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.