Identity Politics

Just so we're clear, pointing out that "all elephants are gray, and Dumbo is an elephant, therefore Dumbo can fly" is not a valid syllogism is not the same thing as denying Dumbo's lived experience as an elephant.

Although, while we're on the subject, the technical term for someone who questions lived experience is a neurologist. Narrative memory not being reliable and all.

Catchphrase

When the convincing result of the vote was announced, helped by more than 100 new recruits to the government benches, one Tory MP was caught on microphone exclaiming: “Back of the net.”

A missed opportunity, I feel.

Laudable Pus

Consider the example of the weapon salve. This was a famous, or notorious, magical oint­ment developed and promoted by the Paracelsians... It was an ointment that could cure wounds incurred in battle by applying the ointment to the weapon that caused the wound... If, as seems likely, the weapon was not available, then the ointment was applied to a bandage or piece of cloth that had been soaked in blood from the wound but which was then kept away from the injury. This proved to be much more successful than the standard means of treating wounds... To understand this you just need to know what the standard method of treatment was.

Since time immemorial, healers had noticed that wounds run with yellow matter, pus, before they heal. We are speaking, of course, of the days before antiseptics - indeed before anybody ever dreamed there were such things as invisible germs and before any concomitant ideas of the need for hygiene in this regard. Formation of pus in a wound seemed, therefore, to be part of the healing process. Here, then, we have a perfectly reasonable conclusion based on often-repeated observational evidence. This was the medical theory ... of ‘laudable pus’: pus is a good thing, a sign that healing is taking place. Accordingly, doctors and surgeons throughout the ages would pack wounds with irritating substances - ground up egg-shells, sand, coarse feathers and the like - in order deliberately to stimulate the formation of pus and thereby, as they thought, accelerate the healing process. In the case of serious wounds they would often bandage the packed wound really tightly to increase the irritation, and would arrange a goose quill (or some other tube), emerging from the dressing, to act as an outlet pipe to drain off the pus as it formed.

By contrast, in the case of treatment by the weapon salve, the wound would simply be kept clean and dry, perhaps with a light dressing ... while the doctors concentrated on smearing their obnoxious potions on a sword or a blood-stained cloth. It's easy to see, therefore, why the weapon salve was so successful as a cure for wounds... The theory of laudable pus was so strongly held that on-lookers concluded not that the theory of laudable pus must be wrong, but that somehow the weapon salve had an occult power of curing wounds without the formation of pus...

From Knowledge is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Helped Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science by John Henry. Under current circumstances, I should clarify this cite has no allegorical meaning, that I’m aware of.

Lest We Remember

In early March 1919, demonstrations in Cairo, mainly by students, initiated an outburst of anti-British rioting, which within a few days spread through all the lower provinces and extended to upper Egypt. The situation was exacerbated by the local civil service's declaration of a general strike and the rapid suspension of railway and telegraph services. In the absence of a large British force in Egypt, elements of the Australian and ANZAC Mounted Divisions, then awaiting embarkation to Australia, were instructed to restore order. Within a month of the uprising order had been restored and principal political agitators imprisoned. The flexibility and mobility of the ANZAC forces involved were principal factors in the suppression of the rioting.

At the Australian War Memorial web page for the Egyptian Uprising 1919, "Category: Riot"

See also the collection items: an improvised cricket bat from Egypt in 1919, which for some reason they keep in the Western Front gallery, and the diary of an Australian CO - I wonder what all the references to military courts involving men with Arabic names were about.

Outsiders

Outsiders are supposed to be good because they bring the perspective of, well, outsiders. Before he worked in the Office of the White House Counsel, Shomik Dutta was pressing his street cred to the fundraising arm of the Obama campaign. His pitch? “You need someone who really understands the mid-Atlantic—the less established donors, the real-estate-developer folks.” That’s what passes for heterodoxy in these quarters.

Grin

Niceness is the blank grin on the face of the psychopath: it is the public enactment of all the forms of love and kindness without the troublesome burden of loving anyone or treating people with kindness.

Disturbing

Actually, while we're here, let's enjoy the imprecise creepiness of this sign from the foyer.

Quotable

I think my desk calendar is taking the piss.

Unwindows

Just now watching "The Commuter", from the Philip K. Dick anthology series Electric Dreams, I am amused to note that the creepy "perfect" town of Macon Heights is portrayed by Poundbury, the famously real-life Dickian exemplar of the dangers of confusing utopian simulacra with a better life.

Poundbury, in the outskirts of Dorchester is a toytown for Prince Charles. Here his architectural views have been given reign. It is an ‘unashamedly traditional’, low, zoning-free faux Georgiania, of car-less dream alleys and not-too-high towers, a market-town fantasia... The paths are gravel for appearances’ sake, for the sake of the picture: that gravel spreads and is a nightmare for pushchairs does not matter.

Many of the 25-year-old exteriors of Poundbury have been constructed with fake bricked-up windows, emulations of the real avoidance-mechanism dating from the 1696 Window Tax.

In Poundbury, strict rules disallow illuminated signs, or clothes-driers, aerials, metres, air extractors, ventilation openings, dustbins, solar cells being visible from the street. And yet here are unwindows, a facile and putrid kitsch homage to a devastating, unsanitary and hated repressive measure, that condemned people to unventilated darkness, is a tasteful detail.

Here, the bad picturesque lives, or is at least undead.

from Skewing the Picture, by China Mieville.

Obituary

In breaking news, Australian breakfast television host David Koch is still fucking alive.

Name the Bats

I never realised Palin did SNL. H/t Mr Perrin

Man is the warmest plasticine to hide...

Ohmigod why have I not seen this before.



("This" - since it's been age-screened - being a claymation mash-up parody of Pingu and The Thing. Grisly if you're triggered by lots of spurting red play-doh.)

Vale Bodgie

It's unsurprising our media are choosing to focus on the Tiananmen Square thing and a fair amount of content provider wank about his "common touch", rather than his orchestrating a wage freeze during an economic boom, privatising everything that wasn't nailed down, deregulating everything else, generally selling out ALP policy and the party base while cozying up to the moneyed elite, marching in lockstep with US imperialism, and providing the inspiration for Blairism. But as you're supposed to say something nice at such times, let's celebrate his legacy as being that he has forced the bilious commissars of Newscorps, and Coalition scumbags themselves, to say something nice about a Labor politician the day before an election; that must feel like swallowing an echidna tail-first. And then we can go and cozily ignore Hawke's contribution to getting us to precisely where we are now, when we give government tomorrow to the charisma free Hawke clone who is the best we can hope for these days.

Previously

Well, this seems fairly comprehensive...

Notajournalist

I gotta say I'm loving this more than usually clueless outbreak of spineless content providers for advertising platforms imagining they belong to a profession.

Solidarity

Neoliberalism is neo because, unlike classical liberalism, it proceeds logically from the dismantling of the labor theory of value. In terms of class, this means writing out the working class, and substituting as its pertinent tri-fold structure the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor. The wealthy are described as wealth makers. The middle class are economically autonomous, and the poor are government dependents.

...

Class, which used to indicate a position in the spheres of production and circulation, becomes, in neoliberalism, a proxy for income.

Politically, income is a very weak guarantor of solidarity. The search for solidarity turns elsewehere – to various identities, which, in the absence of a robust sense of production and circulation, take on the primary roles in structuring our lives, and thus the politics concerning our lives.

Thus society is understood to consist of three groups: investors, consumers, and dole bludgers. This neatly makes explicable the inability of Americans, and, increasingly, everyone else, to understand what class means, and why it matters.

Deeper

On the internet, there’s a small but dedicated group of people who believe that Donald Trump is secretly trans... Of course, it all goes much deeper than the Trumps. They’re only part of a secret elite Satanic trans cabal. Everyone in the higher reaches of power is trans, from the British royal family to pop stars to TV anchors. Why isn’t entirely clear. Because they hate nature, because they hate God, because they’re mimicking the androgyny of the Baphomet, because they’re just perverts. (The theory is also somehow linked to the idea that all animals not mentioned in the Bible are actually fake – zebras are just painted donkeys, gorillas are men in suits, sloths are animatronics, and so on.) But the truth is plain to see, and the investigation continues. Soon, all will be revealed.

This is a fairly stupid, bigoted, and dangerous theory. It’s also far more believable than the idea that Donald Trump is a secret deep-cover Kremlin agent.