RESET THE WORLD

NHS, Healthcare, and 'The Market'

2011-12-13T09:37:00.001Z

With NHS reform shadowed in people's minds somewhat, what with all the other wonderful Euro and education related candy treats the united, perfectly functional government is having fun cramming down the despairing throat of humanity, I hadn't thought about it in a while. But I was having a casual 'solve the world's problems' coffee session, and I had the following insight:

Applying 'market' logic to healthcare is a fundamental error. The following logic led to that conclusion:

1. In theory, the market provides morally acceptable outcomes from self interested and profit seeking activity due the fact that consumers are rational and also self interested actors, who want to be healthy, happy, free, etc; they discipline the market by demanding things which will benefit them, buying things that do, and rejecting things that don't.

2. Health care is not subject to consumer demand in the same way as leisure/unnecessary items. No-one decides to get ill; not one decides to get injured. Consumers have little to no control over when they require health care and what kind of service they require. They simply need it when their biological constraints dictate. In this sense, they cannot discipline the market, as they cannot by choice withdraw their custom; they can, if they have the choice, change provider, but they cannot simply choose 'not to buy'.

3. One reply to this might be that if there are multiple providers, consumers will choose the best, and this will lead to competitive efficiency gains. However, since health care is a necessity, the need for services over which consumers have little to no control, this provides the radical ability of companies to exploit customers collectively. If one company raises its prices by 40%, and such jumps happens in the USA, the other companies, rather than fell impelled to keep their prices low, or lower them further, to attract custom, they know they can raise them also, because people need healthcare; if the companies imitate each others price rises, the consumer body cannot punish them. With TVs, if all companies jacked up their prices, people would just stop buying TVs, and they would go bust, unless they lowered them again. This is not an on option with health care.

4. This applies at all points in the process. Which is to say, if, as would happen under NHS reform, there is a 'free at the point of service' system, but where much of the management and service provision was bought by the government from private providers, the same logic applies. The government, no more than the individual consumer, decides when people get ill or injured; they have to buy when they have to buy. Hence, private companies will be able to exploit the situation, and greater private involvement will lead to an escalation in cost for the government, and by extension the taxpayer. Unless, of course, the private companies are subject to well applied stringent regulation, but this will also lead to an increase in costs due to the need for the newly powerful regulating body, and increased bureaucracy.

There you go. The solution is to keep as much of the whole basket under the 'single payer' ethic as possible: management, equipment, provision, property, etc etc. Obviously this is impossible to an extent, as international trade for drugs/equipment and so on requires engaging with the market, but the market's influence can be minimised nonetheless. If we want to get more ambitious, we could argue for the establishment of a global medical institution, under the UN, into which producers could opt into and become non-profit, that produces medical materials and sells them to all coutries' public systems at subsidized rates. But that's a longer fight.

EDIT: put another way, one could argue that, in the logic of free market value, healthcare, because it is a necessity and because people do not control when they need it, has potentially infinite value: if the price were to be set by an 'ideal' free market system, it would have no theoretical ceiling, as its value is connected with life and death itself. The calculus of value for life necessities cannot, and should not, be located in market economics, therefore.

I Will Not Stop Blaming Society for the Riots – And Neither Should You

2011-08-09T19:45:00.005+01:00

Ok, so there's a lot of talk going round on the riots in England. People seem to be saying we have to choose between condemning the rioters individually, or critiquing society and the way things have been going.

This is a false dichotomy.

No single person out there who has been committed to being a voice for dispossessed, or for trying to pry into the hidden problems of the country, or standing up for human rights, for oppressed minorities and communities, should feel any need to stop now, or temper their arguments because they face accusations of lacking morality or reason or concern for the innocent bystanders.

Because nobody is blameless here.

If anything, the immoral behaviour of those rioting is further proof that it is, in fact, a sociological problem, and that there are things we can do, and should have been doing, to solve it. They obviously don't care about the buildings they are burning and looting. The question is why?

I'm pretty horrified by the 'Let's bring the army in' statements, and other such. Yes, let's turn an angry youth riot into a bloodbath. That'll show the kids whose boss. Make us feel big. Then what? Keep them mired in poverty and fearing an authoritarian, militant reaction? Yes. That will solve our social tensions. The youth of this country will feel even more tolerated, included, and catered-to. Let's show them the stick until they die, and whoever is left will come around to loving us.

Let's remind ourselves of a few things. First, children and youths are treated so badly in this country that the UN is actually concerned. It's never in the media that it actually has international attention, but it's seen as an impending crisis. We treat youths, particularly poor youths, as already guilty. They are criminals before they've ever seen a trial, before they've ever committed a crime. We blame them, through lack of social programs, for the wealth-shortcomings of their parents. They often have nowhere to play, and their sports programs are being eliminated. And so on and so forth. The public perception is that youths are to blame for 50% of crime. They are actually to blame for about 10%. They are far more often the victims of crime. This goes largely unreported, and most are ignorant of it.

And there's the crux. They have no reason to care. They have no reason. I wouldn't care about someone's property if they had been torturing me for years. Society has been punishing these kids for the mere circumstances of their birth their entire lives. And so they hate society. What do you expect?

Watch this video:

This guy makes a magnificent point: they have been telling us, over and over, that things are wrong. That they are treated badly. That inequalities are heinous. That racism and classism define their world. That they have no work, nothing to do, nothing to live for. And nobody gives a shit. If someone is suffering, and they ask you for help over and over again, and things only get worse, and no one helps, they will snap. Eventually, they will snap.

And everywhere people say, 'There is no excuse.' Yes, but they don't care. They don't care about your just pronouncements, they don't care about your moralizing, they don't care about the property and the damage. They don't give a damn.

And that's our fault.

Yes, it's their fault they are looting/rioting, but it's our fault that they don't care – which is why they are doing those things. It's not a false choice between the two. It's both. We need to give people a reason to care about peace, convince them that they will benefit from peace rather than suffer from it, before they will have any stake in it. Right now these kids are feeling more important and paid attention to than ever before, and that is a very bad thing. We need to regain the peace incentive, by making sure the disenfranchised will benefit from peace, rather than have their rights eroded during it.

Lastly, let's not forget that, as a society, we have been at war continuously for a decade. A decade! These kids have been raised to the backdrop of constant Machiavellian warfare, the expansion of islamaphobia, the denunciation of multiculturalism, and the blaming of all the country's problems on immigrants – regardless of whether it is immigrants themselves or children who are targeted. Why are we surprised that they have developed a racist, intolerant, war-like mentality? They see society ready to accept escalating collateral damage in its wars – why shouldn't they accept collateral damage in their own against society? We have taught them how to think, with our guns and our greed.

Nobody is guiltless here.

So lefties everywhere, stop flip flopping, for God's sake! Make your stand! There is no reason to back down from our position! Redouble our efforts to stand up for the young and the alienated!

Never stop fighting for the dispossessed, or for a better world. Someone has to push for it.

Jimmy Reid's Rectorial Address

2011-07-10T12:08:00.001+01:00

At the behest of my good friend Adam (EUSAfishes) here is a copy of Jimmy Reid's Rectorial Acceptance Speech at Glasgow University, to mark the tenth anniversary of his death (this August 10th):

It was the speech that confirmed him as the greatest Scottish orator of his time and shaped the thinking of a generation of students.

Jimmy Reid's Glasgow University rectorial address was reprinted verbatim in the New York Times.

The paper described it as "the greatest speech since President Lincoln’s Gettysburg address".

Here, reprinted is his moving acceptance speech.

– Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.

Many may not have rationalised it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in different ways by different people. It is to be found in what our courts often describe as the criminal anti-social behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop outs, the so-called maladjusted, those-who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.

Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially dehumanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else.

They remind me of the character in the novel, Catch 22, the father of Major Major. He was a farmer in the American Mid West. He hated suggestions for things like Medicare, social services, unemployment benefits or civil rights. He was, however, an enthusiast for the agricultural policies that paid farmers for not bringing their fields under cultivation. From the money he got for not growing alfalfa he bought more land in order not to grow alfalfa. He became rich. Pilgrims came from all over the state to sit at his feet and learn how to be a successful non-grower of alfalfa. His philosophy was simple. The poor didn't work hard enough and so they were poor. He believed that the good Lord gave him two strong hands to grab as much as he could for himself. He is a comic figure. But think, have you not met his like here in Britain? Here in Scotland? I have.

It is easy and tempting to hate such people. However it is wrong. They are as much products of society and a consequence of that society, human alienation, as the poor drop out. They are losers. They have lost essential elements of our common humanity. Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women.

The big challenge to our civilisation is not OZ, a magazine I haven't even seen let alone read. Nor is it permissiveness, although I agree our society is too permissive. Any society which, for example, permits over one million people to be unemployed is far too permissive for my liking. Nor is it moral laxity in the narrow sense that this word is generally employed ~ although in a sense here we come nearer to the problem. It does involve morality, ethics, and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations. Let me give two examples from contemporary experience to illustrate the point.

Recently on television I saw an advert. The scene is a banquet. A gentleman is on his feet proposing a toast. His speech is full of phrases like "this full-bodied specimen". Sitting beside him is a young, buxom woman. The image she projects is not pompous but foolish. She is visibly preening herself, believing that she is the object of this bloke's eulogy. Then he concludes - "and now I give ... " then a brand name of what used to be described as Empire sherry. The woman is shattered, hurt and embarrassed. Then the laughter. Derisive and cruel laughter. The real point, of course, is this. In this charade, the viewers were obviously expected to identify not with the victim but with her tormentors.

The other illustration is the widespread, implicit acceptance of the concept and term, the rat race. The picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal success. Even genuinely intended friendly advice can sometimes take the form of someone saying to you, "Listen, you look after number one". Or as they say in London, "Bang the bell, Jack, I'm on the bus".

To the students I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?"

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a giveaway. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. The power structures that have inevitably emerged from this approach threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic rights. The whole process is towards the centralisation and concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. The facts are there for all who want to see. Giant monopoly companies and consortia dominate almost every branch of our economy. The men who wield effective control within these giants exercise a power over their fellow men which is frightening and is a negation of democracy. 　

Government by the people for the people becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision making by the people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it is an ethical and moral question for whoever takes the important economic decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that society. From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books.

To appreciate fully the inhumanity of this situation, you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant without provision made for suitable alternative employment, with the prospect in the west of Scotland, if he is in his late forties or fifties, of spending the rest of his life in the Labour Exchange. Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.

The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision making in the political institutions of society. The power of Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades with more and more authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see for local government is as a counterbalance to the centralised character of national government.

Local government is to be restructured. What an opportunity, one would think, for decentralizing as much power as possible back to local communities. Instead the proposals are for centralising local government. It's once again a blueprint for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked "Where do you come from ?", I can reply: "The Western Region". It even sounds like a hospital board.

It stretches from Oban to Girvan and eastwards to include most of Glasgow conurbation. As in other matters, I must ask the politicians who favour these proposals - where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of a community? Or a community life? Of a sense of belonging? Of the feeling of identification? These are rhetorical questions. I know the answer. Such human considerations do not feature in their thought processes.

Everything that is proposed from the establishment seems almost calculated to minimise the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under "M" for malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.

If modern technology requires greater and larger productive units, let's make our wealth producing resources and potential subject to public control and to social accountability. Let's gear our society to social ~-need, not personal greed. Given such creative re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in " few years we could eradicate in our country the scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity.

Even this is not enough. To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and where necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people in the decision making processes of our society. The so called experts will tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people's participation anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument.

To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people, I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It's a social crime. The flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone's development.

In this context education has a vital role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change. The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, ne solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with, and in service to our fellow human beings can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.

Universities must be in the forefront of development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest desire that this great University of Glasgow should be in the vanguard initiating changes and setting the example for others to follow. Part of our educational process must be the involvement of all sections of the university on the governing bodies. The case for student representation is unanswerable. It is inevitable.

My conclusion is to reaffirm what I hope and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It's an affirmation of faith in humanity. All that is good in man's heritage involves recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is good by nature. Burns expressed it in a poem that technically was not his best, yet captured the spirit.

In "Why should we idly waste our prime," he writes:

"The golden age, we'll then revive, each man shall be a brother,

In harmony we all shall live and till the earth together,

In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall move each fellow creature,

And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature".

It's my belief that all the factors to make a practical reality of such a world are maturing now. I would like to think that our generation took mankind some way along the road towards this goal. It's a goal worth fighting for.

The Parallel World of War: Video Games, the Future, and Socialism

2011-05-26T23:11:00.000+01:00

An observation a made a while back considering violent video games:

That's what you get for promoting hallucinogens. Thanks somegeekintn.

Some preamble. A Game is any form of play. Video games are, strictly speaking, not a new medium: they are modern versions of play; old games in a new setting. Like the evolution of recorded music. Or evolution of cinema from the theatre. As children would play war with sticks and stones, so now do they play war with fake guns. Better? Well, harder to knock the teeth out with, but with consequences down the road that I think we'll all agree are at the very least morally atrocious.

The next thing that constitutes part of the 'thing thing' that eventually formed from a 'thing thing' into a whole thing to 'strike' me (uh...) was that these modern games have been violent throughout their history. From Mario bouncing on turtles to Bayonetta torturing angels, it has been the overriding theme. The Wii has pioneered away from the theme to an extent, and there has always been a quiet undercurrent of the much played, little discussed Solitaires, Tetrises, and Robot Unicorn Attacks of this world (well RUA is violent... violently addictive! Hiyo!), but these inhabit less cultural space, and hence less of the public consciousness.

Cultural reasons? Sure. As cultures, Japan, the UK, and the USA are all obsessed with WWII. The UK and USA because that fact that they defeated fascism gives an apparent ligitemacy to their global empire and military-industrial labyrinths; Japan because they were summarily defeated, yet forced to tout their defeat as a moral victory. Also, the world these days is very rarely at peace: the UK alone has been at war for a decade now. People have almost stopped noticing. Insert Orwell quote. Boom.

Any way, there are others reason too. Mortality: we love dying and killing without actually dying and killing. Mortality is probably the biggest preoccupation of the human mind, and it makes sense that we'd want to explore it in play more than other things. Also, morals, though rational evolutions of life and society, are constraining, and it's fun to break from them in a safe context. Whatever combination of factors come together to form this obsession with violence, it exists. And here we (finally) come around, as by a 'back way', an 'alternative trail' if you will, to that thing that struck me.

Is it not odd that there is basically another world, parallel to this one, which now, thanks to the Internet and MMOGs, truly is breathing at all times? Though technically only taking place on computer screens, thanks to the signals, the wires, and the omnipresence of its virtual activity, it seems to be playing out all around us, invisible, between the folds, just beyond sight: a truly parallel world, everywhere and nowhere.

If only. By Lawrence Whittemore.

And it is a world of war.

Walking down the street to Tesco, I feel a shudder. My brain has considered, chanced upon the thought, that someone in a room near to me is killing men. Not real men... but increasingly accurate depictions of them. I think of the parties slashing each other up in WoW; I think of machine gun fire and explosions. And in front of my eyes is the tranquility of a peaceful, bright city, its citizens walking by, treating each other with perfect (most of the time) courtesy.

Is this not an odd combination of realities? Is this not an odd choice of parallel world that humanity has invested in? Dreaming of heaven for millenia, rather the expression of our species' play, our games, those conduits of our desires and fears and expectations, is hell. Second Life and all that are nothing in comparison; I mean, let's be honest, they're hellish too, but mainly because they're boring as hell. Burn. Ok, not true, there are good peaceful MMO games out there (Mateusz mentioned Farmville), but, again, they don't have the same presence in the mind or the market.

What does this say about our time? About the species? Is it possible for video games (the most prominent example being MGS4) to both engage with this phenomenon, and yet be critical of it, and perhaps point to a way out of it?

One implication may be that we all expect war. Desires and fears are, after all, tied together by expectation: to expect the good might happen is to desire that occurence; to expect the bad, to fear it. This is the source of their interplay, of their strong interrelation. And if games are ways in which we indulge our desires and our fears beyond what would otherwise be possible, it would be rational to say that their content indicates that we expect war. Always. That virtual world, raging around us, is like a form of prediction: the collective unconscious, like an unholy sage, looks into tomorrow, and sees, to quote WarHammer: 'In the year [x], there is only War' ('In 2101...' heh, nah I won't).

How seriously should we take this prediction? How credible are our gamers' and game makers' clavoyance? Well, one important lesson to learn from games is that the more impunity the powerful feel in war, the more war they will wage. What we have learned from games is that when there is no threat it is quite fun to wage war all the time. And so, as the ruling elites of our time coalesce into a global order, with no national borders turning them against one another, will they start to act as one? The truth is, they already are. What nation opposes us in Afghanistan? What nation, after Saddam fell after one month, opposed us in Iraq? Even in Libya, Gaddafi does not wage war on the UK; we alone wage war on him, and the people. Nothing opposes the new order; nothing counterbalances it. It is free to wage war with near impunity, and it is precisely this condition, this terrifying factor, that the world of video games predict will cease to be near, and soon become total.

Of course, being a socialist 'motha fucka' I would argue that the necessary counterbalance to this 'Playful' attitude towards war must come from those who operate the tools of production, who provide the services and expertise to others that drives the economy... who make weapons, fight in wars, and, yes, design video games. In other words, the workers of this world; not in the nineteenth century sense of the miner and the factory worker, but all workers, all those who rely on the owners' capital, on the credit of the banks, of the benevolent hiring of corporations. A global elite demands a global collective counterpoint, to ensure the reintroduction of peace as the status quo.

Suitably inspiring. By bitzi ☂ ion-bogdan dumitrescu (seriously).

Games do not seem to predict this, or at least, it is not a prevalent theme. And yet, in those games that are not violent, that simulate future domestic life, peaceful successes, adventure without battle, political sparring, domestic management and simulation (play Tropico, FYI; it's awesome), there is a desire for continued life, life that has room for love and learning and laughter. And we should remember, that for as fun as war games are, they all take a morally tragic view of their own subject matter: from Gears of War, to Halo, to MGS4, and even WarHammer, all condemn war. Hence, perhaps when the end game comes, those desires and those morals will win the day.

Can making more socialist and peace building video games help bring this about? Well I wouldn't be much of a lefty if I said no, would I. Anyway, there you have it, a short 'Marxist' reading of the video game market and what it means for all us lazy brain dead slobs. Eat it up!

And design more socialist games! For us all to play. *GRIN*. Later peeps.

And I didn't even get onto to the Predator Drones being controlled by remotes. Gosh Darn it!

Why Ken Clarke Shouldn't Have His Job, and the SWEM Problem

2011-05-20T13:42:00.012+01:00

Given Ken Clarke's recently expressed 'views' and the furor they have cause, I figured I'd throw my weight in with the rape issue. This is a two section article: the first is about reactions to his statment, and I how I think they could politically improve; the second is a criticism of Ken Clarke's actions.

***

Firstly, reactions to the issue.

When I read Stop Talking About Rape and Start Listening, I admit my first reaction was defensive. This is because I am a 'Straight White English-Speaking Educated Man', i.e., the least oppressed group in the world, and The Big Bad Bogey Man. The only way in which I am not part of the ruling clique is that I have never had any money – but obviously the fact that I have been to university means that this is unlikely to be the case in the long term. My mother used to say at the dinner table, 'Well I may be white, American, straight and grew up in a Middle Class home, but at least I'm not a man!' pumping her fist in the air with vigor. Now obviously she was talking in jest, but it had an effect nonetheless.

As a socialist and a writer trying to forward the cause of equality, there has been an odd, latent guilt in me for being born into this body. Obviously, in most conceivable ways, it is an advantage, but the feeling is there regardless. Despite the fact that I have been careful to act morally throughout my life with regards to sexual boundaries and people who are sensitive about various topics, and have always been the political ally of any oppressed group of people, I have been paranoid that feminists and other groups view me as 'The Enemy'. I guess 'Stop Talking' aroused that paranoia in me.

This makes parts of the article hard to read. For example, this line: "A lot of my previous boyfriends have either made me, or made me feel guilty if I didn’t (which almost amounts to the same thing), have sex with them or give them blowjobs."

Now, have I ever made someone feel guilty in the sense of saying to them, "You're frigid, you should be having sex with me, you're being unfair, fuck you, you're a bad girlfriend" etc etc etc? No, of course not. But have I been damn horny and gotten annoyed that it wasn't mutual with my partner, not out of any feeling of injustice, but out of physical frustration? Yes. Just as the other has done when it has been flipped. Obviously I accepted the temporary rejection, but I got a little miffed. Now, obviously, this makes the other person (or myself, were it flipped), feel guilty.

I am fairly confident this is not what the writer meant. But in my defensive state, part of me felt I was being accused of rape.

Another line was this: "Every time a man catcalls me, comments on my breasts in a perverted way (clue: I often don’t mind when gay men say I have nice breasts, I mind a lot more when it’s straight men), it brings back the countless horrible memories"

Again, have I ever gone up to someone I didn't know and started drooling over their breasts? No. Have I commented that friends of mine have nice breasts? All the bloody time. I'm a fairly flirtatious fellow, I'll admit. Do I do it with the intent of pressurizing them, or communicating sexual intent? No. But I do think they look good, and I'll sometimes say. I'm fairly careful to only say to friends of mine I know won't mind, but still, I'll say it.

Once again, I am fairly confident that this is not the sort of thing that was being protested, but again, due to my inbuilt defensiveness on the issue, I felt like I was being accused of being the sort of person who triggers people into reliving trauma.

Lastly, there is the issue of men who may be potential allies being alienated because of their personal trauma being dismissed. Whether they have been in a war zone, been incarcerated, suffered sexual assault as a child, or been violently assaulted, they will not feel like their discussion of their problems are welcome in pro-equality circles, since they feel they are 'The Enemy'. I've been mugged at gun point, had a bloody rock thrown at my eye, been threatened with a knife, been pulled off my bike and attempted to have it stolen, been punched on the face on the street, had people threaten to kill me in High School, and have had an (extremely minor) sexual assault. As have a number of men. Now, I don't particularly care, and have no massive perceivable trauma relating to any of these events, but if I did, I'd feel like my body was dismissing me from the discussion – that how I was born meant what I felt didn't matter.

*Once again* (last time, promise) I know this is not how such anti-rape articles and political stances are intended, and I'm well aware that it's easier to deal with these things when you are in a more empowered group. I'm sure the author of the above article, and many others, would be more than empathetic to such concerns and would welcome discussion on how to solve them and how such people could find help. But, again, the feeling is there; the defensiveness is there.

Why is this important? Well, it has jack all to do with Ken Clarke – I'll get onto him in a minute. But I feel it is important to state as a preliminary consideration that many other empowered SWEM (Straight, White, Educated, Male) folks will feel the same way, but won't necessarily realize, as I have, that they have misinterpreted the comments. This will alienate them as potential political allies. If they have been careful to pay close attention to issues of consent and social etiquette, they will feel like this is not being recognized, that the responsibility with which they have treated their defacto power in society has gone unnoticed, and that they are being lumped in with the bad bunch. There are few things as alienating as feeling people are lumping you in with rapists and such, when you have never done such a thing.

Often a reply to this is that 'Straight men are statistically more likely to commit sexual assault, therefore it is correct to speak of them differently'. This smacks of the same logic used by racist employers in America: 'Black men are statistically more likely to have committed a crime, ergo this black man I am interviewing is more likely to commit a crime.' This is obviously untrue: an individual cannot be preemptively judged with statistics. Now these example are not equivalent, but they do share a certain reductionism, and are generalizing.

Basically, how to reduce the frequency of rape is a complex issue, involving pursuing equality of power, greater education, imbuing sexual confidence, and a fuller dissemination and a strengthening of existing legal rights. But us SWEM bastards have to be on board for those to be achieved; we do constitute about 40% of the population of the UK. Anger is a good thing; it impels us to action. But we must be careful not to alienate our allies: we all have to be able to identify as being accepted into the cause of equality. Some sectors of feminism are more militant with regards to this than others, of course, but it is a lesson to be learned across the board.

In short: just keep in mind when you are writing that a lot of your audience is straight and male, and that a lot of them are willing to support your cause.

***

Right, Ken Clarke time.

For some reason Conservatives never take into account the issue of power. This is presumably because they're all rich and have it, ergo don't have to worry about it. Anyway...

When the Justice Secretary, a public figure, and an executive authority on the Law of the Land implies that certain 'kinds of rape' aren't serious, he helps define the culture of legality surrounding the issue. This then has an effect on how empowered people who rely on the law will feel at any given time.

Power is often a passive thing. When we are in a position of threat, sexually or otherwise, our ability to resist is in part determined by how likely it is we will be defended by society at large, and – yes – how 'seriously' our issue will be taken by the law. Do we have the backing behind us to make that challenge? Will it be worth it, should it lead to further threat? Will we be protected if it does so down the road?

This is also true if we have been attacked in some form and want to pursue legal action: will we be taken seriously? It is worth the stress of a trial, etc? Can we be sure it won't lead to retribution? And so on. This is also an issue of power. If we feel the law is firmly on our side, and that our concerns will be treated 'seriously', it is much easier to take that plunge and make the issue a legal one, should we feel it necessary.

This is why Nazi officials and police in Germany were able to get away so easily with so many extra-legal atrocities, or why many Jews walked without resistance to their fate, things that we would normally never accept: the people knew they had no passive power; no force backing them up, against the massive amount of passive power backing up party cadres.

Basically, Ken Clarke ignored the issues of real power and perceived power, and chose the worst possible word with which to make his idiotic little stance.

Next, there is the fact that he brought up the 'Bush Man' scenario, or the 'properly raped' in the street stranger scenario. Completely irrelevant; as I saw someone write on facebook the other day, this is 'worse' only because it involves further charges of violence, and constitutes a tiny minority of rape cases anyway.

There are bad and worse cases, obviously, as there are with any kind of crime: if you non-consensually punch someone in the face twelves times, it's worse than punching them in the face once. Both constitute violent assault. So it is with rape, and everything else. Those who work in the field of social care know this: distinguishing between people who have been in long abusive relationships where their partners have repeatedly raped them over time and destroyed their sense of security, and people who have suffered isolated incidents is important, as knowing how to reach out to each group and how to deal with the problems people in different scenarios face in necessary to helping them heal. And I personally wouldn't be against judging sexual assault on a sliding scale: as I said above, something very minor happened to myself, but I wouldn't want that person to go to jail, or even have a criminal record, but it might be nice to see them realize why they were wrong.

However, I would say that a prerequisite of liberalizing sexual assault laws in this way would be more equality across the board, to avoid such liberalization being taken advantage of. Still, being a massive opponent of high incarceration rates, I would like to see them progress hand in hand.

But these are not the terms Ken Clarke couched his argument on; saying that only 'Street Stranger' rape is 'proper' or 'serious' rape excludes most people who have suffered assault from ever having any legal standing or power. And even had they been the terms he used, it still would not have been the best idea in the world, as, like I stated, this man is a representative of the nation's justice system: had he been taking power into account and been doing his job, he would have used explicitly positive terms in relation to a person's legal rights and the seriousness of their situation, he would have made them feel like it was absolutely serious, as the main role of justice is to redress power balances, to treat people equally under the law, and correct prejudices in the law and render it fair and representative.

He doesn't realize that his words made people's lives worse. And for some, probably a lot worse. This is why he should give a full apology, and more: it was not a mis-mash, not a mistake, not a gaffe. He did not do his job, and he damaged lives. He should apologize, and, further more, resign – or if he does not, be fired.

Charity is No Subsitute for Freedom, in Education or Elsewhere

2011-05-10T05:09:00.002+01:00

This article in The Guardian describes some of the 'follow through' policies likely to result from that 'door opening' push to increase tuition fees – including a plan for up-front, higher-fees-paying students to get priority for places, plans for corporations to sponsor students, and a plan for charities to sponsor them too.

Now, I may hear you saying, 'Well, there's nothing wrong with charities sponsoring people. Charities are good!'

Have a pie, boy. I can afford it... you can't!

Well, here's a brief argument:

Charity feels good to give. Makes one feel altruistic, kind, upstanding. Powerful, almost: you have the power to give, to rescue, and to aid.

But the truth is, it's not the same to receive charity. Every time someone is forced to ask for charity, it makes them feel less powerful. Yes, as a one-off or a rare occurrence it can be a humbling and positive experience: receiving blood after an accident, having a friend take you in after your house has flooded; all sorts.

But if forced to ask for charity consistently, or for something that for others is a matter of course – not an accident, not a one-off occurrence – it can become very painful.

With this in mind, reconsider the idea that charity is a good way for 'less fortunate' kids to get to university.

For me...

...!

The basic principle that people often forget is that we shouldn't have to ask for charity. People should be able to – through collective bargaining, strong organization, functioning democratic organs of society; i.e., through democratic power – demand free education at every level. They should say, 'No, we don't need to ask you to help us go to University, we demand that you make a place for us at University.'

Charity has been the calling card of Conservative propaganda since ages past. Always they propose to replace public hospitals with charity run hospitals; charities should help the homeless, not a public welfare organization; charities should give disadvantaged kids the resources to go to university. But in truth, it is merely an excuse to 'soften' the blow of commercialization and privatization; let those with money choose to give it away, ran than be forced to because the majority have the leverage – the power – to demand it of them.

A charitable world is a world where the inequality rule: where the few are mighty, and the many are weak.

Though it be a Utopian fantasy, I look forward – as an impossible goal to which I will ever drive, hoping to change reality just a little bit – to the End of Charity, where no one will need to beg for a good life.

But, that aside, in the mean time I urge everyone not to be taken in by this false concession, this patronizing benevolence. Through organization, collective bargaining, and building strong democratic forms of leverage, we need to fight until knowledge, along with every other public service, is free again.

Arguments Against the Libyan War

2011-03-22T23:15:00.006Z

1. Support for Gaddafi Internally Will Grow

The intervention of the West in Libya will give the conservative and nationalist sectors of Libyan society – those were unsure of whether to support Gaddafi or not before – concrete reason to flock to the regime's side. It transforms his 'Foreigners are always to blame' rhetoric from the ramblings of a madman into statements with external evidence. Signs of this growing popular support can already be seen. Hence, in this way, the war is helping Gaddafi: this is why is he eager to fight the long fight; war is, in fact, his best chance at staying in power.

2. The Revolution Would Not Have Been Defeated Without Intervention

You cannot 'defeat', to use William Hague's word, rebellious and revolutionary sentiment with violence. You can cow, intimidate, suffocate – but not eliminate. Regime violence does in fact, as we all know, increase internal revolutionary sentiment – or, you don't make people less angry by killing a bunch of them. Hence, Gaddafi's actions, while left alone would have put back the date of regime change in Libya, would only have made his people more eager for that change. However, as a leader who originally gained power due to massive anti-imperialist sentiment, again, this war will shift the target of many peoples' anger; the West are being violent now, too.

3. The War Will Damage the Libyan People's Ability to Mobilize.

There are, essentially, three things which allow a people to revolt against their government: Wealth, Health, and Education. A society where there is a high level of financial equality, where people are healthy, and where people are well educated, will never abide tyranny, and can effectively organize against it. These should be the aims of any effort on the part of the West to help those in beleaguered and impoverished nations – accomplished through economic policies: Increase Equality; Increase Healthiness; Increase Educatedness. However, war will erode the infrastructure on which these things rely: there is no such thing as a clean war; war is dirty; explosives are explosive. Health, the education of children, the conditions in which people live; all will deteriorate, the longer and more extensive the military action becomes. This was the main mistake made decade after decade in Iraq: constant military action, both initiated by the Saddam regime and by the West, made a people, – who had once enjoyed a world-renowned health care system and high investment in education – too impoverished, tired, and disorganized to oppose their regime. We cannot let the same thing happen in Libya.

4. We Are Waging (another) War During An Austerity Budget

There is no justification for fighting a non-defensive war during a time when the country is being told it must tighten its belt across the board. This war, together with the cuts in corporation tax, the lack of action on Banker bonuses, and the exponential growth in the wealth of the Super Rich, show the true motivations for Austerity, and shed light on the motivations for the War. The current government is more than happy to spend money; it simply wants to open up the public sector to private investment and private management – in short, to the world of profit. And they are more than happy to spend what will become billions of pounds on military explorations, if they might increase their chances at the next election due to nationalist sentiment being stoked. Basically, the deficit is not what matters to this government: what matters in simple and singular, and it is the transference of capital from public to private hands. The eagerness to fight this war is an insulting reminder that the UK just ain't that poor.

5. France and Britain's Conservatives Are Only Using the War to Bolster Popularity

Everyone is wondering why the US, Russia, and China are reluctant here (the US being the most confused about the whole thing, as they are both leading the operation, yet want to get it off their hands as quickly as possible). The reason is: their regimes are secure, or will not benefit from war electorally. It is unlikely that a war will help Obama in 2012, given his voter base and where his popular mandate came from. In fact, it is probably hurting him right now, as we sit here. However, Sarkozy, who faces immanent electoral defeat, and Cameron, whose economic policies are growing more and more unpopular, both need their 'Falklands' moment: this explains their fervent attitude and eagerness. If Gaddafi eventually falls, they will use that fall to call themselves Heroes.

6. Any Victory For the Revolution in Libya Will Now No Longer Belong to Libyans

Since the planes started flying and the missiles started dropping, the rebels have become secondary to the West in efforts to depose Gaddafi; the West is setting up a relationship of military dependence with the people. If several months or years from now the people do depose Gaddafi (hopefully occupation will ultimately be avoided) the West will inevitably have a major say in how this happens, and in what kind of government takes his place. Globally, it will be said that military intervention caused the conditions for victory – just as William Hague is saying now. And tattered infrastructure – the inevitable result of war – will be waiting for the people, when they try and begin again. In short, the West will benefit from this; the people of Libya will suffer.

7. An Economic, i.e. Non-Military, Program of Democratization Must be Developed

Lastly, it is paramount that, when moving into a Global age, for countries all around the world – for there are far too many to wage war on, obviously – who face dictatorship, civil war, and famine, a means of helping them out of this enthrallment is developed that is not based on military action. This would be accomplished by concentrating on economics. Unfortunately, the economic policies pursued by the dominant powers over the last thirty years have been massively on the side of inequality. A will for this to remain the status quo is the main reason why interventionist wars continue to occur. The desire for countries to be opened up to the markets in an unprotected, Neo-Liberal fashion, which will benefit the Corporatist Elite and increase inequality, is trying to reconcile itself with a revulsion for poverty, violence and oppression – the very products of inequality. This results again and again in war, which exacerbates the problems in every direction. An economic program of socialization, of public ownership, of strong corporate regulation, and powerful organized labor and organized consumer bodies would ensure the weakening of dictatorships and violence-riddled societies around the world, and free millions from the thrall of tyranny generally – including in developed countries, like here in the UK.

Inequality? But I hardly know her!

2011-02-25T23:39:00.001Z

I loved this gratuitously graph laden post by Mother Jones so much that I decided to reproduce its wonderful graphs and charts in full. Behold how much bloody money those crooked bastards are making:

It's like those 'Check out how relatively small the Earth is' diagrams, except the Earth is YOUR ASS.

Are you part of the top 1%? Would you like your opinion to be heard? Please record your statements on your face with a blowtorch, and send in your burnt flesh to: Fuck You, Uranus, IH8U 4EVA

You almost gotta despise those 20% sycophantic conservative voting cronies more than the big bosses themselves, eh? "Igor, eat the faces of the petty Bourgeois imbeciles."

"Yeeeeeeesssss Maassssterrrr."

"How do you think we should go about redistributing this wealth?"

"Force rich people to pay for more stuff?"

"So... increase taxes?"

"NO THAT'S BAD TAXES ARE GOVERNMENT WAAAAAH BUREAUCRACY WAAAH"

"Uh..."

This one didn't phase me anywhere near as much as the next wealth list...

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) $451.1 million

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) $435.4 million

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) $366.2 million

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) $294.9 million Rep.

Jared Polis (D-Colo.) $285.1 million

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) $283.1 million

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.) $231.2 million

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) $201.5 million

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) $136.2 million

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) $108.1 million

Bloody CORPRATIST STATE!!!

Ahem, sorry. Moving on...

Of the...

...

DUUUUUUUUH.

Your Bailout money at work, chumps and chumpettes. No but really, they should all just die. But then, I guess that's what the nine el... heh, better not.

And they STILL bloody complain! "If you let the bully bully, the bully bullies more."

The fact that all income groups saw a similar growth rate until the 80s was actually a surprise even to me. Please, do follow the link at the top of the post and check out the sources. I am Kang; I hear all.

Later, peeps. Are you angry yet? Honestly.

In Defense of File Sharing, No. 1: Pop Music Should Die

2011-01-21T10:39:00.001Z

There are many defenses of file-sharing to be given, but I thought that today I'd give a particularly epic one.

"Off with their heads!"

By autumnal fires. Just imagine the dude is Sony.

Now, you may all be thinking 'He's gone mad'. True. But that does not mean that my comments are invalid. See, I look at the debate around File Sharing, particularly in the music industry, and there are indeed many reasons to be afraid of it:

Embedded in every pirated piece of data is malicious code that will eat your children.
When you File Share, you are downloading COMMUNISM!!!!1111omg
You are stealing (even though, as any idiot could notice, the original owner of the file, y'know, still has the file... but anyway...)
Apparently, somehow, it funds terrorism (those Swedes at the Pirate Bay are a scary bunch). And that too will eat your children.
Lastly, it will destroy the music industry by making labor into musical endeavors unremunerated.

It is this last FUCKING LIE that I want to address here today, and in the process of doing so, promote the dissolution of the Popular Music business, or: "Off with their heads!"

Now, we all agree that it is a perfectly reasonable expectation of musicians that they should be able to make money from royalties.

Oh, wait... no I don't.

Every pound is a spit in your eye.

Here's why: say you're Britney 'Obey the President' Spears. How much do you make in royalties, exactly? Who the hell cares; point is, it's a metric Fuck Ton of a Galactic Shit Load. And say you feel depressed for a while, and can't face the world out there. You take a break: lay low for a few months. Get your head together.

Now, random person X, who is not Britney 'Obey the President' Spears, also gets depressed, and has to take a long period of leave from work.

The latter has to depend on either the whims of her benevolent employer (unlikely, these days) or the State's inadequate benefits program and public health care system.

The former makes truck loads of money and spends it all on rehab and plane rides to parties.

Why is this reasonable, again?

Oh wait, that's right: IT'S NOT.

No, it's not a photo of Britney Spears, silly. By Victor de la Fuente.

99% of musicians out there have to do a kaleidoscope of activities to maintain a decent income:

Several live performances a week
Session work
Teaching, in various capacities
Promotion/production work
Other misc work, such as retail/academic/journalistic, that is music related

If they are extremely lucky, a certain percentage of their income will come from royalties. But most of the time this is not the case. And, of course, for these 99% of musicians, File-Sharing is an inherently positive thing, as the diverse work they do benefits from the ease of promotion and exposure that the Internet provides.

The people who publicly defend the economics of the current copyright system are people for whom it is of disproportional benefit – funnily enough.

Yes. sstwalley, thank you. You are a genius.

So lets have a look...

AT THE ALTERNATIVES!

DUN DUN DUN!

Go, Boy, Go!

Ahem.

Let's say File Sharing of music becomes (which it will, eventually) completely normalised. Kids will do it from the day they can type. Everyone will get every song they download from iTunes for free. CD's will still be sold for fetish value, but they will be of negligible economic significance. Data will be freely exchanged by all.

And in this blissful future, the main casualty?

POP MUSIC. Hurray!

The lie is that the music industry will die. Completely false: the music industry will stay as lively as consumer demand requires of it, and that demand will never wane. Music is an integral, ubiquitous part of human existence: all subcultures within and without cities rotate, first and foremost, around styles of music; music forms the background or the foreground to most social experiences.

What will happen however is that big business in music will suffer, because corporatised, royalty-based pop music will be less tenable (5 mega-corporations profit from almost all Western music sales). Musicians who actually rely on live performance, teaching, production, promotion, and so on – i.e. the vast majority – will thus gain a bigger share of consumer attention – hence making them better off. In other words, the majority of musicians will have a stabler, more rewarding lifestyle; the business leaders and the top end of the pop industry will be hurt, and probably only by a disappointingly small amount.

Put it this way: these days, cities, of hundreds of thousands of people, will have an active music scene which involves only thousands. It would not be surprising if less than 1% of any given 21st century city's population was engaged with its music scene. Hence, only large urban areas with populations of millions – London, the LA urban sprawl, the Bay Area, the greater New York area – still have truly thriving music scenes: because less than 1% of the population ever gets involved. Yet, even in these places, the culture has diminished due to increased corporate control.

Does this mean that the other 99.x% are not listening to music?

Of course not. They're just listening to bloody pop music (no, the Beatles is still pop music!).

If their TVs weren't blaring out pop music 24/7, and the radios in their places of work weren't blaring out pop music 24/7, and if there weren't adverts for pop music all over their browser, and if there weren't pop stars promoting all sorts of random products like shampoo and makeup, where would they go?

They might... I don't know... go see a show! Find some music out in the city, or in their neighborhood, which they could then go home, and, now knowing of it, DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE (forgot about that part didn't you? AHAHAHA!). Lovely.

Dance clubs could commission local musicians for blasting tracks! Pub musicians would multiply 20 fold! All would live in harmony and eat the flesh from the fruit of paradise!

Yes! Yes! YES!

That's right: it's such a good idea, it made a statue orgasm (by g33kgrrl).

...

*ahem* Anyway, there would be no harm whatsoever in undercutting the profits of the big-wigs of the music industry, and their pitiful, puppet stars who dance across the tv screen like powdered up, pampered slaves. In fact, it would improve the livelihoods of musicians everywhere, and probably increase the standard of musicianship and the diversity of music played all over the Western world.

So, contrary to the Hell Mouth's vomit-like lies about terrorism, stealing, and the destruction of music for all time, supporting, and actively participating in File Sharing is in the interests of the vast majority of musicians (just not the pop ones... who are the worst ones anyway :P).

So, for all the Corporate Music Overlords and their Pop Star Slaves:

"Off With Their Heads!"

Oh, as a P.S., thanks to all those on the Internet who cover their photos/drawing with CC instead of commercial licenses, so that I can use them on my blog! LOVE :D

Down With the Welfare State – Up With Socialism

2011-01-16T10:58:00.007Z

Time to address some comments about the 'Welfare State'.

I was recently in conversation with a Conservative who said, "There should be a net, but it should be the barest possible net to bounce people back up". Time to deconstruct that statement, and talk about the issue of perception.

Something is only part of a 'Safety Net' if it is perceived as such: no particular public institution carries that status merely because it is publicly funded. The main example that demonstrates this is the NHS: the NHS is a public institution that is part of everyday life, such as the Inland Revenue, or the Police. It is not something designed to be there for when people have bad luck, or find themselves in poverty: it is the normal source of medical care for most people.

A common sentiment in the USA - by
wstera2

Contrast this with Medicaid in the USA. It is perceived as part of a Safety Net: people can only be covered by Medicaid insurance if they cannot afford to cover themselves by any private means. Conservatives would argue that this is necessary – it would be insanely expensive to try to cover everyone on a public system, would require a massive increase in taxes, and its costs would spiral out of control. Hence the public system should be as 'bare' as possible. However, from a British perspective, this is clearly incorrect: America spends much more public money on health care, for what is a profoundly worse service that covers a small percentage of the population.

We have two public health care institutions, one perceived as a 'safety net' and clearly second rate, one universal and perceived as good enough for all. So what is happening here?

Basically, everything that is perceived as part of the safety net is not necessarily part of such a structure. Once a public service is organised well enough and engages with the country as a whole, it becomes normalised, and is integrated into everyday life; it becomes something enjoyed/depended on by the financially struggling, the middle classes, the working classes, and often the wealthy, all alike. Again I would point to such example as the Police, the University system, even roads, etc.

Take the Job Centre and general unemployment benefits. If this institution were more well organised – if it had a greater number of initiatives, if it was integrated more into the education system (say if there were courses in Secondary School/University where the the Job Centre gave information and more active help in providing teenagers/students with their first jobs, for example), if it was less demonised by those in work or those of a generally more conservative bent – it could cease to be part of a safety net at all: it could become something which people go to even when they are in work, if only to get information about the job market and their working rights; it could be a place where more lucrative and unusual employers went as a matter of course, in the knowledge they would be talking to a range of talent, in a venue that was not derided.

This however is not the case. Read some of these comments about people who have 'Had to go on the Dole' – there is a pervasive sense of shame associated with the act. The Job Centre is a place you go to only when you are unemployed and cannot support yourself; it is a place you do not want to have to go to. The job offers there are presented in a profoundly non-user friendly manner, and much of the information is hidden behind obfuscation.

Why is this the case?

It is perceived as part of the Welfare State; i.e., it shouldn't exist, but it has to.

The main challenge is convincing people that this perception is not necessary.

Would creating an integrated employment hub be too expensive? Well, the assumption is that it would equip a country far better for a recession, by getting all parties in one place more consistently, and by making help for finding work less stigmatised. It would also, presumably, dramatically decrease the time an average made-redundant/career-shifting/new-to-the-job-market individual spent unemployed. It would also help new industries to flourish by dramatically increasing the inherent networking potential of everyone in the country.

A non-safety-net oriented public Job Centre, comprehensive in approach, that the rich used along with the less well off, would be of enormous structural benefit, and a long term stabilising force on par with the NHS.

This method of analysis can then be applied to any part of the Welfare State. Why, for example, should housing benefit be capped? This merely serves to produce the perception that only the 'poor' should be able to use such services, stigmatising it and labeling it a 'safety' feature, rather than an integral feature designed to make it easier for people to weather hard times and come out of them without having a reduced quality of life. The latter is a measure which wants to support them in their endeavours, and help them remain productive; the former is an economic policy which states: "We want your livelihood to be in the hands of big business."

Bit of a jump there, you say? Ok, slight elaboration:

If institutions such as these are normalised – are not perceived as a safety net – and people are generally encouraged to engage with them, the economic potential of the average person goes up: they are less afraid of illness, less afraid of redundancy, less afraid of becoming disabled, less afraid of recession, more able to find new work, more able to create new businesses, more able to be productive while disable/ill, spend less time ill, etc, and can more effectively manage their own lives. If these services are reduced to a 'bare net', then people, during hard times, are forced to chase desperately after employers to live – and when these employers turn cold (as they have of late) the investment capacity, morale, and livelihoods of many people radically decrease. A recession, together with a low level of public services, reduces wages, increases hours, makes the economy a hugely disproportionate employers market, and erodes workers' rights. Of course this is seen as good by big business: it gives them more power. But it takes power away from the majority of individuals.

By Dalinian61

In short, if what we seek is a situation where more people can invest, more people can own their own businesses, more people can be economically productive, more people can live a healthy life, and for us all to prosper, the Welfare State indeed must be done away with – but by building on, strengthening, having a positive vision for, etc etc, all of our public institutions, so that they become resources tapped by all... not by eliminating them.

Or, in other words, let's eliminate hatred of the safety net, by actually just helping to keep each other safe in general. Great plan, eh?

Why I Love University Tuition Fees, and Our Government

2010-12-10T02:48:00.007Z

Liberal Democrats Flickr – Where the nice people are.

Seems fitting that the first post in a while should concern tuition fees.

Yesterday our glorious Parliament, and its wonderful leaders (see left), decided to allow universities to charge students up to £9000 a year for tuition. This will be added to the other financial demands on students.

Good for them.

Now, not many people have £50,000 lying around. Borrow! Yay. Long term, structural borrowing, being the stable, stalwart, just plain lovely pillar of our economy that it has been for the last 30 years, is so truly the way to go. I am happy.

Of course, it has been wisely foreseen that not everyone will be able to pay their gargantuan debts back, and so our benevolent coalition rulers have come up with a brilliant scheme – Quote the Cameron: ‘Only the successful’ will repay. Pay it back when you make a decent chunk of money.

If you don’t make enough, you might not have to pay it back at all! As a Conservative MP said yesterday (arguing in favour of the fees): ‘Some of these fees will never be paid back!’

Micah68, now your education is

in good hands. Who are You?

I have no idea. But thanks.

Uh... yeah! Awesome! ...Uh, yeah! ---------------------------------------->

That has got to make University staff feel nice and safe.

I for one feel comforted, embraced even, by the long term planning, and deep and meaningful economic reforms that I am currently witnessing.

Ahem.

What a bunch of swell folks our MPs are. Considerate. Kind. Sensible.

And of course Labour’s terrible (and I mean actually terrible) alternatives – namely their leaders making ‘calls for the decision to be delayed until after the government has consulted more widely’, and their muddy Graduate Tax proposal – reek of a lack of vision and strong insight, the very things which CamerClegg have shone down on us.

All hail.

***

It’s an interesting issue this. Education isn’t free; we know that. Teachers can’t work for free; people can’t spend all their time researching for free; books aren’t free; building construction and maintenance aren’t free. Be great if these were all socialized, but hey: not the world we live in.

So it needs to be payed for. Go figure. And needs to be paid for adequately, and in a way that produces brilliant skills, and nourishes our society and economy, making the world intelligent, vibrant, and well equipped to meet the challenges ahead.

Students are not so stupid that they think universities can be, quote, ‘free’.

The real issue then is what method to use to pay for them.

The debate in the Commons earlier today woefully overlooked so many things, that it kind of made me want to bomb parliament, again (*MI5 random Internet sweep – keyword phrase detected – ‘bomb parliament’ – analyzing – just some whiny blogger – not Muslim – no threat* … “Are you sure he’s not Muslim?”/“Yes Sir.”/”Good. Carry on then”).

It seems like all the talk was about perception and deterrence. As though students are incapable of thinking about economics, or the political and personal complexities of systemic debt.

For one thing, there is no evidence that fees do deter poorer students. They just, funnily enough, put them into debt when they graduate.

In the grand, socially perfected, entirely Utopian, equal, peaceful, and glistening example of human excellence that is the USA, which we seem to be relentlessly imitating, plenty of people from poorer backgrounds go to university: but the debt comes back to bite them in the ass. Hard.

Guess who's judging you:

'Raaaar': Statue-Marx disapproves of your antics.

***

One of the differences between paying for educational facilities through general taxation, and paying for it through privately owned debt, is that privately owned debt is just that: the sole responsibility of oneself. The article last linked to touches on some of the mental health and social problems associated with carrying a large burden of debt: nightmares, stress related illness, family tension, and the possibility of repossession, and a trashed credit rating. This in turn puts more pressure on health care services, and detrimentally affects economic productivity.

Getting into debt by spending too much on a fancy home, or buying a fancy car, or buying too much piddly crap and paraphernalia, well that’s your own bloody fault. Suffer the headaches, douchebag.

But under the US system, debt is systemic: for hospital bills, education, as well as housing. The necessities of life quite precisely require large scale borrowing. And this has been a primary cause of the biggest economic crash in a number of generations.

Do we want this for Europe and the UK, too? Debt driving all sectors of necessity?

The government proposes this, at a time when, according to Cameron himself, we should be trying to ‘live within our means’. How is putting young people into £50,000 of debt before they have even really worked encouraging them to live within their means? Rather: ‘Live outside of your means, before you even have any idea of what your means might be.’

And that Tory MP, who so innocently said, ‘Some fees will never be paid back’ – well, how right she is. Make people borrow before they know how, when, or even if they can repay.

***

Bloody Hell... (By vuokki)

‘Alternatives! Alternatives!’ they cry, their voices wailing with despair as the traitorous Lib Dems, while hollowing out their own values with a spiky spoon, are seemingly – amazingly – leading the intellectual debate on fees, and are deaf to all concerns.

Well, I mean bloody hell, we’ve been living the alternative here in Scotland.

Paying for education through general taxation – even if it requires a rise in taxes – has several advantages: the money is available immediately; funding allocation can be planned ahead more easily; the financial burden is on society as a whole, not on individuals, just as graduates’ labour and expertise will benefit society as a whole and drive the economy; the peace of mind and financial liberation given to graduates frees them up to borrow money for starting a business, or to explore different career paths, and all the other actions that a free, forward thinking economy needs people to be able to do; and, lastly, it prevents education getting caught up in the logic of consumerism – once people are used to paying a lot for their education, someone will be waiting in the wings to start making tasty profits from that mentality. Then BOOM: hello USA.

Hi.

One other thing: this has nothing to do with the recession, or the deficit. The fees won’t yield any dividends for the government for years, by which time the economy will most likely have recovered. This is purely ideological. Personal responsibility, and all that – though only for those who don’t have swathes of cash lying around the family home.

Personally, I think we shouldn't stop making a big deal out of this until it’s fully repealed.

Learn How to Compose for Virtual Orchestra? Damn Right

2010-08-18T17:19:00.000+01:00

I've been busy writing a whole bus load of articles recently, but I've added a few of them to a new page above: Virtual Orchestra Tutorials. Anyone who wants to check them out, and learn how to write music for a virtual orchestra, check them out. It's a hell of a lot easier than you think. The page will be added to over time until I have covered EVERYTHING.

Below is the book I sourced a lot of my knowledge from. A brilliant, fat, all in one resource.

Also, check out my facebook business page to listen to some of my orchestral music, as an indicator of what a virtual orchestra can sound like.

New Articles Added!

2010-08-16T15:14:00.000+01:00

Hello faithful readers.

Don't forget to check the Articles page now and then: I usually write at least one new article a week. I recently wrote a few about Futurama, Family Guy, and Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. That's right, there's an Amazon link below this. Read it; decent yarn, thanks to Painball, the best dystopian punishment mechanism since The Running Man. Hell, I might as well link to The Running Man too: not enough people know the book; they just know the movie. So... many... Arnie... one... liners...

Yes. Enjoy the books, and the articles.

Now I'm afraid I, like Buzzsaw, have to split.

The Largest Protest in Human History

2010-08-15T18:39:00.000+01:00

Bye-Bye, Apple.

2010-08-14T05:54:00.000+01:00

Do I really mean go in peace? No.
I hope you suffer, Apple. Badly.
Photo by C. Frank Starmer

I have used Apple products throughout my computing life, but no more! And here's why:

The closed nature of the iPhone App Store; why did I wait until iOS4 for Folders? Pointless. Also, this isn't Disneyland: stop over-moralizing (Dan Gillmor explores in depth what he calls the 'Walled Garden' ideology).
One of Apple's contracted hardware producing companies, Foxconn, has a record of terrible employment practices; anyone else remember the days when we bought Apple products because we thought it was a more ethical alternative to Microsoft? Makes you laugh, now, huh? (Steve Jobs: it is not a sweatshop!)
The fact that you can't share music directly from the iPod without going through iTunes.
The price of their hardware.
The company's increasingly arrogant demeanor, of late.
Steve Jobs' voice.

The icing on the cake (not the really creamy in-cake filling that lay the seed of hatred: I'll get onto that in a sec) was when I went to the Apple store in San Francisco and I had to wait at the Genius Bar for an hour just to get my laptop charger replaced (they tested it without one minute of my arrival, and knew it wasn't working), because 'That's the way things are done'. Even this was, of course, after much argument on my part; they wanted to make me schedule an appointment for the next day.

Unfortunately, they weren't cute or female.
Photo by ratterrell.

Now for that creamy, vanilla cake filling. I bought an iPhone a while back. Had it for one month. Was robbed at gun point. Uh oh! But only owned it a month right? I can get this thing replaced, right? They'll sympathize with the situation, right?

After about two hours of persistent conversation, I learned that the answer to these questions, is, apparently, no. Not at all. Even the extended Apple Care program (which I wasn't stupid enough to pay for) wouldn't have covered theft. And the third party insurance programs (not that you should, by all rights, ever have to consider getting one) don't cover the full cost of a new phone, have deductibles, and have very expensive premiums, hence they're virtually redundant.

And not only do you have to PAY for another one, you have to pay THREE TIMES AS MUCH, because it doesn't get a 'new contract/upgrade discount'.

There is something about this policy, and about the consequences of it as described above, that offends basic humanity.

This is what you look like in my mind now, Apple.
Photo by Neil101,

It smoldered in my gut since, and slowly grew into an Ancient-Chinese-Warrior style yearning for revenge. And so, when I went in to get my charger replaced, their obtrusive policies pushed me, nudged me, prodded me, ala the humiliating coup de grace move in Worms, over the edge.

So yes: Bye-Bye Apple! Fuck you.

Hello Linux, I suppose.

Socialized Therapy: The First Step Away From a Drug Obsessed Culture

2010-08-12T15:06:00.000+01:00

In America, the use of Anti-Depressants, and other behavioural medication – perhaps the most troubling increase is in medications subscribed to children – has become endemic.

This post does not intend to question the efficacy of such drugs, nor call into question whether or not they are given enough time to be properly tested before being released commercially, nor even whether or not they should be developed by private firms at all – no; rather, I intend to show that they are an enabler of a radically stressful, exploitative working culture, and that there are alternatives.

Here in America, it is quite frequently the case that someone will work more than sixty hours per week. The average annual holiday time is two weeks, and many do not get that – this is in comparison to the EU's guaranteed five weeks a year. A worker may have no health care provided for them by their employer. They may be earning a very low wage. Employee rights in the USA are underdeveloped, and many people are ignorant of their rights, and are deliberately kept in ignorance by their employers to facilitate exploitation. Also, employers frequently ignore health and safety regulations, or take advantage of too weak existing regulation (one particularly bad example is the meatpacking industry).

This gives rise to such events as when a male flight attendent lost his cool, badgered the passengers on a grounded airplane, inflated the emergency chute, jumped down it, and drove from work in his car.

And, of course, to compound the situation, the employee is facing criminal charges.

But, people have to work, right? Well, for the man above, mood-leveling drugs may be one answer: pop some pills; don't get so angry. Here we see how drugs are acting as an enabling agent for a certain work ethic: they can make what would be normally intolerable a bit more tolerable by altering internal chemistry.

With the risk of sounding overly dramatic, humanity is literally physically transforming itself to be more docile: morphing into machines through capitalistic abuses in medical science.

What is the alternative?

Well, it is no coincidence, for example, that the majority of seriously mentally ill individuals in the USA are black, and to a lesser degree hispanic: these groups are more frequently mired in poverty, and mental health is inherently tied to the material and social conditions of one's life.

Photo: Ryan Stanton

And the best way to improve the conditions of the workplace is through organizing the labor force. Hence mental health professionals should work together with unions and employee rights groups, with the overall goal of eventually operating through the catalyst of organized labor.

Think about it this way: if the individual employee being diagnosed, and the therapist themselves, could both appeal to the authority of a well organized workplace, then they could demand that the employee get their hours reduced, be given personal support, have their duties altered – all sorts of real material changes, alterations in the kinds of things that are generative of stress and mental ill health in the first place. This is rather than be sold drugs, with the intent of forcing them to tolerate their bad conditions.

There is a visceral, irrational opposition to organized labor in the United States – it has one of the lowest rates of unionization in the industrialized world – but this would be one definite benefit of increased unionization: the ability to force employers, through bargaining power, to provide for real, material, effective treatments for mental illness.

This is not to say that drugs would not continue to have their place – simply that they would not be the first port of call for all treatment.

No National Speed Limit? Germany Loves it.

2010-08-09T02:20:00.000+01:00

Ah yes, the German Autobahns, where, on two thirds of the network, there is no speed limit, velocities average higher than 80mph, frequently reach 150mph, and the accident and fatality rates are lower than the freeways in the USA:

"Despite the prevailing high speeds, the accident, injury and death rates on the Autobahn are remarkably low. The Autobahn carries about a third of all Germany's traffic, but injury accidents on the Autobahn account for only 6% of such accidents nationwide and less than 12% of all traffic fatalities were the result of Autobahn crashes (2009). In fact, the annual fatality rate (2.7 per billion km in 2009) is consistently lower than that of most other superhighway systems, including the US Interstates (4.5 in 2009)".

(Found at this awesome all-in-one resource for all things Autobahn: Brian's Guide).

Also, since mainland European countries are effectively borderless these days, much of the traffic is cross European, or filled with commuters from Austria or the like, making it a non-argument to say that this has something to do with German culture.

Right, anyway, I haven't quite made up my mind about introducing this to the UK/USA yet, so I'm going to go through the pros and cons.

Pros:

In general it is good economics to allow your population to get around as quickly as possible. Those of you folks who have to commute from Sacramento to San Francisco, don't tell me you wouldn't like to be able to cruise a good stretch of I80 at over 100? Exactly.
It encourages the maintenance of much better roads, and the use of these high quality roads; one of the reasons there are very few accidents. Since 2005, there is a per-km (less than one Euro) toll charged to trucks, but since most of these are commercial, it wouldn't hurt the average joe. This is a good way to fund maintenance while keeping much of the burden off the citizenry.
Driving tickets and predatory cop cars are a source of great anger to people who aren't actually endangering anyone, and a waste of police man-power.
Driving fast is fun.

Cons:

Environmentally, speeds above 60mph decrease fuel efficiency. Now, even though we are all completely behind the development of the electric car (you are, right?), and this may not be as big a deal in 20 or so years, it is, in an oil-sensitive epoch, a big deal now.
It encourages individual car use, and takes emphasis away from the development of more efficient, safer, more environmental, and ultimately potentially faster alternatives such as high speed train systems (although, this is hard to support, since Germany, the primary example here, also has one of the best high speed train networks in the world, where speeds, on the fastest trains, average 140mph; in any case, more people could use trains, and less could use cars).
While it may encourage better road maintenance, the added pressure and vibrations and wear and tear etc do increase the cost of road maintenance substantially.

Final opinion:

Since most pro-national-limit groups cite safety, and since safety has, in those European countries that have adopted limitless sections of road, been proven to be an issue related to things other than speed in non-urban areas, it is hard for me not to come down in favor of having no national speed limit. I am an environmentalist, but I am also very anti-authoritarian, and for now, we still live in the age of the car: I don't think allowing people to move around faster and more freely in their cars prevents investment into other things.

So there we have it. Scrap the speed limit, people!

Reset Law Enforcement: At Least a Third of all Crimes Should Not be Crimes

2010-08-08T11:28:00.000+01:00

The image to your left is a topographical map of crime rates in the grand old city of San Francisco, provided for by the good folks over at io9. Useful for law enforcement training; useful for social services; useful for inquisitive internet-toddling Joes like you and me who want to understand things better: certainly.

But it also throws into relief the following thought experiment: if this is a summary of crime in San Fran – and if we can assume that other cities would have maps with many similarities to these – then imagine if 3 out of 8 of them simply weren't crimes?

Prostitution, narcotics, and non-destructive vandalism (graffiti, etc) could be, and have been, at various points in history and in various parts of the world, decriminalized or fully legalized.

Now we all know the arguments of being able to tax/regulate; of alleviating an entire sector of the labor market from criminalization and the economic benefits of this; of resultant increased public safety; of better access to educational research in these fields; of easing the burden on the prison system; of easing the burden on law enforcement; and of encouraging a less authoritarian system in general.

And we have all read about the almost ubiquitously successful policies in parts of the world like, as Time analyses, Portugal, where all narcotics were decriminalized, and the Netherlands, where prostitutes operate legally and pay taxes.

We are also all aware that the apocalyptic moral degradation of all human community and the end of everything good did not quite occur in these places – and that the frequency of the above activities did not even drastically increase. And we all know they will always happen whether they are or are not legal anyway.

We are ALSO all aware that the other, more harmful crimes, such as assault, robbery, vehicle theft etc, only correlate with these things because they are already illegal, not because they are inherently seedy or generate crime in and of themselves.

BUT AS IF THESE WEREN'T ENOUGH... just imagine? Crime decreasing in a city by about 40% OVERNIGHT? Just because we changed the definitions of what is and is not a crime? Wow. Think about the psychological impact of this on society in general: an overnight proliferation of societal stability.

Criminalization should be a last resort: we incarcerate only when we have to, not because we don't like or have reservations about certain things. In a time where the State is more powerful than ever, we need to make sure that this power is directed at things which are actually dangerous to the world and to human life. Like, oh, I don't know, shoddy safety practices on oil rigs...

The Superstate History of the Middle East

2010-08-05T03:20:00.000+01:00

One of the reasons for the current problems in the Middle East is that it has tended to coalesce into a superstate throughout history, and, in the Age of Oil, this would obviously make said superstate a superPOWER; hence the current superpowers don't like the idea, and want to keep the region weak and divided. Here's an awesome animation from Maps of War that shows the history of the Middle East:

I would argue the right thing is to move beyond the era of superpowers and nation states to an era of Global governance. Then we wouldn't have to wage wars for reasons like this. But that's just me...

John Kerry Might Have Been a Better Choice After All

2010-07-26T20:04:00.000+01:00

Left Wingers across the US have, just in the past week, begun to think that maybe John Kerry would actually have been a better man to put in charge than Obama (not that, due to the conventions of US politics, they had the chance to re-run him after his defeat in 2004): when Harry Reid abandoned the Climate/Energy bill, and there was nary a word from the White House, who butted in and said the fight would continue, no matter what? When the White House reacted to the information released by WikiLeaks regarding the Afghanistan War by blankly saying it, "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security" (even though the information is all purposefully released when it is several months old, to avoid it being operationally relevant), who had the guts to give this subtly loaded but powerful statement: "However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan....Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right"?

Of course, being 'soft on war' and 'whiny about the planet' are the two most incessantly thrown jibes by the right at the left, and Obama's strange approach to the idea of bipartisanship may explain why he has taken these nonsensical complaints to heart – despite the fact that the issues are just as important for Americans and others as health care and financial regulation. Would Kerry have been funnelled down the same path if he had won office? Are the pressures of the office, the inertia of the military establishment, and the titanic resistance of fossil fuel interests just too strong? Who knows. But he's certainly won a few friends over the past week with his willingness to take bold stances.

- As an addendum, I'll just say: this whole WikiLeaks phenomenon is extremely important. People need to relearn why war should be opposed on principle; these acts – these 'mistakes' – are unavoidable consequences of it. The West is too distant from conflict, while it simultaneously promotes it: we have too clean an image of it in our minds, and so rarely feel its sting. WikiLeaks is a bigger step towards accomplishing this than, perhaps, any other innovation in history.

If You Thought FOX Was Bad...

2010-07-15T07:04:00.001+01:00

Check out what they have to put up with in the UK:

Next, check out The Sun.

Psychiatry, and the problem of Irony. Reset the System!

2010-07-14T10:37:00.000+01:00

For those of you who know me well, you'll be aware that I have a thing against psychiatry. Well, here's a nugget of thought I had today:

One question psychiatry seems to have neglected throughout it's history is: what makes it possible for a human to act? Using what variables can one distinguish between pretending and more spontaneous, out-of-conscious-control behaviour?

So, is this guy acting or not, you reckon?

In france, as Jean Baurdrillard recounts to us in Simulations, the army long frowned upon recruiting actors, since it was suspected that, "If he can act mad so well, he must be mad."

Well, apparently Western Psychiatry feels similar, because, on quite a number of occasions, people have been able to pretend to be insane so as to infiltrate Psychiatric hospitals, in order to take notes on the hospital conditions, orderlies' behaviour, etc. Now, this leads to the somewhat amusing, somewhat disturbing conclusion that, since the inability to distinguish between what is real and what is not – indeed what is ironic and what is sincere; what is played, and what is really meant – is generally considered to be the prerequisite for madness, PSYCHIATRY ITSELF MUST BE FUCKING INSANE: an absurd, nonsensical, ridiculous collection of criteria for diagnosing psychological health.

How can effective treatments be given to the mentally ill, when the institution that is supposed to treat them can't distinguish between symptoms that are not consciously manageable (such symptoms can of course be created by excessive intentional fantasy – but that is a sidebar debate for another day) and which ones are feigned? Is the teenager ill, or do they want to be diagnosed as ill to join in with the mentally ill trend? Is the defendant insane, or do they just want to avoid conventional prison? In psychiatry's eyes, they are one and the same.

Worse still is the fact that the reverse of being unable to notice an act also applies, in the form of being unable to notice sincerity: with homosexuality, for example, people who live as such are quite aware of how they feel, and are quite conscious of what is going on, yet for a long time it was assumed that they were acting without realising it: pretending without meaning to pretend. And hence mad. This debate still rages today with those in the Trangender/Tranvestite camps.

Expert diagnosis pronounces that the actors are serious and the serious people are acting!

The fallout from this tragic inability of psychiatry to do precisely what it has claimed to always be doing has been felt throughout the ages: sexually independent women, locked up; homeless people, electrocuted; young adults, lobotomised for being 'unmanageable' (JFK's sister Rosemary is a famous example). And it is still being felt: children being pumped full of behavioural drugs because they don't fit the strict blueprint of the educational system. None of these behaviours are signs of madness: the fact that they are seen as signs of madness is itself a sign that the system is itself damn right fucking mad.

I would advise dismantling the entire structure of criterial diagnosis. A person's mental state is not determined by ticking boxes and assigning categories: it is determined through a sensitivity to minutiae and to that person's unique situation and thoughts. In a sense, it's an art, not a science. Like acting.

Rant over.

P.S. I recommend reading the above story about Rosemary Kennedy. It's a poignant example of just how twisted the world of psychiatry can be.

Next on the List: Immigration Reform. Reset the System!

2010-07-13T13:06:00.000+01:00

Listening Obama? Good.

Immigration is one of those things. The 'Other' knocks at the door. We are aware that we have quite frequently gone round to their house and taken their shit without asking. They just want to participate in running things, in return for fair compensation. We kind of suck air through our teeth, and say, "Yeah, see, thing is, it's kind of crowded... tell you what, you can sit in the side room for, like, a year, and we'll treat like crap, maybe put you in a cell for a little while, and then once we've decided if we want you or not, we'll let you know." Then they notice our window is open.

See, illegal immigration is kind of like Torrenting. Why would anyone in their right mind legally download a song, when it costs more, and can come with DRM and other annoying caveats, when illegal downloading is so easy? Those who follow the law are punished for doing so. The law is unenforceable, and causes a lot of avoidable strife for those who go out of their way to follow it. Hence, the law is obviously stupid.

So it is with immigration. Yes, there are legal benefits to immigrating legally, but the process is so cumbersome, so long, and so insulting to basic humanity, that no wonder one would want to try and move around otherwise. How about eliminating the concept of illegal immigration ENTIRELY? Guess what would happen: they find work, they pay tax! Wonderful.

And it will never stop. It will never go away. People need to work, to eat, to have a home, to live, etc. You know: all that surviving stuff. And they will move to where they think they can do those things. If that includes the US or the UK, then it does, and that's fine; if it doesn't then, well, why would you make it so ridiculously hard for people to come here just to find out? Here's an idea:

If there are very few immigration controls, people can come to the country, then, if there isn't enough work for them, they can *gasp* go somewhere else, because they're not, you know, INCARCERATED. Or being hounded by the authorities. Or waiting in a stupidly long line for the mere possibility of legal immigration. If you make it easier for people to come, you also make it easier for people to go. They will also come and automatically be integrated into the legal system the moment they arrive. You will know they exist. They can easily gather information on economic conditions, learn skills, and so on.

Of course, the more countries that participate in opening up their borders, the better it will work: people can look for work all over, with no legal obstacles. The UK has already taken advantage of the EU's open borders to great economic advantage; it works when we do it together. But really Obama, show some leadership, eh? Show that you're on the right side of history. Particularly since the UK and the rest of the Europe is lurching to the right on this issue like a fat rhino on a tire swing. And for those that argue that we have to deal with global inequality before opening up borders, well, all I can say is: there would be no single greater measure in dealing with global inequality than opening up national borders.

Bring on the Global Village.

And please, stop all this policing the borders business. It is not an evil thing to walk. There's a lot of crime, a lot of violence in the world, a lot things that need dealt with; what a waste or resources to send an additional twelve hundred soldiers and spend $500 million on trying to hound people into jails who haven't hurt anyone.

Lessons From Iraq: The Importance of The State

2010-06-08T11:20:00.000+01:00

The aforementioned John Bolton was fond, in his interviews, of giving the argument: "If you prefer the calm of tyranny to the chaos of a failed state, well that's your preference, not mine". He was also fond of giving it in a tone that said, between the lines: "If you don't agree, you're a commie, a fascist, and an idiot all rolled into one". Thanks, John.

In any case, given the number of dead and displaced that have resulted from the war, the human rights abuses, the torture, the tribal warfare, the lack of utilities, and so on, one does have to start to wonder... at what point do the scales tip? When does a dictatorship become worse than a failed/non-functioning state? Does it ever?

I'll say first of all that the US Government has made the exact opposite decision over the years: whether to the benefit of Pinochet (Chile), Saddam himself, Batista (Cuba), Stroessner (Paraguay), and on and on, the White House and the Pentagon continually decided that, actually, a dictatorship was better than a failed state (or, more accurately, better than a revolutionary state, or, hell, even a slightly disobedient, left wing state). Until, of course, 2003.

Tony Blair's 'Humanitarian Interventionism' would state the opposite: wipe out the bad government, let the people sort it out. Well, here is a quote about Iraq from one of the best damn articles about the war I've ever read:

"In Iraq, two early decisions by the American administrator Paul Bremer after the 2003 invasion triggered a multi-layered conflict. By Order Number 1 of May 16, Bremer dissolved the Ba’ath Party. In an article in Le Monde diplomatique, the British academic Toby Dodge described the Iraqi population a month after the arrival of the U.S. forces as dominated by a Hobbesian nightmare. Dodge estimated that between 20,000 and 120,000 senior and middle-ranking Iraqi officials lost their jobs in the civil service purge alone. They would have constituted the very force capable of restoring order amid chaos and violence."

Now, I don't agree that merely sustaining the Civil Service would have prevented what happened in Iraq, but it does illustrate something about the whole situation: a modern country relies on formal cooperation a lot. If anything, the detritus of Iraq destroys the largely American myth of Meritocratic Individualism.

No living American has ever experienced a failed state (unless they have travelled a lot; this accounts for a small enough percentage of the population for us to call it statistically irrelevant). So many whine on about bureaucracy, but that's because, given how the country was sheltered from World War Two, they don't realize how important a functioning bureaucracy actually is: they've always had one. So many gripe about taxes, but none have experienced a state where utilities are unreliable/non existant and where the rule of law is negligible. In effect, going into Iraq, many conservative Americans literally believed that if the Baath state was dismantled, the people would just spring up and manage themselves fine, and instantly build a new, functioning power structure. They honestly believed this was physically possible. The 'personal responsibility' rhetoric in the US has been built on foundations of a sheltered, comfortable lifestyle, shielded from the worries and chaos and instability that plague other parts of the world: a highly functional state is quite literally taken for granted.

Suburban America is, in fact, to blame for everything.

Sometimes, you do just have to stop and think: wouldn't it be great if they actually got what they wanted? No taxes, no bureaucracy, no infrastructure, no state? No utilities? No rule of law? Civil war? Famine? Mass emigration? That would teach them a fucking lesson.

(Random fun factoid: Bush made 935 false statements in the lead up to the war. Impressive, right?)

Rock on.

Don't Ask Me What I Think About the Military's Stance on Homosexuality, and I Won't Tell You

2010-05-29T09:36:00.000+01:00

Ok, I lied. Well, you clicked on the link, so I suppose that's the equivalent of you asking me. Whatever. Here's why keeping the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy would be a bad idea:

It aids in politicizing the armed forces, identifying it more strongly with one political party (the Republicans). Though this phenomena occurs in America for several reasons – and it could be argued that right wing parties throughout the world share in this, since nationalism is a near-ubiquitous symptom of conservatism – it doesn't help to add one more on. If the army is implicitly opposed to homosexuality (straight members are not required to hide their sexuality, of course) then not only will LGBT people be less likely to serve, but, simultaneously, the broad pro-equality Democrat base will also be more disillusioned with the military. This not only makes the army a more conservative organ in general, but it also exacerbates even further those partisan divisions all through society that are founded in whether or not the military serves the interests of American individuals and is compatible with their outlook on life.

Secondly, there is this to consider (found over here at MSNBC):

"House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that of the 13,500 members of the military who have been discharged under "don't ask, don't tell," more than 1,000 filled critical occupations, such as engineers and interpreters."

So it's clear this is not just a political problem, or an ideological one. People with real skills that are of critical value are being discharged for a reason that bears no logical relation whatsoever with their ability to do their job.

One protest that has been offered by Senator James Webb (a Democrat) is that such a legislative move during war-time is a bad idea, as it would put pressure on troops to adjust to a new status quo at a time when that isn't helpful. Well, since it's shaping up to seem like America will always be in a state of war (since we're, you know, fighting to eradicate something which is entirely a violent protest of our military policy in the first place; nice closed, self replicating war-time scenario there) then it comes as no surprise that this argument doesn't hit home very hard. Nor would it, even in a more conventional time of war: if we're going to fire someone who is responsible for interpreting another language in a given region for utterly arbitrary reasons, this is, obviously, not going to put any pressure on any one, is it? Come on. Also, in terms of psychological pressure, is effectively institutionalizing lying and dissimulation a good way to foster camaraderie and morale? Clearly.

Happily, I think this woman is the principle opponent.

Luckily it looks like, in the midst of Republican inertia and loudly complaining Pastors, the majority of people support the repeal. However, it does seem that Obama has had the authority to stop the law's enforcement while the repeal goes through; though I don't pretend to know the complexity of the different pressures he's currently under, and the subtleties of the situation, one has to wonder why he hasn't used it...

Ideas of the Global Recession: East and West, Real and Virtual

2010-05-24T19:35:00.000+01:00

Robert Peston gives a concise, impassioned big picture view of the economic crisis (the source file can be downloaded here):

"To put it in crude terms, for much of the past decade, millions of Chinese slaved away on near subsistence wages and still managed to save, both as a nation (China swanks £1,400bn in foreign exchange reserves) and as individuals. And to a large extent they were working to improve our living standards, because they made more and more of the stuff we wanted at cheaper and cheaper prices - and clever bankers took their savings and lent the cash to us, so that we could buy the houses we cherished, the cars we desired, the flat-screen TVs.

This imbalance - between the savings of China, India, Japan and Saudi and our indebtedness, between their massive trade surpluses and our deficits - was never sustainable. At some point, the Chinese were bound to say, “we’d like some of the cake now please, which means you’ll have to have a bit less”.

Tragically, they toiled for our prosperity – or we lived high on the hog while they fattened the pigs for us – for too long. Which is partly why the return to equilibrium, to a more balanced global economy, is happening in a horribly painful way that's impoverishing millions of people."

He has in the past described this as the 'East-West Financial Superhighway'. A smart man.

He goes on to explain:

"This customer funding gap was nil in 2001. But by the end of June this year, according to the Bank of England, the gap had soared to £740bn. To be more specific, a typical British bank has been raising the funds for 40% of all the loans it makes to you and me from big financial institutions, money managers, giant companies and other so-called wholesale sources."

And, as we all know:

"The trigger of the closing down of wholesale markets was the horrifying realisation by financial institutions in every country that hundreds of billions of dollars lent to US homeowners in the form of low quality subprime loans – and repackaged into putatively high quality investments as collateralised debt obligations – were going bad."

However, there is one point on which I suspect he may not have said all he thinks, or simply hasn't though of all the implications of his own words. He says:

"asset prices have to find a floor – and they haven’t found the floor yet – before the financial economy can rebuild itself and the real economy can receive the necessary finance that will allow the recovery to begin."

This echoes Ben Bernanke, when, shortly after he took charge of the Federal Reserve, he asked an aid, in relation to a group of mortgages, "Somebody tell me what these damn things are worth?"

Could the fact be that, in our age of virtual finance, the age of the net, of ballooning numbers, of no physical standard for currency, and so on, that there is no floor? Echoing theorists like Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard, who worry that virtual spaces – how things appear on a map, on radar, on a satellite feed, in numbers, on a stock exchange monitor, etc etc – are the 'real' thing to us – that the fluid precedes the stable, the virtual the physical, etc – to the point where any kind of 'bottom' or 'basic' value of a house, at any given time, is impossible even to conceive of? What kind of world is this leading us into?

The physics of the economic world, always a matter of conceptualization, is changing; that's obvious. But for those of us with a cyber punk bent, we can't help but get a little 'Whooooooaaaaaa' about the possibilites. Watch this space.

Mandatory Gender-Equal Legislatures: The Case For

2010-05-22T17:36:00.000+01:00

Here is a brief summary of my reasoning for why there should be a requirement for legislative bodies to be 50/50 in terms of gender:

First of all, it displays a message of gender equality, in terms of power, to the entire nation, and beyond that, to the world.

Secondly, merit is irrelevant: in a country of, in the USA, 300,000,000 people, or even in the UK (60,000,000), you will be able to find a number of people who can do a legislative job very well. So it's not a question of 'choosing the worse candidate because they're a woman': there is enough of a pool of talent to avoid this.

Thirdly, gender plays a significant role in voting habits – not always to the left of course; although this is currently the case in the USA, with many reasons being peddled, in the UK women were, for much of modern history, more likely to vote Conservative; and, of course, some women campaigned against Universal Suffrage: an odd oxymoronic democratic act to hinder democracy. Consider this quote:

As women they were also considered to be naturally conservative. The Liberal Party and later on the Labour Party feared the backlash of women’s votes which they expected to be conservative. It was these concerns that had kept women out of public life for such a line time. Those campaigning for women’s suffrage were not helped by the fact that opposition to their cause included many women. In 1908 general concerns took on an organised form and a small group of well known women formed the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League.

Marij Van Helmond , Votes for Women: the events on Merseyside (1992)

Marij Van Helmond is a museums development officer.

(my emphasis)

However, the hidden message in this act of 'forming an opposition' is that they wanted a public voice; they merely disagreed on the form it should take. In any case, as a demographic group that quite often shows collective swings in certain directions, one could assume that the same would be true in equal legislative bodies – and hence that such legislative bodies would be more in tune with the gender-specific policies and cultural moods of the day.

(It would be interesting to read a feminist analysis of my use of the word 'bodies' in this post).

Fourthly, leading on from the last comment, there are specific legal issues which, even in a more equal society, would still specifically concern each gender and which would benefit from an equal representation of each group: most particularly in the realms of sexual health and violent crime. See graph (source):

As we can see (this is a Canadian study, but the finding are internationally representative) men are more likely – contrary to popular wisdom – to be the victims of violent crime; women are, of course, more vulnerable to rape. Hence the law needs the input of both parties to be able to properly tackle the problems. The need for the representation in sexual/reproductive areas is more obvious.

Lastly, it would fundamentally alter the tone of government and legislative rhetoric, and begin to weed out the 'structural' sexism inherent in the language of the powerful. The theory behind this is full of complicated semiological meanderings, but safe to say, the 'hierarchical sex dichotomy' (men > women), as a historically ingrained foundation of logic and of complex thought, informs a lot of statements concerning issues to do with the family, sexuality, health, education, culture, and employment. Take emotion vs reason (emotion < reason). A false, scientifically ridiculous dichotomy, but one that provide a foundation for a lot of thought in Western culture. And since women are thought to be more emotional, when filtered through the above dichotomy, it is then 'logical' to conclude that they are literally 'worse' than men. It is this kind of linguistic axiom that would be rooted out through a simple and full inclusion of women in positions of power and decision making. Through powerful bodies having an equal number of active female participants, who would regularly debate and participate, we would see the institutional, idiolectic inertia that sustains this phenomenon start to break down.

So that's my two cents on that. Now, how to make it happen...

John Bolton: Profile of a Neo-Conservative.

2010-05-17T14:32:00.000+01:00

Of course, he claims he's not a neo-conservative (while he's arguing for military action against Iran); statement at about 3:50:

Here is a short summary of his opinion of the UN, and the US's role in the world:

Nice.

And just think, while he was in positions of power (he represented the United States to every other world government, mind), this man was his boss, who when questioned on what laws governed private military contractors (who at times accounted for almost 100,000 troops in Iraq, in addition to the conventional military), he literally couldn't give any answer at all:

Yes, this post is a total you tube blitz.

So, Bolton, eh? The man who consistently annoyed and drew the frustration of BBC heavyweights like Jeremy Paxman, David Dimbleby and others, and infuriated Tony Benn. Alright, no, I'm not just going to post the link, I'll embed the video, because Benn is just such a total dude:

(See Bolton laughing in the background there?)

What exactly is an exemplary neo-conservative? Bolton, a highly intellectual, unwaveringly dedicated, war mongering, Schizo-Imperialist-Hegemon (we don't want to rule other countries, just bomb them), who works in the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-con think tank – similar to Cheney and Rumsfeld's old 'Partnership for the New American Century – is one of the best examples you'll see.

Mr Bolton is always going on about how terrible 'Wilsonian' thought is; or, specifically, the advocation of anti-imperial, open international relations, non-militarized air and sea space (it was mainly sea in his day, but the principles can be extended for the modern context), and that promotes tolerance, cooperation, and world peace (Wilson helped found the League of Nations, the major precursor to the UN). As Bolton implicitly states in the second video, the objectives of the game are not peace, stability and economic opportunity; they are for the most powerful to take what they want (paradoxical, since, one could assume, stability is, in fact, in the interest of the USA; but then, that's why they're wrong).

His main argument in favor of the Iraq war is that getting rid of Saddam was good; now the Iraqis have a chance to make a new country on their own 'sweat'. So, it's their fault things aren't perfect, basically. He keeps repeating that it is the 'responsibility' of nations to determine their future; the US does not do that for them, only attacks them when it sees attacking them as being in its 'national interest'. A convenient formula: we'll determine your regime and the state of your living conditions, but it's your responsibility to make sure that the outcome is good for you.

One of the more worrying aspects of Bolton's speeches, is that he has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY about torture and rendition:

Being direct consequences of the extra powerful executive and extra aggressive international stance he puts forward, and the inflated terrorist and nuclear rhetoric and consistent advocation of war that he adopts, one would think he would have an opinion, or have studied the issues. And of course he does, and he has; he's just dodging. That torture and rendition are symptoms of a neo-con military attitude is clear; they're are simply symptoms, like an alcoholic's frequent pounding headaches, that they would rather sweep under the rug.

Warning: Long video. The important part is the first 6 and a half minutes. It illimunates something quite striking about neo-conservative thinking:

His rhetoric here doesn't seem to actually, in any way at all, express a dislike of domestic reform. If anything, the nuances in his tone seemed to indicate that they could be, under (what he would define as) more peaceful circumstances, a good idea. In this sense, it is similar to Cheney's open advocation of a tolerance for homosexuality within the Republican party; the social conservatism side of things really isn't that important. They play that game to get votes. What's important is an advocation, as mentioned, of constant warfare.

Until what end?

Until they win, obviously.

Of course, victory is quite purposefully couched in a future so distant and so radical that it would generate a quite literally staple diet of warfare: a permanent state of affairs. The War is Peace slogan comes to mind. Thanks Orwell. I have certainly felt this way, over the past decade: with Afghanistan, then Iraq, now Afghanistan again, the UK and the US being at war feels... normal? Like it's an ordinary part of the furniture? Don't you think?

If one considers the spread of this mentality throughout the West, it seems that the neo-cons have indeed won what Bolton claims to be a major strategic victory.

Bolton talks a good talk, but he does obfuscate the issues, and sometimes, just lies. For example, if you watched all of the above long video, he talks about uranium and plutonium hollow hemispheres, used in bombs that have an implosion mechanism to create nuclear critical mass. This is his evidence that Iran are about to produce a nuke. Of course, what he doesn't mention, is that Iran is currently capable of enriching uranium to about 4.7% to isotope 235 (the one required for fission), while weapons grade uranium is commonly defined as being enriched in excess of 90%. So really, a ways to go there Bolton.

Not that nuclear proliferation isn't an issue, but here's another crack in his argument...

Did I mention Israel? I did. Non announced nuclear power, in the middle east, that doesn't cooperate with the international regulations concerning nuclear energy. Sound familiar? Iraneal? Isran? Eh, sure. The only difference being, Israel, of course, ALREADY HAS NUKES, and is, if anything, quite true to form evidence that nuclear states who aren't bound to international treaties certainly destabilize a region (particularly when they're so militarily aggressive, and have no comparable opposing force to balance them out). But then, in the above videos, Bolton consistency puts Israel attacking Iran as a decent option to consider. So again, the goal is not stability. The goal is not creating a world where people can go about their lives without worrying that a missile will hit their house. The goal is, in fact the opposite: a world where you're CONSTANTLY worried that a missile, terrorist bomb, or nuke will kill you and your loved ones. Apocalyptic rhetoric, a policy of constant war, instilling as much fear as possible, avoiding diplomacy and internationalism... but why?

Orwell and Michael Moore both came to the conclusion that it is simply power.

I'm of the more pessimistic bent. I am tempted to say that these people are caught in their own terror mind-games. They actually believe that the world needs to be bombed to shit in order to prevent it being bombed to shit. Doublethink time! Oh yeah.

One last thing. Bolton (retrospectively, of getting rid of Saddam) says a number of times that the Iraqi Dictator having nukes wasn't what was really important (heh). It was the scientific nuclear knowledge of Iraqi scientists.

Whoa! Did this just take a leap towards book burning?

Information control! That's right, bitches.

So it isn't other countries attacking the US. It isn't other countries being in a position to attack the US. It is countries knowing something, that they might possibly apply to make something, that they might possibly use to possibly threaten the US, at some point in the future. This does, needless to say, include pretty much everyone on Earth.

War on/of Terror, for all time. Thanks Bolton. Good thing you're not sitting in any important chairs any more.

Now please Obama, and everyone else, for the love of a world worth living in, get on with dismantling these idiot's bullshit. Stop playing their game.

"We are Making Money Off the Backs of the Greeks"

2010-05-16T07:51:00.000+01:00

Mr. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leading Green MEP and a participant in the 1968 French Student Uprising, gives an astute, piercingly direct account of how the financial world is treating the problem is Greece:

Absolutely brilliant. This guy is my new favorite politician,

US Financial Reform, Oil Spills, and What it Means to 'Know the Game'

2010-05-15T16:51:00.000+01:00

There's a saying on the left of politics: 'It has to start in the States.' You certainly never hear the old European argument over here, the one that goes: 'The banks will all go elsewhere! Business will evacuate! We'll be doomed!' This is a non-statement in the USA. This is the epicenter of financial power.

So when Obama finally convinces the Senate to pass the Financial Reform bill, it might – just might – actually mean something.

"Imma kick the shit out of those whiny, spoiled, casino-addicted little banking sonsa-bitches... somebody give me a cigarette..."

The whole BP oil fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico has, more than anything else, shown the limits of free market ideology. Not least because the companies have limited liability for their actions; they get all the profits, get to pay politicians ridiculous amounts of money for favours, get to control the world's most valuable and essential resources, but are they jack going to be held legally responsible for all the consequences. Bloody hell. But also, the oil companies' clout within the United States has allowed them to have what Obama described in the above article as a 'cozy' relationship with legislative bodies, that let them systematically prevent/tip toe around regulations, safety concerns, and demands for coherent long term plans.

So the State and private individuals (or 'taxpayers', as they're also called) are, really, the defacto owners and underwriters of the whole bollocks anyway, just like with the banks, because it's all just too important; we're just expected to let them piss about with the stuff in the mean time anyway, and simply use our power to give them more money when they almost doom us all.

There would be a good approach to oil management (considering the somewhat terrifying and increasingly influential Peak Oil theory), and it would be: gather all the international data we have on oil reserves, all the data on techniques, projections, predicted usage, etc etc; setup an international management body, that takes into account all the medical/household/miscellaneous products that contain crude oil derivatives, as well as petroleum needs; remove any profit relationship between oil and usage (which would eliminate half the problem with acting on Peak Oil concerns overnight); finally, initiate a planned, phased in reduction strategy, spanning about 40-50 years, working in tandem with Green Energy investment and pollution reduction.

Of course, this would require a huge overhaul of the financial system. But yes, there you go.

For those who say: 'De-privatize oil? WTF?', I put this to you: there is the utter madness being peddled right now that putting financial value on the rainforest is the way forward: "This deal puts a financial value on the environmental services these 'utilities' provide in the way of rainfall, climate regulation and carbon storage". What in the name of SWEET HOLY COSMIC JUSTICE would happen if transnationals decided to take up this game, invested in these utilities, started 'charging' the governments of the Earth for them (the quite overtly stated aim: 'Capitalism can save the Rainforest'), and then some of the Governments/private purchasers didn't/couldn't pay? Would the companies cut all the fucking trees down as an 'oxygen fine'? Build a giant bloody dome over the whole thing, and mete out the oxygen, one dollar's worth at a time? Great idea that.

So yes, privatizing the rainforest = dystopia in a paragraph.

So, if it is obviously absurd to privatize and monetize the resource of oxygen, which all life on Earth needs to survive, why have oil be governed by such a short-term-interest ruled system? That the fluid that currently guarantees the entire edifice of human civilization's operative capacity should be a thing to be capitalized on in the short term to the expense of the long term, a thing to be under the control of companies that want to dodge regulation, ignore science, and keep promoting the over consumption of their black gold until the Middle East is a smoldering heap of Cradle-of-Civilization crispy, overcooked jerky and half of us are dead from War and pollution and flooding and just being so pissed off that the veins in our heads have exploded, is surely a terrible, terrible idea?

Not that the pending Financial Reform Bill will go anywhere near as far as to internationalize and de-capitalize the control of oil resources (it bloody well should), but what it does aim to do is, quote The 'Bama, create an 'even playing field'. What does this mean? Well, in Republican terms, in means government 'overreach' into the private sector. Bloody right. Why is football a good sport to watch? Because the players play by the rules (usually). Because you have regulators making sure a team doesn't trade a few 'intentional losses' to another team for a sly 'cup giveaway'; if this were to happen, the fans would not have been watching the game they thought they were watching. They would have been disenfranchised. And would be pissed off when they found out. And you know what? I just metaphorically described the entire financial system.

Trade is entirely built on confidence. If you're in one tribe, and you give some dude in another tribe a fish, and he gives you some cloth, you do so on a basis of trust: there isn't poison in the fish; there aren't fire ants in the cloth.

"Just wait till he wraps this cloth round his precious, flabby torso... eheheheh." – Goldman Sachs Cloth Trading Division.

Hence, knowing where your boundaries are is actually a prerequisite for a healthy financial system. The only people who disagree, and think that having clear, universal legal boundaries would 'stifle innovation', are those who, funnily enough, have enough power to manipulate an unregulated system to their own fiscal benefit (and the libertarian types who have been suckered by their anti-government propaganda).

Now, the old argument goes, in a world where regulation was consistent and enforceable, the enforcers would need to have enormous amounts of power. As in, if there was a single body responsible for oversight (global government, in effect), it would need unprecedented powers of surveillance and policing.

Not so.

The current 'web of bureaucracy' is maintained because there are not consistent rules. If there were steady, blanket, enforced rules, the market would indeed (as opposed to how it is now) be largely self regulating, because people could trust each other not to fuck everyone over. Micro-decisions could be made by small parties, because they could trust the enforceability of the meta-rules of the whole. Like football leagues. Like sonnets. Freedom is a product of knowing the structure, of knowing the rules of the game your playing. Not knowing the rules is paralysing. The non existence of rules, in a world of oil spills and bank crashes, is terrifying.

It is the existence of uber-powerful private companies that necessitate the existence of bureaucratic nightmares; the existence of powerful companies that cause obfuscatory, confusing, cost-inflaming mazes of laws and tax policies and the necessity of credit chains and all this crap.

So here's for strong financial regulation.

Next, we need a cap on company sizes. A restrictive one.

Ugh, the world's in such a mess...

Women in the UK Cabinet: Lack Thereof

2010-05-13T15:58:00.000+01:00

Hello. I thought this image might brighten up your day somewhat.

Anyhoo, I was planning to make this post about something American, but, since fuck all is going on in American life right now – unless, of course, you count the fact that our horrendously minimal Oil Drilling safety standards and non-existant systemic oversite, and our utter lack of any competent disaster planning or rapid response initiatives existing at the federal level, are causing sweet Lady Earth to continue her long journey into the cosmological grave like a sobbing, tortured grandmother – I'm going to make it about the UK again. Actually, there is one thing going on in the US: Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan, who, though she is wholly uninteresting, and her nomination has gone down in a wholly uninteresting way, has royally pissed off Rush Limbaugh, which results automatically in a feeling of <3 filling my normally cold, disappointed, black and bitter soul. Also, with her nomination – should it go through alright – the US Supreme Court will have, for the first time, three women on its benches, meting out slightly higher pitched, moist, and righteously estrogenical justice for the first time in history.

That's right Rush: Kagan just ate your cake. All of it.

Which leads me on to what I was going to say about the UK.

Statistics time! Women in European Cabinets: Spain 53%, Germany 37%, France 33%, Neth 33%, Italy 27%, Greece 26%, Belgium 23%.

New UK Cabinet... 17%

Poor showing guys.

The Labour Party is about 27% female. The Conservative Party 15%. The Liberal Democrats, 10%. (Green Party 100%! Ahahaha!). It is little back door stats like these that can help determine the more 'real terms' ideology of a party and its 'actual' commitment to progressive values, as opposed to the thin, pitiful man-nonsense it ejaculates onto the eyebrow of the public in the hopes of blinding them to its slavish dependence on institutional inertia and the helpful, buttocks-cupping hand of the political status quo.

Rather than a 'Changed Consevative Party', with a diverse Cabinet that is approaching equality in terms of gender, we have the galumphing, jowly specters of death's lamer younger brother (despondency) that are the Tory Old Guard: Hague, Fox, Clarke, and Duncan Smith, all just waiting to smile, say something really annoying, and reach their clammy hands into your pockets and take your public services away.

Ken Clarke used to be married to Sexism, but it left him because he was too sexist.

And poor Theresa May, who, as you'll know, has been given the great honor of presiding over the newly combined Home/Women and Equality post which – if we're all being honest, given that Home Secretary is a pretty big job, what, with crime and immigration and all that jazz – is a spit-in-the-face, take-that-lefties, don't-pretend-you're-not-angry-I-can-see-it-on-all-your-new-disgruntled-hippy-fridge-magnets way of basically eliminating the latter as a position of significant importance. Hey, at least Anne Widdecomb will be happy. Remember her? Yeah... sorry.

"I really am looking forward to more of Ken Clarke's vague attempts to remind people of Winston Churchill: with his grumbly, portly demeanor – ever so droll, ever so droll."

Set this poverty of advance in relation to equality in government against, what I'm sure you will all also be aware of, is the

*takes deep breath*

UTTERLY UNBRIDLED BROMANCE!!!

*fixes shirt*

that went on between Cameron and Clegg.

I have to admit, I was laughing my ass off the entire time they were talking. My mouth was gaping like a hungry Blue Whale's. Holy shit... I mean, wow.

So what does this all mean? Are we going back to the nineteenth/early-twentieth century models of a ruling cadre of blatant male homosociality, where the men get together around brandy and cigars, make love to each other with their eyes and jostling, good natured mockery while they cut up the world and gamble with the wealth and welfare of most of society, then go home to their CHILDMAKER-O-MATIC gramophone like thing, which, having already borne children for them, can be quite prudently ignored and left to do, well, whatever it is the things do with their time, since they don't work, learn, ot think about anything, obviously, while they the men then go into their man-studies and look at a wall for a good three hours or so, wearing a very self satisfied smile as they congratulates themselves on knowing everything about everything, over and over again?

Perhaps.

Though not, of course, if we, like good rebellious shit heads, kick up as much of a droning, whiny stink about it as we can during the course of this LibCon government.

Just remember:

I might make this a regular slogan on the blog...

As always, spread the win.

The UK's Future of Coalition Government

2010-05-11T10:02:00.001+01:00

Righto, my first post shall be, aptly enough, about the recent formation of a LibCon UK government, and what it means for the world.

A door big enough for two? Hell Yes.

No more Neo Liberal, Authoritarian 'New Labour'. In with Neo Liberal, Authoritarian 'New Conservatives'? Well, obviously the situation is a little more complicated than that. Cameron and the coming Conservative agenda aside, there are positives to take from this situation, if one takes a long term perspective. Contrary to the nonsense coming out of the Wall Street Journal, four days of haggling is hardly comparable to the pitched battles between Unions and Police, the nationalistic militarism surrounding the Falklands War, and the mass expulsion of industry that was witnessed under the last majority Conservative government. Put it this way: a minority government is not one that can govern ideologically.

I feel (to the chagrin of a lot of you, no doubt) that a LibCon arrangement actually sets a good precedent. Which is to say, if we give any credence to history, then, even if the much-longed-for Proportional Representation system eventually comes into effect, the Tories will still, at times in the future, be in a position of influence; to set the precedent that they have to compromise, cooperate, and soften their ideological goals is by no means negative in the view of history.

Another positive to take away from this situation is that, if the Liberal Democrats prove that they can work effectively in a coalition with other parties, then more people will be likely to vote for them in the next General Election. Which means they will get more seats, even under First Past The Post. Which means a greater chance of enacting PR, which, in turn, would mean an even greater number of seats for them. And at the end of this great journey, lo and behold, an ideologically right wing majority in the House of Commons becomes a statistical impossibility. Goodbye Thatcher's Ghost; please don't write.

Braaaaaainssss.... of Trade Unionists.

In fact, I would argue that coalition government becoming the norm in the UK is a stark necessity. The UK is a country which, in the majority, consistently votes to the left (in terms of the popular vote): it is a country that has a strong rural as well as urban left wing tradition. But the left vote is split.

Regular coalition government might even give Labour the opportunity to slink back over to the more properly socialist left, since they would no longer need to secure the fiscally conservative center vote, and could rely upon combining their support with the Liberal base. Hence, coalition government would not only make the UK parliament more representative in terms of the different parties' share of the votes, but also make the parties themselves more representative, by freeing them to reach out to their core base, without having to worry about having to secure an outright majority through muddling their policy stances.

Economically, coalition government also avoids some of the pitfalls of market-state interaction. Almost all the major collective complaints of the markets can, despite what the ruling plutocrats might tell you (whose corporate interests extend far beyond the concerns of trade and economics), be traced back to the fact that government seesaws; the majority of market traders can't properly establish what environment they're playing in over a long period of time, under the current system in the UK (and the US). In the end, most economic agents don't care what the regulations are, as long as they are not Totalitarian and involve torture and death being brought to bear for fiscal adventurousness. What they react negatively to is being given a Neo Liberal, ultra pyramidical structure at one moment – where risk, aggression, greed and gambling are indeed required for success – and then being inundated with new regulations a few years down the line, which force them to change their whole business model, their habits of behavior, and their overall profit calculus.

I hope good coalition government makes Murdoch cry.

I quite firmly believe that most businesses would be happy to accept a Socialist planning structure and strong, environmentally sound, socially-progressive regulations, so long as that structure and those regulations were consistent: they could play their trading game within the rules knowing that those rules were not going to lurch the next time an election came along. Regular coalition government would help stabilize major changes in rule-making, and indeed, if perhaps gradually, increase the faith in the public's and the market's mind about the viability of socialism and planned economics.

The US could certainly benefit from a more multi-party system: quite large chunks of the US left are openly socialist, and quite large chunks of the right are anti-authoritarian, and even, if one can believe it, against 'big' business. A Socialist-Liberal-Conservative-Libertarian party divide in the US could take a lot of impetus away from the reigning plutocrats, and help put the world onto a more sustainable political and economic path.

Lastly, internationalism needs ideological cooperation. If we want international regulation to be possible, where many players with radically different interests sit across the table, cross partisan deal making has to begin at a more local/regional/national level. And this is only possible if we dispel the idea of the need for ideologically monistic government (a dispelling long underway in continental Europe, it's worth noting; the PR apocalypse prophesy is debunked by a mere sly glance across the sea) .

So, despite my anti-Tory sentiment, I'm choosing to see this as a stepping stone towards a better world.

Spread the win.