Belief

Sane, sober and alone, any serious professional political journalist knew that this deal would be made and broadly what it would look like. ... Yet absolutely everyone has been pumping out this false narrative of cliff-hanging tension, as have the national ministers of EU states in the EU Council and the Members of the European Parliament.

...

This forcefully reminds me of the run-up to the Iraq War, when I asked an FCO colleague working directly on Iraq how he managed to do his job when he knew full well that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction. He replied to me that he was an avid player of “Football Manager”; while in the game he really was immersed for hours and the manager of Arsenal, once he left the game of course he knew he was not. Walking into the FCO to work was the same. While in the FCO, he believed Iraq had WMD and acted on that basis; once he left in the evening he did not.

Mungo MacCallum 1941-2020

If they tell us they care about the future but show neither vision nor emotion about it, why should we care any more than they do? We vote without enthusiasm or conviction, and often in the belief that whatever we do will make no real difference; that the ritual is no longer worthwhile. And when we, the people, reject the democratic process, the very spirit of the nation withers and dies.

The only problem with this quote is that it isn't funny; and Mr MacCallum was. Very. This vicious year leaves us with another unfillable void.

Thanksgiving

In 2010, a US air force drone crew watching infrared video of a night-time convoy of Afghan vehicles, as revealed in the transcript of their conversation, thought that warm dots in the trucks they saw on their screens were weapons. In fact, they were turkeys, presents carried by the peasant passengers for their relatives in Kabul. (The trucks were attacked, killing 23 people.)

Triumph

Jesus, Saddam Hussein went out with more dignity than this.

Oh look, here's Thomas Frank, perennial winner of the Ian Malcolm Award for Political Commentary* back in the Guardian again, shouting the blindingly obvious into the howling void.

I have been narrating our country’s toboggan ride to hell for much of my adult life, and I can attest that Biden’s triumph by itself is not enough to bring it to a stop. It will never stop until a Democratic president faces up to his party’s mistakes and brings to a halt the ignoble experiment of the last four decades.

Yeah, well, good luck with that. These are after all the idiots who thought Biden would be good for down ticket candidates, when his whole strategy was to persuade disaffected GOPers to vote against Trump, while cheerfully ignoring the obvious question - why on Earth would they vote Democrat in any other race? And the idiots now arguing the failed campaigns of "centrists" are the fault of the progressives who won. But of course it makes perfect sense to construct a national election strategy around the question of whether it might spook some paranoid ex-Cubans in America's wang.

* It's a statuette of a young Jeff Goldblum in a leather jacket, with the inscription around the plinth: "Boy do I hate being right all the time."

Pitch

Sixties used car pitchman's joke out-take (warning: quite a lot of sailor-talk).

Success

Seriously, desk calendar*? Again with the jokes?

*Different brand this year. It must be endemic.

Square

It is not people like the Abbie Hoffman of The Trial of the Chicago 7 — those who dare to memorialize the troops and celebrate our institutions while critiquing them within reason — who are most essential to a thriving democracy. It is people like the actual Abbie Hoffman, who could never have been the subject of an Aaron Sorkin film, because Sorkin would never have been able to get a square liberal audience to like him.

Apparently, but unsurprisingly, the new Chicago 10 flick isn't very good, taking place, as it does, in the alternative history magic pixie land that is Sorkinworld. These two are better, or you could just read the transcript.

Perversity

Still, let us genuflect before the superhuman perversity of the thing. Tax cuts, union busting, and deregulation - the historic achievements of right-wing populism - have led us straight back to the massively skewed economic arrangements of the 1890s. It takes a kind of hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist while cracking down on workers and ignoring antitrust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It's like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It's like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, "Yours in solidarity."

- Thomas Frank, from "The People, No!", Chapter 7 (for what it's worth, my copy is the Scribe edition with the tiresome alternative title People Without Power)

Presidential

I'd have to toss a coin to choose between my two favourite moments from that trainwreck:

Trump pronouncing "Antifa", slavishly followed by Biden, like it was an island in the West Indies (AnTEEfah).

Biden shoehorning in a reference to Trump's alleged reference to WW1 dead as "losers" by pretending he was misremembering Trump's attacks on his corrupt druggie son Hunter as being attacks on his brave veteran son Beau: that's a courageous stratagem for a guy the GOPers are keen to paint as senile.

Top-down

Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.

Possibly not the most interesting paragraph of Graeber and Wengrow's How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened) - that's more likely to be the discussion of seasonal variation in prehistoric political structures, or the article's various vigorous myth demolitions - but certainly the one that made me laugh.

Editing

GPT-3 produced eight different outputs, or essays. Each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument. The Guardian could have just run one of the essays in its entirety. However, we chose instead to pick the best parts of each, in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed.

Which explains why this op-ed written by a computer program proceeds through a series of non-sequiturs to make no coherent conclusion, in case you were going to blame the poor AI for the Guardian house style.

Crazy

I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire crisis, calling the fire police department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down there's an emergency, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire police department! That would be bad."

C. D. Bales, from Roxanne, in the original, of course.

David Graeber 1961-2020

If pandemic related lockdowns, and the consequent paradigm of essential workers, has taught us anything, it's how right David Graeber was. Appallingly, I have to say 'was' now.

Trade Secrets

every time you see a photo of prawns in a recipe book, they are almost certainly the same six prawns

LRB Bookshop's Twitter feed with a work of bioluminescent genius.

Dead Animals Feel No Pain

BrainEx pumped an experiment solution into the brain that essentially mimic blood flow. It brought oxygen and nutrients to the tissues, giving brain cells the resources to begin many normal functions. The cells began consuming and metabolizing sugars. The brains' immune systems kicked in. Neuron samples could carry an electrical signal. Some brain cells even responded to drugs.

The researchers have managed to keep some brains alive for up to 36 hours, and currently do not know if BrainEx can have sustained the brains longer. "It is conceivable we are just preventing the inevitable, and the brain won't be able to recover," said Nenad Sestan, Yale neuroscientist and the lead researcher.

Ethical review boards evaluate research protocols and can reject any that causes undue pain, suffering, or distress. Since dead animals feel no pain, suffer no trauma, they are typically approved as subjects. But how do such boards make a judgement regarding the suffering of a "cellularly active" brain?

Jocular Provocations

Meanwhile we have those journalists that recognize the Everett/Wolfe stuff is all a bunch of hokum but simply don’t care. Why? Because, in this day and age, it isn’t about finding the truth; it’s about winning the news cycle. This attitude is pristinely reflected in a review of the book in Canada’s Globe and Mail.

“Wolfe is a reporter and an entertainer, an opinionated raconteur rather than a scientist, and that is why we will always report on his jocular provocations. And if they serve as an excuse to explain what universal grammar was in the first place – as it has done – then Chomsky should be thrilled.”

Right. Because what could thrill Chomsky more than to have the media fraudulently misrepresent his theory using a facts-be-damned line of anti-intellectual argumentation that exoticizes another human culture? Chomsky must be “thrilled” about that, because, my God, his whole life he has been complaining that the media is too serious and too concerned with getting the facts right, when it should be, you know, writing about the Kardashians and otherwise using misinformation to bring eyeballs to advertisers.

I only recently discovered this article by Mr Spode (Daniel Bloody Everett started showing up in my Amazon recommendations). It amuses me that Tom Wolfe, whose primary beef with Chompers is he doesn’t like the Professor’s analysis of elite power, which he styles a “cabal” theory, felt the need to go after Universal Grammar as well, but, then, an endorsement from professional Chomsky-hater Oliver Kamm shows up as a blurb for Everett’s latest work, presumably because Kamm thought he could launch a surprise attack on this pesky anti-imperialist through the soft underbelly of linguistics. *laughs nerdily through nose*

Viral Spread

The permission structure for them to fuck us all so royally was created by governments and a business lobby preferencing economic transactions over public health. Viral spread was inevitable as soon as the border opened and the mass movement of tourists and business travellers not just allowed but encouraged. It’s a passing irony that these two were likely both.

...

While the bogans from Logan were partying in Plaguetown (that’s Melbourne, btw, Melbourne is Plaguetown now) billionaire coal baron and motile Jabba the Hutt custard sculpture Clive Palmer was filing in the High Court to have WA’s border controls struck down. Why? Because that sketchy fuck is up to some sort of villainy in the far west and he doesn’t want to tell Mister Plod what it is when next he comes to visit. So the entire model of controlled movement which did so much to contain the spread of the virus in the first half of the year, is to be dismantled because Palmer has the moral architecture of a botoxed hollaback girl but enough money to build that out into a suite of depressingly predictable pathogenic consequences for the rest us.

And supporting him in this?

The Morrison Government*.

*I probably should have posted this yesterday when this was still true.

That F***ing Letter

‘Cancel culture’ letter is about stifling free speech, not protecting it

Here’s the latest reasoning. Apparently, the letter sets an important benchmark that can in future be used to protect free speech by the left when we are threatened with being “cancelled” – as, for example, with the antisemitism smears that were used against anti-Zionist Jews and other critics of Israel in the British Labour party.

I should hardly need to point out how naive this argument is. It completely ignores how power works in our societies: who gets to decide what words mean and how principles are applied. This letter won’t help the left because “cancel culture” is being framed – by this letter, by Trump, by the media – as a “loony left” problem. It is a new iteration of the “politically correct gone mad” discourse, and it will be used in exactly the same way.

It won’t help Steven Salaita, sacked from a university job because he criticised Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, or Chris Williamson, the Labour MP expelled because he defended the party’s record on being anti-racist.

The “cancel culture” furore isn’t interested in the fact that they were “cancelled”. Worse still, this moral panic turns the whole idea of cancelling on its head: it is Salaita and Williamson who are accused – and found guilty – of doing the cancelling, of cancelling Israel and Jews.

Mr Taibbi, Mr Marcetic, Mr Greenwald, Mr Phillips and other (full or partial) defenders of the letter from the left have a point or several – but so do the detractors. And leftists (and I mean leftists; liberals can please themselves) need to get it through their heads: invariably, these sorts of speech policing (and the anti-“cancel culture” plaint, like the regular wanks about “civility” during the blogging era, is first and foremost a push to limit speech freedom, not expand it*) and every other sort, however they start, are eventually turned against the left. Even HUAC began as a committee for investigating Nazis; before the Thirties were even over they were hunting communists instead.

*Otherwise the letter would have focussed on the spineless institutions that sack people in response to the (supposed) clamour of the mob, rather than on the clamour itself. I also can’t help wondering if the signatories would have anything to say in defence of someone who had their life destroyed by Twitter not because of something they deliberately wrote in mainstream discourse, but because they were caught doing something mean and silly to a cat or making a joke that foolishly assumed idiots on the ‘net can detect irony. And if you’re not finding this issue complicated enough, feel free to read the parts of Mark Steel’s memoir where he talks about the left’s successful “deplatforming”, as the old folks say, of Neo-Nazis during the Eighties.

Prepositions

The Grauniad hasn't really lived up to the nickname for a while, so it's good to see them keeping their hand in. (They got it right at the top of the page.)

Moderate

It's worth pausing to acknowledge that the real Hillary Clinton is a charming person of moderate intellect and ability whose true talent lies in convincing college-educated people that her ambition, and by extension theirs, is a genuine expression of competence. Among the striving professional classes there is no greater analogy for career advancement than the presidency, and Clinton’s bitter defeat at the hands of a mad pretender has only deepened their conviction, successfully branded as feminist, that the height of injustice consists in the withholding of privileges owed.

Ian Holm 1931-2020

Privilege

The rhetoric of privilege is a weapon, but it’s not pointed at actually (ie, financially) privileged white people. We get off lightly. All we have to do is reflect on our privilege, chase our dreamy reflections through an endlessly mirrored habitus – and that was already our favourite game. You might as well decide that the only cure for white privilege is ice cream. Working-class whites get no such luxuries. But as always, the real brunt falls on non-white people. What happens when you present inequality in terms of privileges bestowed on white people, rather than rights and dignity denied to non-white people? The situation of the oppressed becomes a natural base-state. You end up thinking some very strange things.

Read this from Mr Kriss. All of it.

Jack Mundey 1929-2020

For God's sake, let's sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings...

Decorum

About the only weird thing about people reacting with predictable schadenfreude to Rush Limbaugh's lung cancer diagnosis is the large number calling him a blowhard compared to the much smaller number calling him a blowhard as a joke.