The Cornell Effect: Being a Fan
Never Mind the Magma Creature, Here's the Caves of Androzani
I have on several occasions unsuccessfully tried to explain the virtues of fandom to my friend and occasional acting coach Tony Wickert (director of, among other things, numerous episodes of Z-Cars but no Doctor Who; Verity Lambert approached him, but he turned it down!).
It is vital that the object of your fandom is not uniformly excellent. It should be occasionally excellent, mostly good, sometimes bad, and every now and then absolutely atrocious. Such variation encourages the development of the cultural literacy necessary to explain it, and contributes to the depth and richness of one's appreciation of any work of art. A consistent work of unalloyed genius would be absolutely useless to this end.
By this measure, the mid-1980s was perhaps the best time to be a Doctor Who fan, regardless of how we felt at the time. When thinking about this period, I can't but recall an excellent article written at the time by the frighteningly prolific Paul Cornell (writer of Father's Day for Christopher Ecclestone's Doctor, and Human Nature for David Tennant, as well as being a one-man industry of print fiction including, but far from limited to, titles within the worlds of Doctor Who of varying levels of canonicity).
Titled "The Androzani Effect", it absolutely nailed what had gone wrong with Doctor Who to produce the appalling first full series of Colin Baker's Doctor in 1985. About five years ago, I was looking for a copy of this article online, and found there was none, but (of course) I had a cardboard box in the cupboard full of fanzines, so I asked Paul via his website if it would be okay if I preserved it for digital posterity, and he very kindly agreed. A few personal developments in the meantime meant that I didn't get round to it until recently. However, before the casual viewer of New Who has a very rewarding read of it, I feel obliged to add my two cents worth of context.
Firstly, one must consider the average age of fandom in 1985. A decade earlier, then producer Philip Hinchcliffe established, in his own mind at least, that the core audience for Doctor Who was "intelligent fourteen-year-olds". I was fourteen years old in 1985. Current Doctor Who showrunner (as far as I can make out, "showrunner" is a merging of the old roles of producer and script editor) Chris Chibnall was fifteen. Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Robert Shearman — basically the authorial class of 2005 New Who — were all teenagers. Emeritus showrunners Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat were in their early twenties. When you are fourteen (if my own experience is any guide) you're suddenly taller than your parents, there are hormones raging, and you feel intensely passionate about the oddest things. For some reason the The Famous Five and the Tomorrow People lose their allure, and you're desperate for something that will stretch your imagination and flex your intellectual muscles, because you have an inkling that something big is about to happen, and you need to be ready for it. (Sadly, I'm still waiting.) Suffice it to say that this is an audience you disappoint at your peril.
The aforementioned Hinchcliffe, along with script editor Robert Holmes — a tall, urbane fellow, perpetually wreathed in pipe tobacco smoke, who had been writing for Doctor Who since the 60s — presided over what (to hell with it I'll give up on qualifiers) was the programme's Golden Era. It's this period that most people think of when they consider classic Who. Tom Baker was dazzling and working incredibly hard, rather than phoning it in or sending it up, as he was later inclined to do. Elizabeth Sladen as the indefatigable Sarah Jane Smith was an acting masterclass in every episode; the difference between what she was sometimes given on the page and what she delivered on screen is just amazing. And beneath it all was the work of Robert Holmes, writing, or more often heavily re-writing, the majority of the stories.
Nobody knew the soul of Doctor Who like Holmes. To be sure, other writers have equalled him in one way or another. Stephen Moffat can write dialogue to equal Wilde, but too often Moffat writes his characters from the outside in, and sometimes not very far in. With Holmes, the wit bubbles up from from the core of the character. Often it's when two characters realise they are just fundamentally not on the same page and they are going to have to muddle through as best they can; for the initiated, think Litefoot and Leela's supper in Talons of Weng-Chiang, or Harry and Vira in the Ark in Space.
[I, and I realise I may be in a minority here, love Harry Sullivan. Conventional wisdom says that he was devised to cater for the casting of a Doctor older and less partial to physical action than Jon Pertwee's, and upon the casting of a younger Doctor was relegated to the role of buffoon. I disagree; he was a character who functioned extremely well in a very particular and familiar context, and taken out of that context he adapted in ways that were sometimes sub-optimal, but still revealed his fundamental decency. He ought to be regarded as a template for how to do a companion, not an aberration.]
The point of all this waffle is to say that the story of what went wrong with Doctor Who in the 80s begins with what went wrong with Doctor Who in the 70s. After Hinchcliffe and Holmes left, the program cruised along under the momentum they had given it for a while. At some point, possibly due to the existence of a subsidised bar at the BBC, somebody thought it would be a ripping wheeze to hire the notoriously deadline-averse Douglas Adams as script editor while he was also supposed to be writing the second radio series of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This worked to the detriment of both programmes (despite providing the delightful Adams-penned romp City of Death).
At the same time the second oil crisis of the 1970s hit the UK, causing devastating inflation, the winter of discontent, and strikes such as those which terminated the production of Adams' next story Shada. Due to inflation, budgets planned at the start of a series' run dwindled to nothing by the time it came to produce the last episodes, and the programme, never blessed with the money necessary to realise its ambitions, began to look decidedly cheap. Nobody was at the wheel, and the programme's charismatic star had become lazy and petulant. As commentators subsequently put it, Doctor Who had become, at best, "The Tom Baker Comedy Half-Hour".
Enter a saviour in 1980: John Nathan-Turner, or JN-T to fans, having worked his way up the BBC ladder from floor assistant on shows such as BBC's Doctor Who to the rank of producer for the eighteenth series.
JN-T sincerely loved and believed in Doctor Who; he just didn't understand it.
Fortunately he had new script editor Christopher H. Bidmead, with a history not just as a scriptwriter, but also as a science journalist, and by heavens Bidmead worked himself as hard in that year as Holmes had done previously. The scripts were tighter, and there were thematic threads of varying degrees of subtlety that ran through the series, prefiguring New Who. The errant star, despite being "ill" much of the time (of the kind of illness you might catch in the public bar of the Coach and Horses or the Colony Room) delivered some of his best performances, "reined in" as they say, but still utterly beguiling.
And then the wheels came off. Baker demanded more money, which gave JN-T the opportunity to wish him all the best for the future. Bidmead also left, and JN-T, with no real idea what he was doing, managed to coast along on scripts Bidmead had commissioned for series nineteen, along with no small amount of luck. The casting of Peter Davison as the Doctor could be considered genius, were it not for JN-T's own admission that the reasoning behind it was that he wanted to contrast an older actor with curly hair with a young actor with straight hair. #facepalm
Here's where we get to Cornell's critique. Halfway though series nineteen, a young writer named Eric Saward was taken on as script editor. Like JN-T, he didn't understand Doctor Who, but unlike JN-T I don't think he ever really cared about it.
Saward's universe was bleak, and its inhabitants were constantly bickering to no good end. Endless whining in the Tardis console room was, for Saward, the stuff of drama. It became painful to spend time with these people. Once outside the Tardis (and sometimes even inside), body counts and bloody vengeance were at the core of Saward's 80s Hollywood sensibility.
Davison deployed all his charm in consistently playing against Saward's version of the Doctor: melancholic, irritable, amoral. His successor, Colin Baker. on the other hand, took that brief and ran with it. But first there was the return of Robert Holmes.
JN-T was vehemently opposed to hiring old hands, but Saward, to his credit, felt that Holmes was the person to write the Doctor Who twentieth anniversary special. Holmes wisely refused to shoehorn five Doctors, every supporting actor that could be rounded up, and a grab-bag of old monsters whose costumes hadn't disintegrated while in storage, into ninety minutes. That job fell to his script editing predecessor Terrance Dicks, who did about as well as can be expected with Peter Davison, two other Doctors, a stand-in for one, and some location footage from the unfinished Shada in lieu of an egotistical Baker. Then, for Davison's final story a year later, Saward again turned to Holmes.
Here you should transport yourself back to 1985 and turn to Paul Cornell's insightful analysis. I'll be waiting here till you're done.
Good, wasn't it? I remind you that the author was at an age where many of his peers were still saying things like "Wouldn't it be great if the Cybermen battled the Daleks?". No Russell, it wouldn't! It would be very, very boring!
I desperately tried to enjoy series twenty-two and Colin Baker's Doctor. True, at the age of fifteen, I was probably at my most vulnerable to Saward's excesses (I was also watching a lot of James Bond at the time; a penchant I now find utterly inexplicable). Other criticisms of the show's direction failed to persuade me. Founding member of Australian Doctor Who fandom Antony Howe famously railed against "Doctor Whooligan" and basically quit all association with the program in protest, yet I was unmoved.
Yes, series 22 was, in comparison to its predecessor, a dud series, but it had its bright spots. Vengeance on Varos was at its core a clever variation on prior dystopic tales like the Sun Makers, somehow managing to critique reality television long before the term had even been coined. The Mark of the Rani was an old-school psuedo-historical which ought to have pleased the traditionalists. Holmes' the Two Doctors suffered from a mostly superflous, exposition-heavy first episode and flat direction which utterly failed to take advantage of much-hyped location filming in Spain (an example of JN-T's instinct to produce based on what would make for a good press release while being quite unconcerned by what ended up on the screen), still it is not quite without charm and Swiftian bite ("But I remember a dish… Shepherd's Pie." "Shepherd's Pie? Oh, a shepherd! Can't we walk faster?").
Saward created for the series 22 finale (here I perhaps damn with faint praise) his best credited work on the programme in Revelation of the Daleks. Cornell is of course quite right in identifying it as largely the product of lessons half-learned from Holmes. But on the other hand, Saward did at least bother to draw a wider than usual net of cultural influences including Evelyn Waugh's the Loved One and ripping yarns of the Knights Templar. And it is tightly paced, save for the by then traditional plot exile into which he sends the Doctor and Peri, who wander around aimlessly for the whole of the first episode, and in fact barely influence events at all throughout the entire story. Saward did not much like his regular cast, and prefered to do without them wherever possible.
It was Cornell's dissection of the way that Saward had learned all the wrong lessons from Homes that shook me from complacency, making fan commentary I'd previously dismissed suddenly salient. Certainly in retrospect it was on target in a way that hindsight has only vindicated.
Still, if there is anything Doctor Who does well, it's reinvention. Two troubled series later, once Andrew Cartmell, who both loved and understood the series as well as recognising its potential to break new ground, was firmly established as script editor the show was as solid, and certainly as innovative as it had ever been.
But by then Doctor Who was the only drama that the BBC was still producing in-house, as the corporation preferred to follow strict Thatcherite doctrine by becoming a purely managerial enterprise, and outsourcing actual production to companies without the merest sliver of the institutional expertise that the Beeb once had. It is doubtful that any programme could have survived in this environment.
However it is tempting to look at how well 1989's series 26 and (if one really must adopt new nomclementure) 2005's season 1 (really series 27) mesh together, and wonder what might have been. I know that Cornell, Cartmell, et al. were having fun writing novels, audio dramas, and so on, but oh! for another couple of years at least with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred…
Bondi Junction: A Quick Red Brick Tour, Part One
I'd long assumed that the flat that I lived in a quarter of a century ago had been demolished for high-rise or retail. I can't easily get there to verify that, so I recently checked to see if this was the case, using a certain Evil service through which one may View a Street.
Here it is:
Ours is on the first floor; the two windows on the right. Having removed that element of suspense, I will proceed to tackle the biographical and geographical significance of that flat in a roundabout way.
One thing that definitely doesn't exist any more is Oscar's Palace, just around the corner from that flat. This is where I think it used to be:
I am not sure about this, as most of the surrounding landmarks have also been demolished, but this is the only block of land in the general area wide enough to have accommodated it.
In the early nineties, in what was to become a recurring motif in our relationship, my then-girlfriend thought it a very good idea that I lived somewhere she didn't. The reasons for this were utterly mysterious to me at the time, although embarrassingly, humiliatingly, mortifyingly obvious since. So she found an advertisement for a room in a boarding house in Bondi Junction.
It was a mere eighty dollars a week, which is a steal for a pretentious unemployed youngster intent on writing a great novel, despite displaying no previous aptitude in this area, and not even having a particular fondness for long-form written fiction. And of course she would be visiting at every opportunity, as would anybody offered the prospect of a miserable time with a drunk, know-nothing, self-obsessed bore, with a once-pretty face rapidly growing flabby in proportion to the rest of his body, with the exception of the thinning hair.
So, having visited said establishment and verifying that I could in fact live there, according to some broad definition of "live", I went along with this plan, signing a six-month lease for a single room with bed, tap and basin in the corner, two-ring cooker on the sideboard, and bar fridge.
Oscars's Palace was obviously once a rather grand three-story house, sufficiently far out from the industrial squalor of Darlinghurst and Paddington to be genteel, but still close enough to the city for an easy commute. I'm no judge of such things, but I'd say it may well have been built before the electric tramline along Oxford Street.
At some point, the residence fell from grace and was divided into two semi-detatched houses, and then into the final indignity of being a boarding house for those working their way down to homelessness.
Every floorboard creaked beneath the loose folds of fraying carpet, and the stairwell reeked of cat urine. The cats themselves were mangy, rail-thin, and hissed at everyone, including each other. I presumed they belonged to the couple upstairs, who also spent most of the day engaged in loud mutual verbal abuse. (However that was the most violence I ever experienced there, which from the perspective of my current neighbourhood, seems quite idyllic.)
The shared bathroom on my landing had a lavatory, a basin, a shower head sticking out of the wall, and a drain in the middle of the floor. So if someone had just showered, you had to splash across the room to get to the lav. The real challenge was the gent residing at the far end of the landing, in the room nearest the bathroom. He was a man of regular habits, the first of which was to throw up all over the bathroom floor, before donning his off-white linen suit and fedora, to go off and do whatever he needed to do in order to perform the same feat the next morning. So if you didn't want to tiptoe though a minefield of diced carrot to have your morning shower, you had to be an early riser.
The other thing was to give your luggage a good brisk shake before closing it and setting off anywhere. Because ideally, you want the mice to leap out of your bag before you get to your destination, unless you have the bravado to smile broadly and cry "Ta-da!"
The place was riddled with mice. The feral cats clearly felt they had bigger fish to fry, as they seemed not at all interested in something so petty as mice. They had so much stuff to hiss at or piss on; one simply cannot be looking after everything!
Within a couple of months, I was going insane. I had no idea how to look after myself. I had quit my job with the intention of writing the work of genius that had been sitting inside me, desperate to be delivered, yet the typewriter sat idle. I realised that without a job I couldn't carry on bouncing from pub to pub with occasional stops for junk food, so my solution was to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken in bulk and eat it over the course of a few days to a week, washed down with ouzo and lemonade, of all things. I can't imagine how sweet, sparkling, southern fried, liquorice-scented chicken, never made it onto the bathroom floor along with the diced carrot. It appears I did have some measure of self-control, after all.
The old chap who set up office every day in the shed out back was heavy set, but took your four twenties each week in a genial, grandfatherly way before slipping them into his cashbox, locking it up, and issuing a stamped and signed receipt. I was afraid that, at the end of six months, when I told him I was moving out, that he might feel offended. He smiled, took my eighty dollars, and gave me a receipt.
I actually met Oscar, in a manner of speaking, shortly before moving out. I was on my way somewhere, locking the door behind me, and turned around to see a couple of unusually respectable people coming up the stairs, and only then noticed a dapper little old man at about eye level with my belly looking up at me, beaming and waving a silver-topped cane, crying "Ah! Velcome! Velcome!" He continued on to the next tenant, coming down the stairs, "Velcome! Velcome!"
Makes the regal "And what do you do?" seem positively garrulous.
I surmised that, as a young man disembarking at Circular Quay and seeing all the potential for urban decay that Sydney had to offer, he realised that he would need to pick up a smattering of English if he were ever to become a successful slumlord, and with a shrewd businessman's knack for economy, decided that "welcome" was sufficently convivial to pretty much cover it.
Now, you may well ask, how did I know his name was Oscar? I didn't at the time, but I did a couple of years later thanks to my friends Chris and Dave, and an establishment called Billy the Pig's…
Sunday, 13 December 2020 - 5:29pm
This who-knows-for-how-long, I have been mostly reading:
- To Defeat Fascism, We Must Recognize It’s a Failed Response to Capitalist Crisis — William I. Robinson in Truthout:
Yet many white members of the working class have been experiencing social and economic destabilization, downward mobility, heightened insecurity, an uncertain future and accelerated precariatization — that is, ever more precarious work and life conditions. This sector has historically enjoyed the ethnic-racial privileges that come from white supremacy vis-à-vis other sectors of the working class, but it has been losing these privileges in the face of capitalist globalization. The escalation of veiled and also openly racist discourse from above is aimed at ushering the members of this white working-class sector into a racist and a neo-fascist understanding of their condition. Racism and the appeal to fascism offer workers from the dominant racial or ethnic group an imaginary solution to real contradictions; recognition of the existence of suffering and oppression, even though its solution is a false one. The parties and movements associated with such projects have put forth a racist discourse, less coded and less mediated than that of mainstream politicians, targeting the racially oppressed, ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants and refugees in particular as scapegoats. Yet in this age of globalized capitalism, there is little possibility in the United States or elsewhere of providing such benefits, so that the “wages of fascism” now appear to be entirely psychological. The ideology of 21st-century fascism rests on irrationality — a promise to deliver security and restore stability that is emotive, not rational. It is a project that does not and need not distinguish between the truth and the lie.
- Joe Biden’s drive for diversity in top political jobs is only an illusion of change — Nesrine Malik in the Guardian:
Biden’s diverse picks, the “very best of the nation”, are not representatives of the people who put them into office as much as they are figureheads. They are ambassadors with no brief other than to stand as proof of meritocracy – if you work hard and are “the very best”, you too can get a great gig. Diversity in government isn’t about solidarity, it’s used as proof of the soundness of the system: the elevation of women in particular as “girl boss feminists” who will not be interrupted, the reduction of the deeply serious business of government to inspiration politics. […] When people are hired to make a government “look” a certain way, by governing parties with conservative politics, it’s usually a way of making change so everything stays the same – or gets worse. Little demonstrates that more than the “most diverse parliament in history” that came to Westminster in 2019. The election of a number of female and black and minority ethnic MPs to the Conservative party, and their rise in the ranks of the cabinet, has produced a government that feels more comfortable in doubling down on policies such as the hostile environment, and where senior BAME ministers have been recruited to the task of denying structural racism.
- What would a state-owned Amazon look like? Ask Argentina — Cecilia Rikap in openDemocracy:
Last October, Argentina announced the creation of an online marketplace called “Correo Compras”. The platform is to be run by a state-owned company, Correo Argentino, which is also the country’s official postal service. Argentina has been severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, and its lockdown has been among the longest. Even before the pandemic internet penetration in Argentina was already high (74%), and since the lockdown e-commerce and other digital services thrived in the country. Through its publicly owned option, the government aims to offer an alternative to Latin America’s current e-commerce private octopus.
- Before — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- Australia’s spy agencies caught collecting COVID-19 app data — Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch could have knocked me down with a feather:
Australia’s intelligence agencies have been caught “incidentally” collecting data from the country’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app during the first six months of its launch, a government watchdog has found. The report, published Monday by the Australian government’s inspector general for the intelligence community, which oversees the government’s spy and eavesdropping agencies, said the app data was scooped up “in the course of the lawful collection of other data.” […] The report did not say when the incidental collection stopped, but noted that the agencies were “taking active steps to ensure compliance” with the law, and that the data would be “deleted as soon as practicable,” without setting a firm date.
- Do You Know Your Microsoft Productivity Score? — Jacob Silverman in the New Republic:
The tech giant recently announced the wide availability of Productivity Score, declaring, “As leaders, it’s our job to make sure people have the tools they need to do their best work. But tools alone are not enough—you also need to help everyone in your organization build the habits that harness the true power of those tools. Until now, it’s been difficult for leaders to get insight into these habits and understand how to help people make the most of the technology they invest in.” (Their emphasis, of course.) The score is a feature within Microsoft 365’s Workplace Analytics, which the company advertises as a way for employers to “harmonize productivity and well being,” “enhance organizational resiliency,” “transform meeting culture,” and “increase customer focus.” Critics and labor advocates say this all amounts to an invasive method of monitoring and cataloging worker behavior, producing inscrutable metrics and forming databases that may be used for union-busting or to tilt the playing field toward employers during annual reviews.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Mythbuster: What is quantitative easing and how does it work? — Richard Murphy provides more detail than most people want or need to know. The punchline is this:
Politically it has suited the government’s narrative to maintain this pretence that interest is owing on these [BoE-held] gilts. As a consequence of this pretence, successive governments have been able to claim that the cost of government debt servicing has been more onerous than has actually been the case, and have claimed that this has prevented it from undertaking other forms of spending. This claim has been disingenuous. In practice, the income received by the APF as a result of the payment of this interest belongs to the Treasury as a consequence of the management agreement reached between it and the Bank of England, previously noted. The result has been that the income in question has been returned to HM Treasury, as a matter of fact. The accounts of the APF make this clear. The refund has not, however, been used to cancel the interest charge recorded in the government’s own accounts: it does, instead, appear to be shown as part of the ‘other income’ of the government. In accounting terms this might be called a misrepresentation. The two sums should be offset to present a true and fair view of the interest cost that the government actually incurs. The only possible explanation for this misrepresentation has been that it has suited government purposes to make it.
- The Purging of Jeremy Corbyn - The Truth — Esha Krishnaswamy at Historic.ly:
In March of this year, we reviewed leaks from an internal report commissioned by the Labour Party ahead of the EHRC report. I have thoroughly read the report and instead of finding instances of anti-semitism amongst Corbyn supporters, the report found instances of sabotage, leaks, and betrayal by the staff of the Labour Party to their constituency: the working class of Britain. Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) was responsible for handling complaints from members regarding anti-semitism, racism and sexism within the ranks. Instead of handling such complaints, the GLU was more interested in attacking and purging Corbyn supporters. […] On April, 2017, when Theresa May called for a general snap election, instead of working to make sure that labour wins as many seats as possible, the staffers intentionally sabotaged Corbyn, his campaign and some members of the Labour Party. In February, they already talked about sabotaging the election in hopes of electing a new leader.
- Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups — Lauren Kaori Gurley at Vice:
A trove of more than two dozen internal Amazon reports reveal in stark detail the company's obsessive monitoring of organized labor and social and environmental movements in Europe, particularly during Amazon's “peak season” between Black Friday and Christmas. The reports, obtained by Motherboard, were written in 2019 by Amazon intelligence analysts who work for the Global Security Operations Center, the company's security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world. The documents show Amazon analysts closely monitor the labor and union-organizing activity of their workers throughout Europe, as well as environmentalist and social justice groups on Facebook and Instagram. They also indicate, and an Amazon spokesperson confirmed, that Amazon has hired Pinkerton operatives—from the notorious spy agency known for its union-busting activities—to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.
- Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
Saturday, 28 November 2020 - 2:41pm
For ages, I've been meaning to blog/list interesting videos that I've piped onto my hard disk via youtube-dl. Instead I've just been filing them away in '~/tmp/blog'. Time to free up some disk space on the trusty old Thinkpad!
Last August, 2019, I was mostly watching:
- The Merits Of MMT — Martin North interviews Stephen Hail, mainly about MMT:
I can't remember it at all, frankly, but Stephen must have been on good form, otherwise I wouldn't have kept it.
- Two Of These People Are Lying — The Technical Difficulties:
I've been a fan of these lads ever since the original reverse trivia quiz podcast. Four quite intelligent chaps. Around a kitchen table. Making each other laugh. What's not to like?
- The Purpose of Education — Noam Chomsky interviewed as a remote contribution to a conference:
Behind any significant use of contemporary technology — Internet, communication systems, graphics, whatever it may be — unless behind it is some well constructed directive [or] conceptual apparatus it is very unlikely to be helpful. It may turn out to be harmful. For example, random exploration through the Internet turns out to be a cult generator. You pick up a factoid here and a factoid there and somebody else reinforces it, and all of a sudden you have some crazed picture which has some factual basis, but nothing to do with the world. You have to know how to evaluate and interpret and understand.
- Mr Olds’ Remarkable Elevator — Things You Might Not Know:
Tom Scott demonstrates an invention that should have been invented a century or more earlier, but wasn't because it's a bit of a mind-bender.
- Paying for the Green New Deal — Stephanie Kelton:
Sigh. Remember when the imminent end of human civilisation seemed a pretty high priority? Happy days.
Sunday, 15 November 2020 - 5:18pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Where loneliness can lead — Samantha Rose Hill in Aeon:
The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right. But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment: "Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist."
- Universities belong to the whole community: why we should fund the humanities — Daniel Gregory in Pearls and Irritations:
The greatest difficulty in deciding how to fund universities is that students, academics and prospective employers are not the only stakeholders. Universities exist for the benefit of the whole community, including those who will never have the privilege of studying at one. It is easy to see how medical and scientific research benefits the community. It is easy to see how training engineers and computer programmers and nurses benefits the community. We can justify funding universities to do these things without even thinking about the interests of students and academics. What about the humanities? Does the community benefit from funding research and teaching in history and philosophy and the arts?
- The long-term unemployed are not an inflation constraint in a recovery — Bill Mitchell:
The first issue to clear up is the definition of long-term unemployment. Long-term unemployment tracks the total unemployment rate in a lagged fashion. So as governments abandoned full employment in the in the 1970s and allowed unemployment to rise significantly, they also had to then contend with the politically troubling issue of long-term unemployment. The solution they took was the purely political – they redefined long-term unemployment. So in the early 1970s, a person was long-term unemployed if they has been unemployed for 13 or more weeks. This was changed in the late 1970s to 26 weeks and from the mid-1980s to 52 weeks. There is on-going pressure change the threshold to 104 weeks and confine it to a small number of so-called intransigents. The changes were designed to disabuse the citizens of the severity of the problem that occurs when government’s fail to deal with an economic downturn in a timely and sufficient manner.
- Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results — Cory Doctorow in Locus Online:
Machine learning operates on quantitative elements of a system, and quantizes or discards any qualitative elements. And because it is theory-free – that is, because it has no understanding of the causal relationships between the correlates it identifies – it can’t know when it’s making a mistake. The role this deficit plays in magnifying bias has been well-theorized and well-publicized by this point: feed a hiring algorithm the resumes of previously successful candidates and you will end up hiring people who look exactly like the people you’ve hired all along; do the same thing with a credit-assessment system and you’ll freeze out the same people who have historically faced financial discrimination; try it with risk-assessment for bail and you’ll lock up the same people you’ve always slammed in jail before trial. The only difference is that it happens faster, and with a veneer of empirical facewash that provides plausible deniability for those who benefit from discrimination.
- KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence — Satchel Walton and Cooper Walton in the Manual RedEye, a High School newspaper:
A training slideshow used by the Kentucky State Police (KSP) — the second largest police force in the state — urges cadets to be “ruthless killer[s]” and quotes Adolf Hitler advocating violence. […] One slide, titled “Violence of Action,” in addition to imploring officers to be “ruthless killer[s],” instructs troopers to have “a mindset void of emotion” and to “meet violence with greater violence.” A line from Adolf Hitler’s fascist and anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf, is featured in the slide: “the very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.” The presentation also links to a Hitler page on Goodreads, a database of quotes and books. Two other slides quoting Hitler bring his total to three, making him the most quoted person in the presentation.
- Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer — Cory Doctorow at the EFF:
HP's latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their ink cartridges or the ink in them. Instead, HP's customers have to pay a recurring monthly fee based on the number of pages they anticipate printing from month to month; HP mails subscribers cartridges with enough ink to cover their anticipated needs. If you exceed your estimated page-count, HP bills you for every page (if you choose not to pay, your printer refuses to print, even if there's ink in the cartridges). If you don't print all your pages, you can "roll over" a few of those pages to the next month, but you can't bank a year's worth of pages to, say, print out your novel or tax paperwork. Once you hit your maximum number of "banked" pages, HP annihilates any other pages you've paid for (but continues to bill you every month).
- Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say — Clara Jeffery at Mother Jones:
Conservatives had been very effective at working the refs by accusing the platforms of liberal bias, especially after a widely publicized 2016 incident in which platform moderators were accused of suppressing pro-Trump content. After that, says a former employee who worked on News Feed, it was made clear that “we can’t do a ranking change that would hurt Breitbart—even if that change would make the News Feed better.” (Breitbart News, where Steve Bannon was still executive chair, seems to have been a particular obsession.) So, too, with the January 2018 changes: “Republican lobbyists in the DC office said, ‘Hold on, how will it affect Breitbart?’” recalls another ex-employee. Testing showed that the proposed changes would take a “huge chunk” out of Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Caller. There was “enormous pushback. They freaked out and said, ‘We can’t do this.’” The code was tweaked, and executives were given a new presentation showing less impact on these conservative sites and more harm to progressive-leaning publishers—including Mother Jones. “The problem was that the progressive outlets were real [news] outlets like yours,” recalls the ex-employee, “and the right ones were garbage outlets. You guys were one of the outlets who got singled out to balance the ledger.” […] The graphs and slides appear to have appeased Kaplan. Zuckerberg signed off on the algorithm changes. And soon, the million-plus readers who had chosen to follow Mother Jones saw fewer of our articles in their feeds. Average traffic from Facebook to our content decreased 37 percent between the six months prior to the change and the six months after.
- Calvin and Hobbes — by Bill Watterson:
Sunday, 1 November 2020 - 4:28pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Rebels, Please Join Me in Wishing Emperor Palpatine Well — Scott Bolohan in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
As I’m sure you have seen by now, Emperor Palpatine has recently suffered horrific injuries after being thrown into the Death Star’s reactor, which subsequently exploded and crashed into Kef Bir. I understand that many of you may have initially reacted with joy upon learning of the Emperor’s incident. This is understandable, as he has tried to kill many of you, but as Rebels, it is imperative we take the high road. Earlier today, Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca all sent their well wishes to Emperor Palpatine. We, in turn, must join them in their show of support for a man who hates them with all of his heart. It is time that we put aside politics and the fact that he wants us all dead, and come together and join in prayer to wish the Emperor a swift recovery.
[Or, as Glennzilla puts it:] - Why Are Democrats Praying for the Speedy Recovery of a “Fascist Dictator”? — Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept:
Over the past several years, but particularly in the months heading into the 2020 election, it has become extremely common for prominent Democrats and their media allies to refer to President Trump as a dictator, a fascist, a tyrant hellbent on destroying U.S. democracy, a genocidal racist, and even a Nazi. And yet, the overwhelming reaction in those mainstream precincts to the news that the fascist dictator has contracted a potentially lethal virus is to hope and pray that he makes a speedy recovery whereby he can resume his democracy-destroying, genocidal, tyrannical, fascist rule. […] Perhaps Democratic leaders are simply pretending to be hoping for Trump’s well-being for political purposes while secretly hoping that he suffers and dies. Or perhaps national Democratic politicians have ascended to a state of spiritual elevation rarely seen in modern political history, in which they are capable of praying for even those they most dislike, including ones they believe are imposing fascism on their nation? Or perhaps, maybe more likely, Democratic leaders do not really believe the things they have spent four years saying about Trump and, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney before him, are applying such labels of historic evil to him for political advantage but still see him as one of them, whom they intend to rehabilitate and honor once he is out of power.
- Life in the simulacron — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
- The US supreme court may soon become plutocracy's greatest defender — David Sirota in the Guardian:
If you get your news from the political press and television ads, you might think the US supreme court is a forum that only adjudicates disputes over the most hot-button religious and civil rights issues. What you would not know is that while the court does periodically rule on those important matters, it spends as much or more of its time using business-related cases to help billionaires and corporations rig the economy against ordinary Americans. In light of that, Amy Coney Barrett’s US supreme court nomination must be understood as the culmination of cynical tactics that Republicans have perfected over the last two decades. The strategy is straightforward: they nominate plutocrat-compliant judges knowing that the corporate-owned media and political system will make sure confirmation battles focus on partisan wrangling and high-profile social issues – but not also on the economic issues that justices often decide. In other words: Republican politicians rely on conflagrations over political process and social issues to mobilize their religious base in service of Republican donors’ real objective – smuggling corporate cronies on to the highest court in the land.
- Commanding View — George Monbiot:
I don’t mean to single out Andrew Marr, but to show how even the staunchest defenders of the BBC’s independence unwittingly surrender it. They report from within the castle of power. For most BBC political journalists, politics seem to begin and end in Westminster. A political issue is one that divides the major parties (or divides people within a party). If the parties aren’t divided, it’s not an issue. The BBC’s political reporting, like that of almost all the media, is, in effect, court reporting: what one powerful person said to another, who’s in, who’s out, who might win, who might lose. The really big questions – such as the gathering collapse of our life support systems – are, on most days, outside the circle of light. Above all, because the BBC is unconsciously led by the oligarchs’ agenda, it fails to confront the greatest source of political power: money. The BBC represents politics as a matter of preferences, rather than as a matter of interests.
- Love — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- The Religious Reason Many Americans Refuse to Wear Masks — Kate Blanchard in Religion Dispatches:
I can’t help thinking of snake-handlers when I see the President and his minions going maskless. Like many mask-wearing losers, I gazed in horror upon images of the White House ceremony honoring the President’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. In colorful photographs and videos, we saw approximately 150 Republicans hugging, shaking hands, talking closely together, and just generally getting all up in each other’s personal space—almost all of them without masks. As the count of related covid-19 infections surpassed 30 this week, including the President and First Lady, multiple staffers, and high-profile figures like Chris Christie (who’s still hospitalized as of this writing), few of us were surprised to hear Dr. Fauci designate the affair a “superspreader event.” […] After a mere three days (let the reader understand) the President emerged triumphantly from his sick bed, performing a full recovery from the disease that had already killed more than 210,000 Americans and a million people worldwide. What’s more, the President ascended the White House steps, removed his mask with a flourish, and promised that we could all be just like him. Never mind that millions of Americans have minimal health insurance or no health insurance at all; we can be winners too if we just believe! “You’re going to beat it,” he promised; “Don’t let it take over your lives.” The message, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, came across loud and clear: Only losers die of covid. Only losers are afraid of covid. Only losers let covid alter their lifestyles in any way. So it should come as no surprise that resisting masks is a matter of principle for many Trump voters. It’s a way of proving their faith in the President, his power, and his worldview.
- After The Donald, The Deluge? — Ted Rall:
One of history’s least-discussed ironies is a counterintuitive pattern: it is not the vicious tyrants who are overthrown by angry mobs, but well-meaning liberal reformers who promise to fix a broken system and fall short of expectations. […] Biden comes out of the Clinton/Obama/Democratic Leadership Council austerity wing of his party. His instinct will be to spend as little as possible in order to try to balance the budget. “When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare,” says Ted Kaufman, who will run the transition office that will select Biden’s top personnel. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit…forget about COVID-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.” Kaufman, a former Delaware senator, promises that Biden won’t significantly increase federal spending. The streets are already seething. Austerity will bring things to a boil. Political suicide by fiscal means.
- Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
Sunday, 25 October 2020 - 5:08pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Antitrust as Economic Stimulus — Hal Singer and
Marshall Steinbaum at Pro Market:
Consider the following experiment: Under the current antitrust regime, which places coordination rights in the hands of corporations and punishes atomistic suppliers from coordinating in their dealings against dominant platforms, Uber captures about a third of the revenues from each ride in the form of commissions. Suppose a policy intervention—whether a reform to antitrust, labor, or some other law—altered the workplace power imbalance, such that drivers captured an additional 10 percentage points of the fares, reducing Uber’s commissions from 33 to 23 percent. New research on the stimulus checks from the 2020 CARES Act shows lower-income households spent a greater share of the checks than did middle-income households. To the extent that lower-income drivers would spend a greater portion of every incremental dollar than do Uber’s higher-income shareholders, this redistribution of fares towards drivers would mean a greater multiplier effect for the economy every time a passenger takes a ride.
- Driving the 2021 Cadillac Escalade was one of the most stressful experiences of my life — Andrew J. Hawkins in the Verge:
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I don’t consider myself a timid driver, but being behind the wheel of this 6,000-lb behemoth gave me high-grade, flop-sweat-inducing anxiety. I’ve never ridden on the back of an elephant before, but driving the 2021 Escalade may be as close as I’ll get. […] Sitting in the driver’s seat, it’s easy to feel disconnected from the outside world — mostly because you can’t see a lot of it. The grille was like a sheer cliffside, obstructing my view several feet out in front of the wheels. An entire kindergarten class could be lined up in front of this vehicle and I wouldn’t see them. […] When you need a suite of high-definition cameras and other expensive sensors to safely drive to the grocery store, there might be something inherently wrong with your design. Manufacturers know that these types of vehicles are more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, but they keep making them because people keep buying them. Cadillac says it is responding to customer demands for more interior space and cargo room. Super-sizing its vehicles helps it sell more SUVs to more people.
- Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange — John Pilger interviewed by Timothy Erik Ström for Arena:
The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.
- America Has No Allies, Only Hostages — Caitlin Johnstone on Medium:
We saw the dynamics of the imperial blob explained quite vividly last year by American political analyst John Mearsheimer at a debate hosted by the Australian think tank Center for Independent Studies. […] “You’re either with us or against us,” he continued. “And if you’re trading extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.” Nervous laughter from the Australian think tank audience punctuated Mearsheimer’s more incendiary observations. The CIA is known to have made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro. If you’ve ever wondered how the U.S. is so successful in getting other nations around the world to align with its interests, this is how. It’s not that the U.S. is a good actor on the world stage or a kind friend to its allies, it’s that it will destroy you if you disobey it. Australia is not aligned with the U.S. to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the U.S. to protect itself from the U.S..
- Trump’s Turn From Immigration to the Enemy Within — Ryan Devereaux at the Intercept:
This widening of the threat aperture is straight out of the authoritarian playbook, said Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” “You begin with something that separates citizens from noncitizens,” Stanley told The Intercept, explaining how fascistic power grabs often take place. “You have your colonial war, your war on terror, your imperialist war that focuses on distinguishing between citizens and noncitizens, and then you direct that force inwards against your political opponents.” “He’s been wooing the security forces his entire term,” Stanley said. As Tuesday night’s debate wrapped up, Trump explicitly encouraged his supporters to head to election polls and be on the lookout for suspicious activity in what he predicted would be “a fraud like you’ve never seen.” Courting paramilitary groups and loyal security services, calling the integrity of the election into question, and urging his supporters to take it upon themselves to respond are “classic fascist tactics,” Stanley argued. “He’s been using fascist tactics, unquestionably, and he’s already transformed many of these things into policy, particularly around immigration,” he said. “Now he’s turning to his political opponents, so now we’re really facing the concern about transformation into a fascist regime.”
Sunday, 18 October 2020 - 4:38pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- The “herd immunity strategy” isn’t part of a scientific debate about COVID-19. It’s a well-funded political campaign. — Abby Cartus and Justin Feldman in Medium:
This “herd immunity” strategy is not part of a legitimate scientific debate. It has been rejected by key scientific leaders in the US, UK, Germany, and World Health Organization. Proponents of “herd immunity” haven’t tried to address even basic questions about the strategy, such as how many households would need to be locked down or how many people would still get sick from endemic COVID-19 once herd immunity was achieved. The proposal is not evidence-based and does not reflect even a minority view in the scientific community. Rather, it appears to be the product of an organized, well-funded political campaign in the US and UK. The UK campaign has been described elsewhere. In the US, the campaign appears to be largely coordinated by two right-wing think tanks — the Hoover Institution and the American Institute for Economic Research — in coordination with the Trump administration.
[And, in more detail:] - Scamademics? Right-Wing Lobbying Groups Reviving ‘Herd Immunity’ in the UK — Nafeez Ahmed in the Byline Times:
A pernicious but flawed narrative has come to dominate the public debate over the second COVID-19 wave. It is the idea that the science is somehow irreparably divided on what to do about the pandemic. This notion is encapsulated in two different letters sent to the Government by what the press has portrayed as two groups of esteemed scientists – one group supporting the reintroduction of social distancing restrictions, and the other criticising efforts to ‘suppress’ the Coronavirus. Widespread media coverage of the letter has suggested a deep-seated schism at the heart of the British scientific community about how to respond to the crisis. In reality, the authors of the letter that is critical of a COVID-19 suppression strategy have numerous ties to Conservative and Republican Party lobby groups as well as to various agencies of the Government, including HM Treasury, the Ministry of Defence and the ‘Nudge’ Unit – ties which represent potentially serious conflicts of interest. Worse, this group’s claims about the Coronavirus have no basis in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Instead, it represents what one top British epidemiologist has described as “a fringe group of scientists”, out of sync with “most of the public health experts in the world”.
- Good Intentions, Bad Inventions — Amanda Lenhart and Kellie Owens at Data & Society:
The tech companies that design and build so many of the devices, platforms, and software we use for hours each day have embraced myths that push a flawed under-standing of digital well-being. While we are encouraged that these companies are dedicating greater attention to social media’s effect on the mental and physical health of users, their current approaches to improving user well-being fundamentally misunderstand how people engage with technology. At its worst, this approach funnels time and resources to making technology more “enriching” for middle-class white users, while failing to address the systemic harms that minoritized communities face. The heart of this misunderstanding is biological determinism, which suggests that our “Paleolithic” brains cannot resist “God-like” technology, placing too much power in the hands of tech companies to both create and destroy our capacity for attention. But attention is not a fixed biological entity, it is a value-laden social category; people stop using social media of their own volition all the time. Current approaches to improving digital well-being also promote tech solutionism, or the presumption that technology can fix social, cultural, and structural problems. At their core, these approaches lack empirical evidence to support them. We want to replace these myths with new evidence-based narratives that shift the conversation toward agency and equity.
- Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing — Jesse Frederik at the Correspondent:
I’ve been hearing a lot about blockchain in the last few years. I mean, who hasn’t? It’s everywhere. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought: but what is it then, for God’s sake, this whole blockchain thing? And what’s so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve? That’s why I wrote this article. I can tell you upfront, it’s a bizarre journey to nowhere. I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution. […] Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.”
Sunday, 11 October 2020 - 4:36pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- The Scramble to Defuse the ‘Feral Swine Bomb’ — Diane Peters in Undark:
“I’ve heard it referred to as a feral swine bomb,” says Dale Nolte, manager of the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program at the United States Department of Agriculture. “They multiply so rapidly. To go from a thousand to two thousand, it’s not a big deal. But if you’ve got a million, it doesn’t take long to get to 4 [million], then 8 million.” Most wild pigs are a mixture of domestic breeds and European wild boar. “The problem with the hybrids is you get all of the massive benefits of all of that genetics. It creates what we’d call super pigs,” says Brook. Domestic pigs have been bred to be fertile year-round and have big litters — now averaging more than 10 in each — and also to grow large. (Farmers limit their diets in captivity, but they fatten up when they graze at will in the wild.) Boars, meanwhile, have heavy fur and other attributes that help them brave the winter months. Wild or domestic, the species is highly intelligent with a keen sense of smell. Over the last few decades, wild pigs in some regions have grown to unmanageable numbers: Texas has about 1.5 million and spends upwards of $4 million annually controlling them, with little hope of eradicating the population. Florida, Georgia, and California also have vast populations.
- The Internet is for End Users — Internet Architecture Board, at the Internet Engineering Task Force:
For whom do we go through the pain of gathering rough consensus and writing running code? After all, there are a variety of parties that standards can benefit, such as (but not limited to) end users, network operators, schools, equipment vendors, specification authors, specification implementers, content owners, governments, nongovernmental organizations, social movements, employers, and parents. Successful specifications will provide some benefit to all the relevant parties because standards do not represent a zero-sum game. However, there are sometimes situations where there is a conflict between the needs of two (or more) parties. In these situations, when one of those parties is an "end user" of the Internet -- for example, a person using a web browser, mail client, or another agent that connects to the Internet -- the Internet Architecture Board argues that the IETF should favor their interests over those of other parties.
- Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble — Gilad Edelman in Wired:
The real trouble with digital advertising, argues former Google employee Tim Hwang—and the more immediate danger to our way of life—is that it doesn’t work. Hwang’s new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, lays out the case that the new ad business is built on a fiction. Microtargeting is far less accurate, and far less persuasive, than it’s made out to be, he says, and yet it remains the foundation of the modern internet: the source of wealth for some of the world’s biggest, most important companies, and the mechanism by which almost every “free” website or app makes money. If that shaky foundation ever were to crumble, there’s no telling how much of the wider economy would go down with it.
- Dying in a Leadership Vacuum — the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine:
The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was the world’s leading disease response organization, has been eviscerated and has suffered dramatic testing and policy failures. The National Institutes of Health have played a key role in vaccine development but have been excluded from much crucial government decision making. And the Food and Drug Administration has been shamefully politicized, appearing to respond to pressure from the administration rather than scientific evidence. Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government, causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.
- Back to Normal — Ted Rall:
- Be Still — George Monbiot:
Fundamentally, this is not a vehicle problem but an urban design problem. Or rather, it is an urban design problem created by our favoured vehicle. Cars have made everything bigger and further away. Paris, under its mayor Anne Hidalgo, is seeking to reverse this trend, by creating a “15-minute city”, in which districts that have been treated by transport planners as mere portals to somewhere else become self-sufficient communities, each with their own shops, parks, schools and workplaces, within a 15 minute walk of everyone’s home. This, I believe, is the radical shift that all towns and cities need. It would transform our sense of belonging, our community life, our health and our prospects of local employment, while greatly reducing pollution, noise and danger. Transport has always been about much more than transport. The way we travel helps determine the way we live. And at the moment, locked in our metal boxes, we do not live well.
Sunday, 4 October 2020 - 9:41pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- A New American Manifesto — AbsurdistWords updates the US Declaration of Independence:
Nobody is suggesting that we take the dismantling of a government lightly. Things must have gotten really bad for this to be the only option left. Humans by nature don’t like change and even when they’re being harmed, they’re more likely to just endure that harm than to break down a whole system that they’re comfortable with and used to. But if things get so bad that the government starts abusing and harming its citizens in the name of gaining more power, it’s every human’s moral duty to burn that government down and build one that protects them better from would-be dictators. The American people are now facing down these exact same kinds of abuses. We have tried to be patient, but now we’re fed up and the whole thing needs to come down.
- John Yoo: The Man Who Would Make the President King — Gene Healy reviews Yoo's latest:
Defender-in-Chief has already earned Yoo the coveted tweet-blurb from @realDonaldTrump, so it's unlikely anything I write here will put much of a dent in its sales. But ye gods, this is a terrible book: a lazy, turgid, error-ridden mess, perched atop an appallingly silly thesis. Yoo forgets history he learned in high school, announcing that the Mexican-American War kicked off with an "attack on Sam Houston's forces along the Rio Grande." (Zachary Taylor's, actually; Houston was a U.S. senator at the time.) He forgets history he actually lived through, declaring that President Barack Obama "launched attacks on Syria for its use of chemical weapons." (Er, he didn't.) Through large stretches of the book, Yoo even forgets what he's just written, as when he deploys the same damned passage from the Federalist three times in seven pages. You get the sense that with this book, unlike the Torture Memos, his heart really wasn't in it. As for that thesis: What makes a president a defender-in-chief, anyway? The answer is in the book's subtitle: It's the "fight for presidential power." You earn your laurels by defending the office's prerogatives—genuine or imagined—thereby keeping the flame of "energy in the executive" alive for future presidents. Trump amply deserves the honorific, Yoo argues, because he fought back against the special counsel investigation, defended his travel ban in court, dropped bombs without congressional authorization—or, as Yoo frames it, "stood up for traditional executive leadership in foreign affairs and war"—and made some judicial appointments Yoo likes.
- The Election That Could Break America — Barton Gellman in the Atlantic:
December 8 is known as the “safe harbor” deadline for appointing the 538 men and women who make up the Electoral College. The electors do not meet until six days later, December 14, but each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president. We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century. Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- Down with meritocracy — Michael Young writing in the Guardian about 20 years ago:
I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair. The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033. […] It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others. Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education. A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values. With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before. The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
- Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism — Rich Benjamin in the Intercept:
In order to win this presidential contest, liberals need to accept that Trump supporters do not care if he were to scrap millions of mail-in votes or to welcome, and even solicit, Russian interference for his cause. Not only do some Trump supporters understand that he is an autocrat who will cheat the rules to stay in power, that’s precisely what they like about him. The left should understand that many Trump supporters inherently believe that they would fare better under an autocratic system of white supremacy than under a multiracial democracy. So many white liberals and moderates are invested in the idea that authoritarianism can’t happen in America, because to question whether authoritarianism exists here is to question what they’ve achieved. Such white people, figuratively and literally, have so much money, property, social status, and self-image invested in the mirage that this country is based on merit and fair play. They have so much invested in the illusion that their political institutions and white cohorts are good actors that will keep everything nicely afloat. Questioning all that fervent, widespread Trump support would force them to question how their neighbor, their cousin, their uncle, their co-worker, their favorite vendor is complicit to a regime that prioritizes their well-being and social privilege as white people, second only to Trump’s greed. To acknowledge your aunt’s or your own complicity in Trump’s nationalist autocracy might make you feel accountable for what this country is. And that accountability to the problem damns you to an accountability to the solution.
- Houses are becoming commodities to buy and sell and not homes — John Menadue, Pearls and Irritations:
It is no accident that Scott Morrison was a senior executive in the Property Council. So it is no surprise that the ‘housing minister’, Michael Sukkar is not even in the Cabinet. He is in the ‘Outer Ministry’. That demonstrates to me more than anything that Morrison regards property as a commodity to be traded in the market and not a social good like education or health. We need major reforms in our health and education sectors but the failings in our housing sector tell me that housing and particularly social housing for rent is of the highest priority. Housing policy should be based on three important principles. First, we should value housing for its use-value, not its exchange-value. Second, housing policy should be part of community and neighbourhood building. Third, housing policy should promote social mixing and sharing, rather than stratification.
- Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
- Will citizen assemblies change local government? — Bill Garner in Pearls and Irritations:
With the local elections on the way in Victoria democracy could get a surprising boost. If instead of merely voting in councillors, what if citizens were able to directly set the strategic directions councils must follow? This may seem far-fetched yet it is exactly what the new Victorian Local Government Act enables. The Act places community engagement at the core of municipal governing. It is intended to encourage a much greater degree of participatory democracy. It is potentially revolutionary. […] Where citizens actively take up this opportunity it could go a long way to restoring the democracy deficit that resulted from the council amalgamations of the 1990s when more than 100 councils were sacked. This managerialist reform resulted in the old cities, towns, suburbs and neighbourhoods being submerged beneath newly-created megacities. […] The council amalgamations were justified by the claim that the admitted decrease of democracy would be more than compensated by an increase in efficiency and effectiveness. People would be better served if local government was primarily an exercise in management. […] While the democracy deficit became increasingly apparent, the promise of large economic gains in efficiency was never realised. But for a quarter of a century this has been the largely unquestioned way of running local government in Victoria.
- From the FSF Bulletin: Trial by proprietary software — John Sullivan, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation:
Unfortunately, with the shutdown of in-person institutions around the world, people have turned to the proprietary software companies that had the sales and marketing resources to quickly insert themselves as "solutions." Among these institutions are courts of law, many of which have been conducting some proceedings over Zoom. While Zoom is a "service," it also requires those using it to run nonfree software on their local devices -- either the official client application, or downloaded nonfree JavaScript when connecting via a Web browser. While Zoom's software itself doesn't cost an individual any money to use, it raises two clear categories of concern: requiring people to agree to Zoom's arbitrary demands as a condition for access to justice, and the state's public endorsement of Zoom.
- So an ancient TV set can bring down the mighty broadband? Good... — David Mitchell being all David Mitchelley in the Guardian:
Not being able to access the internet is a plus as far as I’m concerned. I look back fondly on the afternoon in 2009 on the Isle of Skye that I spent waving a Samsung flip phone around my head in the hope of it coinciding with a big enough blob of reception to get a text to send. I was significantly more likely to catch a flying splat of seagull shit. But the inconvenience makes you feel remote and, for me, that was the point of going there. Nowadays, I could probably get streaming HD. Which sounds like a disease. And maybe it is.
