labor.

5.5% voted informally out of a voter turnout of 13,131,667, of which 30.4% failed to number all boxes after numbering at least one. More than a quarter of the informal voters were people who wrote "1" next to their preferred candidate and then stopped. That's about two hundred thousand people who clearly expressed their choice of candidate, but whose votes were ignored.

Commentary

At Japanese art and culture site Pink Tentacle, a selection of woodblocks featuring giant catfish:

In November 1855, the Great Ansei Earthquake struck the city of Edo (now Tokyo), claiming 7,000 lives and inflicting widespread damage. Within days, a new type of color woodblock print known as namazu-e (lit. "catfish pictures") became popular among the residents of the shaken city. These prints featured depictions of mythical giant catfish (namazu) who, according to popular legend, caused earthquakes by thrashing about in their underground lairs. In addition to providing humor and social commentary, many prints claimed to offer protection from future earthquakes.

...

This print shows a namazu engaged in a fierce game of "neck tug-of-war" with the god Kashima. A group of earthquake victims root for Kashima, while those who typically profit from earthquakes (construction workers, firemen, news publishers, etc.) root for the catfish.

Tell

Q&A: Alternative vote referendum - What do opponents of the change say?

Defenders of the current system say it generally leads to stable government and has historically reflected the will of the public in that unpopular governments have been voted out.*

UAE joins Gulf forces to restore Bahrain's stability

“The UAE has decided to send a security force ... in response to a request by the sisterly kingdom of Bahrain to help and participate in strengthening security and internal stability,” [Minister of State for Foreign Affairs] Gargash said.

Whatever the circumstances, it's a dead giveaway: if you use the word "stability", you're an enemy of democracy.

(Well, unless the circumstances involve architecture or tectonics.)

* The two halves of this sentence are, in essence, contradictory, but never mind.

Scene

“It was like this weird surreal scene that one doesn’t expect at the National Gallery.”

Rene Magritte throws down his bowler hat in a fury and storms out.

Madhouse

Your correspondent spent most of the last week in the wilds of Iceland, blissfully out of Wi-Fi range; as soon as you come back into town, and catch up with the news, you wonder what sort of madhouse your country has become. Kristallnacht in Marrickville? People’s cultural identity being assessed by holding up a bunch of swatches to their skin, to see if they match the décor? And the Prime Minister gives an address named after the most unlikely, un-Australian Labor leader in history to damn a whole political party for not sharing in the “delight of family and nation”?

These three events — Andrew Bolt’s appearance on accusations of racial vilification, the revival of attacks on the Greens as some sort of Nazi party, and Julia Gillard’s strange, strange Whitlam Oration — have all been discussed at length in the past week, but not as the expression of a single process, which they are.

Each in their own way represent a desperate desire not to acknowledge a profoundly changed world, retreating into past fantasy as a substitute for a vision of the future. Throw in Greg Sheridan’s bandwagon-jumping mea culpa on multiculturalism, and you have a picture of a carping and negative political culture, structured that way for obvious reasons.

Mobile Vulgus

...a display of chocolate bunnies was knocked over and had to be put painstakingly back together.

Bunk

Browsing over at Antony Green's blog, after checking to see what the likelihood of Pauline Hanson getting an 8 year sinecure in the NSW Legislative Council was, I ran across this news, which I failed to notice at the time:

26 eminent British historians have fulminated against Britain adopting the Alternative Vote, the preferential voting system that we have happily used in Australia for more than eight decades.

In an open letter to the Times of London, the historians have railed against the terrible injustice of the Alternative Vote.

The historians are Professor David Abulafia, Dr John Adamson, Professor Antony Beevor, Professor Jeremy Black, Professor Michael Burleigh, Professor John Charmley, Professor Jonathan Clark, Dr Robert Crowcroft, Professor Richard J. Evans, David Faber, David Starkey, Professor Niall Ferguson, Dr Amanda Foreman, Dr John Guy, Robert Lacey, Dr Sheila Lawlor, Lord Lexden, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Dr Richard Rex, Dr Andrew Roberts, Professor Richard Shannon, Chris Skidmore, MP, D. R. Thorpe, Alison Weir, Philip Ziegler, Professor Lord Norton.

It's an interesting list, although I am unfamiliar with most of the names on it. Beevor and Black are historians of warfare, and Starkey and Weir seem to concentrate on monarchy, which may explain their confusion on matters electoral; possibly the same is true of historian of the Third Reich, Richard Evans. Unsurprising in the extreme is the presence of the Burleigh-Ferguson-Roberts circle-jerk of rightist empire-lovers. I wonder what the problem with the rest of them is.

Also unsurprising: these signatories aren't arguing that a more democratic system than "AV", like proportional representation, would be better.

Don't Like Tory-Lite? Try Tory!

Watching (disaffected) Labor supporters vote is like watching a particularly stupid blowfly repeatedly banging its head against a closed window.

Let's Get Together and Have Fun

Piers Kelly at Crikey's language blog looks in more detail at the question of what Moomba really means. Apparently the old "up your bum" story might be an urban myth, as these translation stories often are.

Penitentiary

Guy Rundle in Crikey! on the incarceration of Bradley Manning:

Such forms of confinement are unquestionably torture, but they are torture of a very specific kind  —  a sort of paradoxical torture. If the aim of torture per se is to make the prisoner’s body rebel against their soul  —  have animal pain and terror fill the consciousness until any principle, belief, or commitment is undermined  —  then the “supermax” regime is the opposite  —  it dissolves subjectivity by removing all that is most basically human, from diversion to human connection.

This is the point made most famously by Foucault: that the notion that neat antiseptic prison regimes are more humane than physical punishment is the founding conceit of modernity. In many ways they can be worse. Solitary confinement and the microcontrol of a prisoner’s behaviour are designed as a form of total annihilation, because they exert enormous energies in ensuring that the prisoner goes on existing, while depriving him of anything resembling life. That division of existence from purposeful life is effectively a standardised and routinised way of producing despair.

Not surprisingly, it is a particularly American form of human annihilation. The “supermax” prisons, and such total regimes, are the descendants of the first modern prison schemes, the penitentiaries established by the Quakers in Pennsylvania in the 1830s. Where other prisons housed prisoners collectively in squalor as part of their punishment, the Quakers believed that this merely bred criminality. The object was to make a prisoner repent (as the name suggests) by developing a relationship with God — and the only way to do that was to deprive a prisoner of a relationship with anyone else.

Thus, prisoners in the penitentiary were ideally utterly isolated from anyone else  —  they even had separate corridors so they couldn’t see each other. Eventually through their screaming isolation they would seek and find God. The gentle and peaceful Quakers thought that this invention was a force for good; many of those who observed it, such as Charles Dickens, thought it was a horrifying nightmare. But someone who never saw a problem with it was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America was based on the trip he took to the US to report on this marvellous new prison system, for the French government.

Much of Democracy in America was devoted to trying work out what the problems of the new American society might be. He never realised that the answer was the very thing he was sent to study  —  the penitentiary was the other side of American depthlessness, an indifference to the full humanity of others hidden from oneself by following correct procedure and affirming goodness of heart.

The penitentiary is bad enough when it’s part of a God-centred culture; when part of one  —  even the US  —  where God is a shaky notion, then it’s a literal Hell. Its deeply anti-human nature does achieve what the Quakers sought, since many prisoners become believers out of the sheer need for someone to talk to, but it’s a counterfeit conversion, won through psychological warfare.

With 2 million Americans in prison, many of them in semi-penitentiary style incarceration, the prison system mirrors key aspects of American life  —  in particular the substantial atomisation and isolation of everyday life.

Allegiance

In other news, fish still don't live in trees:

Note that Goldsmith isn't merely pointing out that American journalists are "patriotic" or "jingoistic" as individuals. He's saying that these allegiances shape their editorial judgments. And "patriotism" to Goldsmith doesn't merely mean some vague type of "love of country," but much more: this "sense of attachment" creates a desire to advance "U.S. national security interests," however the reporter perceives of those.

Leave aside just for the moment the question of whether it's good or bad for American journalists to allow such nationalistic allegiances to mold their journalism. One key point is that allowing such loyalties to determine what one reports or conceals is a very clear case of bias and subjectivity: exactly what most reporters vehemently deny they possess. Many establishment journalists love to tout their own objectivity -- insisting that what distinguishes them from bloggers, opinionists and others is that they simply report the facts, free of any biases or policy preferences. But if Goldsmith is right -- and does anyone doubt that he is? -- then it means that "the American press" generally and "senior American national security journalists" in particular operate with a glaring, overwhelming bias that determines what they do and do not report: namely, the desire to advance U.S. interests.

Burnishers

At Politico (via Mr Seymour):

One of the more unlikely figures to have advised a firm which has worked to burnish Libya's image and grow its economy is not registered with the Justice Department. Prominent neoconservative Richard Perle, the former Reagan-era Defense Department official and George W. Bush-era chairman of the Defense Policy Board, traveled to Libya twice in 2006 to meet with Qadhafi, and afterward briefed Vice President Dick Cheney on his visits, according to documents released by a Libyan opposition group in 2009.

Perle traveled to Libya as a paid adviser to the Monitor Group, a prestigious Boston-based consulting firm with close ties to leading professors at the Harvard Business School. The firm named Perle a senior adviser in 2006.

The Monitor Group described Perle’s travel to Libya and the recruitment of several other prominent thinkers and former officials to burnish Libya’s and Qadhafi’s image in a series of documents obtained and released by a Libyan opposition group, the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition, in 2009.

...

A 2007 Monitor memo named among the prominent figures it had recruited to travel to Libya and meet with Qadhafi “as part of the Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi” Perle, historian Francis Fukuyama, Princeton Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, famous Nixon interviewer David Frost, and MIT media lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of former deputy secretary of state and director of national intelligence John Negroponte.

...

Monitor is not listed with the Justice Department as a lobbyist for Libya, as it explained in a 2006 letter to its Libyan client:

“Monitor is not a lobbying organization,” its CEO Mark Fuller and Director Rajeev Singh-Molares wrote to their Libyan client in July 2006. “Our ability to introduce important, influential visitors to Libya’s advantage depends on our experience, prestige, networks and reputation for independence. We are deeply committed to helping you with this program.”

The memo also mentions popularist of the "Third Way" Anthony Giddens, and says of David Frost:

Frost has repeatedly requested the opportunity to interview Qadhafi, in a program that would be broadcast to a global television audience. A date has not yet been agreed.

Better get a wriggle on.

Tinkering

The more interesting the world gets, the less I have to say. So instead I added a bunch of stuff to the blogroll: Things Magazine; Inside Story; Salon.com's War Room; the Verso, LRB, FAIR and Overland blogs; Talking Squid; Pink Tentacle; Greg Palast; Neil Gaiman and Drawn!

I think I'll call it the Alps.

Auld Lang Syne

Robert Dreyfuss finally gets around to penning the piece on the Muslim Brotherhood he promised here. It's a useful overview of the Brotherhood's history, influence, and possible mellowing. Since the January 25 rebellion started, almost everything on the net about the Brotherhood has cheerfully ignored their off-and-on history as clients of the US (and the British), part of imperial policies designed to marginalise Third World leftists and nationalists by abetting the Religious Right. Mr Dreyfuss includes this history - unsurprisingly, as it was a major strand of the thesis of his good-book-with-a-silly-title Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. More comprehensive coverage is supplied in the linked article by Ian Johnson. Both Mr Dreyfuss and Mr Johnson can't resist including the photograph of Brotherhood leader Said Ramadan meeting that radical leftist and coiner of the phrase "the military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower.

Well, Well

What a remarkably interesting year this is shaping up to be.

Niche

In other news, Tom Switzer, Awful Pundit, Is Awful.

Listen

Pepe "Pipelineistan" Escobar gets clamorous at Asia Times Online:

Islamophobes of the world, shut up and listen to the sound of people power. Your artificial Middle East dichotomy - it's either "our" dictators or jihadism - was never more than a cheap trick. Political repression, mass unemployment and rising food prices are more lethal than an army of suicide bombers. This is the actual way history is written; a country of 80 million - two-thirds of which born after their dictator came to power in 1981, and no less than the heart of the Arab world - finally shatters the Wall of Fear and crosses to the side of self-respect.

Egypt's neo-Pharaoh Hosni Mubarak threw a curfew; people never left the streets. The police dissolved; citizens themselves organized for security. The tanks rolled in; people kept singing "hand in hand, the army and people are together". This is no think-tank-engineered color revolution, this is not regimented Islamists; this is average Egyptians bearing the national flag, "together, as individuals, in a great co-operative effort to reclaim our country", in the words of Egyptian Nobel prize-winning novelist Ahdaf Soueif.

Via Nana Levu commenting at Larvatus Prodeo, where some are taking a moment to whimper about the Muslim Brotherhood.

Limited Options

This week's "well, exactly" come from Middle East Report Online:

Amidst the hand wringing in the mainstream media over Obama's "limited options" in Egypt, through whose Suez Canal cruise oil tankers and the warships of the US Fifth Fleet, the truth is that the entire debate over democracy promotion in the Arab world and greater Middle East has been one long, bitterly unfunny joke. The issue has never been whether the US should promote democracy; it has been when the US will stop trying to suppress it. The bargains with tyrants lay a "commitment trap" for Washington, which must solemnly swear allegiance to each strongman lest others in the club have second thoughts about holding up their end. The despots, in turn, assume that the Marines or their equivalents will swoop in to the rescue if need be. Most, like Ben Ali, are mistaken, if nothing else because an ambitious underling is often waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, just as Iranians have not forgotten the Carter administration's eleventh-hour loyalty to the Shah some 32 years later, neither will Pakistanis soon forgive the US for standing by Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Americans wondered why their country had been targeted. Many, of course, settled upon the solipsistic, emotionally comforting explanation that "they hate us for our values" or resorted to conspiracy theory about Islam and world conquest. Saner sorts looked to the US history of support for Israel in its colonization of Palestine or coziness with certain kingdoms sitting atop vast pools of petroleum. But these factors have never been the whole answer. All who continue to wonder about the rest should ponder this day, January 28, 2011. The words of Obama and his chorus of apologists say it all: When it comes to the aspirations of ordinary Arabs for genuinely participatory politics and true self-determination, those vaunted American values are suspended, even when "special relationships" and hydrocarbon riches are not directly at issue. And the anti-democratic sentiment is bipartisan: On this question, there is less than a dime’s worth of difference between "progressive" Democrats and Republican xenophobes, between pinstriped State Department Arabists and flannel-clad Christian fundamentalists, between oil-first "realists" and Israel-first neo-conservatives. There is none.

Via Mr Loewenstein.

Meet Cute

From Peter Pomerantsev at the LRB blog:

This is how they met. He was alone and bored at his post, a little brick hut high in the Caucasus. It was night and he was drunk. He wanted to find a girl away from the front. He looked down at the serial number on his gun. Just for the hell of it he took out his phone and dialled the Moscow area code followed by the serial number. A sleepy girl answered.

'Who is this?'

He told her. She slammed down the phone.

'I just liked her voice,' he said. 'So I kept on phoning.'

He called every day. Slowly she caved in. They sent each other photos of themselves on their mobiles. Two weeks before our shoot he had some leave and came to visit her. She was from a traditional family from the Caucasus, and he asked her father’s permission to marry her. He agreed. Now they both wore rings. The wedding was planned for when he returned from the Chechen front in six months time.

Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how this story ended.

(And, yes, I'm being more than usually irrelevant.)

Assonance

Mr Denmore commenting at Larvatus Prodeo:

Political journalists hate numbers (generally) because numbers provide proportion and sometimes that can ruin the story. The pink batts saga, that Possum so brilliantly deconstructed, was a prime example.

So innumeracy is like anonymity in that respect.

(Link to Possum piece added by me.)

Observation

From some tangential historical background in an article about the War-on-Terror gulag, by JoAnn Wypijewski for the latest subscriber edition of Counterpunch:

In photographs, those [World War 2] POWs are always bareheaded, facing the camera, in shirt-sleeves, often picking crops or felling trees, or standing in groups in a gymnasium. Back in the 1990s I came upon a plaque in Aliceville, Alabama, touting the arrival of the German prisoners there as the impetus for a sports arena and playing field, a theater, bakery, and other appurtenances of bustling society. A museum displays specimens of the Germans’ pottery, mementos of their productions of Faust, their concert performances of Wagner and Beethoven, their newspaper, Der Zaungast.

Literally "fence guest", zaungast refers to people who watch concerts and shows for free by peeking over the wall around the venue. By extension it means those who observe situations over which they can have no possible influence. Which is to say, the Germans have a word for everything.

Primordial Debt

An alternative explanation is primordial-debt theory, a school of thought developed largely in France by economists, anthropologists, historians, and classicists; its foundational text is Michel Aglietta and André Orléan’s La Violence de la Monnaie (1992). Adherents insist that monetary policy cannot be separated from social policy, that the two have always been intertwined. Governments use taxes to create money, which they are able to do because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another. This debt is the essence of society itself.

At first, the argument goes, this sense of debt was expressed not through the state, but through religion. The hymns, prayers, and poetry collected in the Vedas and the Brahmanas, the foundations of Hindu thought, constitute the earliest-known reflections on the nature of debt, which they treat as synonymous with guilt and sin. According to the commentators of the Brahmanas, human existence is itself a form of debt: A man, being born, is a debt; he is born to death, and only by way of sacrifice does he redeem himself from death. Two famous passages in the Brahmanas insist that we are born as a debt not just to the gods (to be repaid in sacrifice) but also to the sages who created the Vedic learning (to be repaid through study), to our ancestors (to be repaid by having children), and, finally, to the whole of humanity (to be repaid with hospitality to strangers).

The first explicit theory of the debt owed by each living person to the society that makes his or her existence possible was formulated by Auguste Comte in his last work, The Catechism of Positive Religion (1852)...

Comte doesn’t use the word debt, but it is clear what he means: We have already accumulated endless debts before we get to the age at which we can even think of paying them. And by that time there’s no way even to calculate to whom we owe them. The only way to redeem ourselves is to be dedicated to the service of humanity.

Comte’s notion of an unlimited obligation to society crystallized in the notion of social debt, which was taken up among social reformers and, eventually, socialist politicians in many parts of Europe and abroad. In France the notion of a social debt soon became something of a catchphrase, a slogan — and, eventually, a cliché: “We are all born as debtors to society.” The state, according to this view, was merely the administrator of the existential debt that everyone owes to everyone.

Theories of existential debt always end up justifying — or laying claim to — structures of authority. What we really have in the idea of primordial debt is the ultimate nationalist myth. Once we owed our lives to the gods who created us, paid them interest in the form of animal sacrifice, and, ultimately, paid back the principal with our lives. Now we owe our lives to the nation that formed us, pay interest in the form of taxes, and, when it comes time to defend the nation against its enemies, pay back the principal with our lives. This is a great trap of the twentieth century: On the one side is the logic of the market, which insists that we don’t owe one another anything. On the other is the logic of the state, which insists that we are born with a debt we can never truly pay. In fact, the dichotomy is false. States created markets, markets require states, and neither could continue without the other.

From "To Have Is To Owe" by David Graeber at Triple Canopy.

Failure to Communicate

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch on how Wikileaks has done April Glaspie, former US ambassador to Iraq, a favour:

Transcripts of varying levels of credibility have been released over the years, but this week WikiLeaks published Glaspie's cable to the US State Department reporting her discussion with Saddam. What comes shining through is that the Iraqi leader never made clear that he was thinking of annexing the emirate as Iraq's 19th province. Notorious though he was for his bloodcurdling and exaggerated threats, for once he was not threatening enough. Everybody suspected he was conducting a heavy-handed diplomatic offensive to squeeze concessions, financial and possibly territorial, out of the Kuwaitis. Almost nobody predicted a full-scale invasion and occupation of Kuwait, in large part because this was an amazingly foolish move by Saddam, bound to provoke a backlash far beyond Iraq's power to resist.

I have always sympathized with diplomats and intelligence agents unfairly pilloried for failing to foresee that a country, about which they claim expert knowledge, is going to commit some act of stupidity much against its own interests.

History is full of examples of experts being dumbfounded by countries acting contrary to their own best interests. Stalin is often denigrated for disbelieving Soviet spies who told him that the German army was going to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. No doubt his paranoid suspicion that Britain was trying to lure him into a war with Hitler played a role. But another factor was that Stalin simply did not believe that Hitler would commit such a gross error as attacking him before finishing off Britain and thus start a war on two fronts, something that the Nazi regime had previously taken great pains to avoid.

A more recent example of a country's leaders blindly shooting themselves in the foot was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. I had been spending a lot of time in Iraq and was in Jordan when it happened. I had seen repeated Israeli incursions into Lebanon fail bloodily in the years since 1978. I could not believe the Israeli military were once again going to try their old discredited tactic of mass bombardment and limited ground assault in a bid to intimidate the world's toughest guerrillas.

Israelis tend to be more cynical about the abilities of their own military commanders than the rest of the world and, looking at the Israeli chief of staff on television, I thought of the old Israeli saying: "He was so stupid that even the other generals noticed." Even so, I could not rid myself of the idea that the Israelis must have something new up their sleeve. I was quite wrong and the war was a humiliating failure for Israel.

In Saddam's case it would be wrong to think of him as a stupid, though he had an exaggerated idea of his own abilities and place in history. He was a cunning, ruthless man who knew everything about Iraqi politics and how to manipulate or eliminate his rivals. Outside Iraq he was far less sure-footed, having spent little time abroad, and disastrously overplayed his hand by invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait 10 years later.

Dang. I guess I'll have to finally let go of this little fantasy scene, then.

Saddam: I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about - hell, George, I ain't embarrassed to use the word - I'm talkin' about ethics. You know I'm a drilling man. I like to tap the black gold. And I figure I got a right to expect that I can sip the dinosaur wine under my own patch. But every time I strike a field layin' a part under those sonofabitch Kuwaitis, before I know it the damn thing's dry. The Kuwaitis are draining it from their end. They know where I'm goin' to drill and they get to the field first. The point is, they ain't satisfied with the honest dollar they can make off their share. They ain't satisfied with the business I do with them or with the money I spent kicking the Iranians for 'em. They’re draining my fields, and blockin' my access to the Gulf, and that means part of the payoff that should be ridin' on my hip is ridin' on someone else's. So back we go to these questions - friendship, character, ethics. So it’s clear what I'm sayin'?

George H W Bush: As mud.

Saddam: It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from resource extraction. Now if you can't trust that, what can you trust? For a good return you gotta go with a mixed economy, and then you're back with anarchy. Right back inna jungle. On account of the breakdown of ethics. That's why ethics is important. It's the grease makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts a burden, beasts a prey. Ethics. Whereas the Kuwaitis are a horse of a different color ethics-wise. As in, they ain't got any.

H W: You sure it's them, ripping you off?

Tariq Aziz: It ain't elves.

H W: Nobody else knows about the fields?

Saddam: No one that ain't got ethics.

H W: What about the geologists you pay to sniff 'em out?

Tariq Aziz: We only pick geologists we can put the fear of God in.

...

H W: So you wanna invade.

Tariq Aziz: For starters.

H W: Sorry, Saddam. Kuwait pays me for protection.

Saddam: Listen, George, I ain't askin' for permission. I'm tellin' you as a courtesy. I need to do this thing, so it's gonna get done.

H W: Then I'm telling you as a courtesy that you'll have trouble. You came here to see if I'd kick if you annexed Kuwait. Well, there's your answer.

Saddam: Listen, George, I pay off to you every month like a greengrocer - a lot more than those playboy princes-

H W: You pay for protection, just like everyone else. Far as I know - and what I don't know in this town ain't worth knowing - the Congress haven't closed down your arms deals and the UN hasn't sanctioned you for gassin' Kurds. You haven't bought any license to conquer medieval statelets and today I ain't selling any. Now take your flunky and dangle.

Saddam: You think I'm some raghead fresh outta the dunes and you think you can kick me! But I'm too big for that now! I'm sick of takin' the strap from you, George! I'm sick a marchin' down to this goddamn office to kiss your scrawny New England ass and I'M SICK A THE HIGH HAT! (At door.) Youse fancypants, all of yer.

H W: Saddam, you're exactly as big as I let you be and no bigger and don't forget it. Ever.

Saddam: 'Ats right, George, you're the big-shot around here and I'm just some schnook likes to get slapped around.

Objectivity

Via Antony Loewenstein, Newsweek helpfully explains why American journalists are such craven lickspittles. Judging by the comments thread (which seems, happily, to contain as many skeptical Americans as other nationalities), Mr Loewenstein isn't the only person intrigued by the grotesque insularity and self-delusion evidenced in this choice quote:

American journalists, unlike many of their foreign counterparts, have a strong commitment to objectivity and nonpartisanship.

What's sad is the person who wrote that was almost certainly stating their honest belief.

Zonage à l’Américaine

From Luc Sante's review of The Invention of Paris, in the New York Review of Books:

A less visible, more insidious form of social control practiced in the 1960s was the elimination of the ancient practice of mixité: “The same building would house shops on the ground floor — the shopkeeper living on the mezzanine — apartments for the aristocracy on the second storey (the ‘noble’ floor before the invention of the lift), and workers in the attics” — the theme of Zola’s novel Pot-Bouille. Under Malraux, Pompidou, and their minions, zonage à l’américaine — zoning by income — was ruinously introduced to the oldest parts of the city. The results of all these social-engineering strategies include high prices, a fetishistic but skin-deep style of historical preservation, an antiseptic street culture, the further polarization of classes, and the gradual strangling of vertical mobility. But contrary to the crêpe-hangers, Hazan knows that even the ensemble of these factors cannot kill a city that is open to change, and that Paris can be redeemed by expansion, both cultural and geographic:

The tacit understanding with past generations is beginning to be renewed, and another “new Paris” is taking shape…. It is leaving the west of the city to advertising executives and oil tycoons, and pressing as always towards the north and east…. It is spilling over the line of hills from Montmartre to Charonne, crossing the terrible barrier of the Boulevard Périphérique…and stretching towards what is already de facto the twenty-first arrondissement, towards Pantin, Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, Bagnolet, Montreuil….

In order for its vitality to endure, that is, Paris must incorporate the banlieues and their inhabitants, just as in previous centuries it had knocked down its walls and taken in the masses crowded outside them.

(In French cuisine, à l’Américaine refers to cooking with a spicy tomato sauce. The phrase is also used in cinema criticism, meaning what you'd expect, and apparently was also a term of art in French brothels, though for what I'm not entirely keen to check.)

Pete Postlethwaite 1946-2010

And just last week I was remarking how often I would find myself thinking "Pete Postlethwaite? Why on Earth would they cast him in a role like this?" and then watching for a while and saying to myself "Ah. That's why."