Facing Up to the Falklands

In today's Observer Nick Cohen offers a lucid and dignified confession (here) that most of the British Left, himself included, were wrong in 1982 to oppose Thatcher's military expedition to liberate the Falkland Islands from Argentine invasion. He goes on to discuss the US neocons' support for Argentina in that conflict, and explains clearly how the Left bamboozled itself with an anti-imperialist rhetoric that had more to do with visceral hatred of Thatcher than with common sense (what was the Argentine junta doing if not imperialism?) The Left has never recovered from the political damage it suffered then.

The main point of his article is that the current spat over Falklands oil is unlikely to lead to war, but that if it does the Left should support Britain, and that he believes that this time the Obama administration would too. I applaud this display of realism but must confess to one nagging suspicion. His entirely-correct line of reasoning vis a vis the Falklands campaign could by extension be brought to bear to justify support for the Iraq War, which Cohen has never renounced. It's at this point one needs to bring up the vital distinction between idealism and pragmatism. The same moral argument does indeed apply to removing Saddam Hussein as did to removing Galtieri's troops from the Falklands. However the pragmatic realities on the ground were entirely different, namely:

1) The level of military force involved was orders of magnitude less: Britain could and did achieve a rapid victory on its own using a small taskforce (which is not to diminish the courage and effort of those who had to fight there). 

2) The territory was tiny, homogeneously British, there were no adversary national groups present who needed to be kept apart, and no new nation needed to be constructed after victory.

3)  They didn't completely demolish the infrastructure of the Falklands during the fighting because there barely was any in that thinly-populated, bleak moorland sheep-rearing community. 

4) It wasn't necessary to lie to Parliament or to the British public to justify launching the Falklands campaign because they both supported it already.

In fact this comparison might make an excellent textbook example of the limits of idealism in real politics.

Predator: the Next Installment

In a previous post here I expressed my admiration for James K Galbraith's 2008 book "The Predator State", in which the US economist describes the way a cabal of politicians, bankers, businessmen, bent union officials and downright gangsters hijacked the social democratic state institutions created in the aftermath of World War II. The levers that Roosevelt's New Deal invented with which to regulate the economy, in these corrupt hands became shovels with with to loot the public purse.


When I reviewed this book for Political Quarterly (Volume 80 Issue 3, pp443-5, July 2009), for an instant I wondered whether its argument represents some sort of paranoid conspiracy theory, perhaps because I'd just been reading James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. However Galbraith's sober and lucid arguments, illustrated with impeccably sourced statistics, soon convinced me otherwise. Events since then (only a year ago) have further reinforced that conviction, that Galbraith is the only commentator who comes close to grasping what is actually going.


First we had our own little scandal here in the UK - over MPs fiddling their expenses - which as I opined in that same earlier post is pretty small beer as these affairs go. Then this January came the "devastating" ruling of the US Supreme Court which threw out all limits on corporate and union political spending, enabling those with unlimited funds to buy political influence with impunity (see Ronald Dworkin's summary of this affair in the New York Review).


In the aftermath of the bank collapses, credit crunch and recession that many sensible people believed must lead to more regulation and responsible government, it's becoming clear that nothing of the sort is going to happen: the predators are still firmly entrenched, still cocky, still confident that nothing that Obama (still less New Labour) is going to do will hurt them.


In the latest London Review of Books there's a thought-provoking review by Peter Mair of Martin Bell's book on the MPs expenses scandal, "A Very British Revolution". Mair uses Bell's book as a launching pad for an extended essay on the moral degeneration of the political classes, a topic which he's well placed to observe living as he does in Berlusconi's Italy and being of Irish descent. He quotes plenty of examples of outright corruption from around the world, with figures, to which public opinion has become more or less blind - he deploys the corruption rankings compiled by Transparency International to amusing effect throughout (New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore are the least corrupt, the UK squats at number 17, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are the bottom-feeders at 71). Charles Haughey's Fianna Fail rule in Ireland was in effect the rule of the Irish building industry; Gerhard Schröder passed straight from Germany's chancellor to the board of a Gazprom subsidiary, three months after signing a deal with Putin for a gas pipeline; the whole Russian Gazprom/Yukos business might provide a juicy future plot for Ellroy, were he not so provincially American.  


Mair draws attention to some of the more familiar factors - the steep decline in prestige of the political profession in recent decades, and the *relative* underpayment of MPs, not relative to the rest of us but to the super-rich financiers and businessmen with whom they eat, drink and negotiate every day. He points up the growth of populist parties throughout Europe, as citizens recoil from the political process altogether. But he is more interested in structural factors, like the cost of running a political party which is no longer a mass party, and hence no longer commands an army of unpaid canvassers and organizers. All those pollsters, marketing gurus and consultants charge predatory fees for their advice, and the advice typically costs millions more to implement (eg. TV advert time).


He claims that wealthy individuals and corporations have tired of corrupting existing political parties and seek to "cut out the middle-man" by setting up parties of their own. Berlusconi is the paradigm case: he set up Forza Italia as an extension of his media empire having tired of suborning Craxi's socialist party throughout the 1980s. Organised crime sponsors political parties throughout the former-soviet republics and, particularly the cocaine syndicates, in Latin America.


The lesson to be learned from all this is that our political classes have almost seceded from society at large to become a parasitic caste, but the solution is not to be found in preaching anarchism or anti-state libertarianism. Technology makes modern industrial economies extremely productive but also extremely fragile: we constantly live barely 72 hours away from the chaos of a Haiti, should our electricity, water and food distribution systems be disrupted in any significant way (we saw an inkling of this during the tanker driver's strike, when submerged panic was visible in Tony Blair's eyes on the evening news). Not only can we not do without the state, but the state is the only institution that can defend us against unfettered predation by the hard men - assuming, that is, we can wake up and wrest it back from the predators who are eating it from within.


The fact that Gordon Brown has recently started to remember some of the vocabulary of social democracy forces me to say, against all previous experience and my better judgment, that the next election matters a lot and that a Labour/Lib Dem coalition might be the least disastrous result... In the meantime, please, please read "The Predator State".

meshes

This is my favourite among the photographs I've taken so far this year. As always it was the light - strong winter sun, low in the sky - that made it happen, rather than anything that I or the camera did.

It appears here only to test the blog-posting feature of Flickr, not because I propose to use this blog as a gallery

meshes, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

Dirac and Beauty

Nobel laureate Paul Dirac, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, has been a hero of mine ever since my teens. He was one of a mere handful of scientists whose grasp of theory was so strong he could predict the existence of something unknown in Nature (anti-matter) that was subsequently found exactly as he'd predicted. Recently Freeman Dyson offered a favourable review of a new Dirac biography by Graham Farmelo, in the latest New York Review of books, which contains some very thought-provoking ideas. Toward the end of this review Dyson claims that Dirac left a three-fold legacy to physics: the astounding discoveries of his fertile period 1920-33; a doctrine of mathematical beauty expounded over the remaining 50 years of his career; and a profound distaste for philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics (which I vigorously share).

Here is Dyson on the second phase: "The second legacy is summarized in a statement that Dirac wrote at the end of his life: 'If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand.' ... The doctrine of mathematical beauty is itself beautiful, and there is no doubt that Dirac believed it to be true. But it does not agree well with the historical facts. During the wonder years when he was making his great discoveries, his thinking was more concerned with practical details and less with abstract beauty. And during the long second half of Dirac's life, when he was preaching the doctrine of mathematical beauty, it did not lead him to important new discoveries."

This touches on an interesting question to which there's no sign of an answer yet, and may never be. Perhaps Dirac's faith in mathematical beauty is actually justified, but science also proceeds in fits and starts as described by Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". A simple and beautiful principle is discovered which triggers many more discoveries that complicate and muddy the picture; then a deeper simple, beautiful principle emerges that clears the board once more; and so ad infinitum. Modern complexity theory shows clearly that very complex behaviours can arise from applying very simple rules (a beautiful illustration is the computer simulation Conway's Game of Life). So the really big question is this: is the reverse true, that every complex behaviour arises from the application of simple underlying rules that we haven't yet discovered. This is the modern form of an old dispute between rationalism and pragmatism, and therefore one of those philosophical disputes that Dirac so hated. Dyson is clearly on the pragmatist side, namely that Nature is at root complex and messy. I veer to the other pole.

Whichever is right, it's a far more interesting problem than those fashionable fairy-tales that purport to be interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the many-worlds hypothesis. Such pretentious cosmological speculations always end up in the same place, namely that there's another copy of you somewhere else in this universe (perhaps infinitely many). The whiff of incense is overpowering - this is just Heaven by another name, the egoists' inability to face the fact that their personal identity will cease upon death. 


originally posted 11 Feb 2010 12:43 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 11 Feb 2010 13:40 ]

Going Cold on Warming

Ian Katz, in a thoughtful Guardian article (Case for climate-change science) suggests today that climate activists will need to start again and make the case for climate change from from scratch, thanks to recent scandals involving the IPCC and East Anglia University, the unusually cold winter and the failure of Copenhagen talks. I'm sure he's right, but I wish him lots of luck in the attempt, as I don't believe a significant political movement will be mobilised around climate change any time soon.

That isn't because I deny the reality of the Greenhouse Effect - on the contrary I've been a "believer" in it (that's to say one who's aware of and accepts the scientific evidence) for 20 years or more. The problem is that climatic systems are so complex that no current (or foreseeable) climate models are good enough to produce the kind of cast-iron predictions needed in politics to convince people. The adoption of the term "global warming" was the environmentalists first and probably fatal error, linking the effect in the public's mind with things getting warmer soon, and where they live, a sore hostage to fortune. Also the industrial revolution isn't yet completed globally, and the fact that China and India won't abandon it on the strength of current evidence is hardly surprising.

What we can say for sure about the Greenhouse Effect is that we have unquestionably raised levels of atmospheric  carbon dioxide to levels not seen for many thousands of years, and have thereby caused more solar energy to be retained in the atmosphere. That makes all climatic processes operate faster, more extremely and more unpredictably, but doesn't leave us with any single politically-exploitable prediction. Drought and flood patterns will shift with dramatic social effects, perhaps triggering mass migrations and wars, but we can't say where and when.

After another 50 years or so of increasing global turmoil a generation will arise who do accept the connection and set about dismantling the growth-based industrial economy, if there's anything left to dismantle among the chaos. We're clearly not that generation, though perhaps my grandchildren are. There's irony in this situation (as always), namely that those who own the most desirable bits of the world, hence with the most to lose, are the strongest climate-change deniers. Their dismay once the penny drops should be a sight to see.

originally posted 9 Feb 2010 11:25 by Dick Pountain

Gates famous at last

Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of the software giant Microsoft, for a while the world's richest man, has finally achieved true fame - he appeared on Jon Stewart's Daily Show last night. (Actually it was his second time on the show, but the first was so long ago that Stewart was not yet the radical chic fame-maker he has become.)

Gates is a fascinating figure, a multi-billionaire capitalist with a canny business head who is nevertheless entirely unfitted for power in the Society of the Spectacle. However much he spends (or doesn't spend) on his haircut and clothes, he still looks like a physics postgrad, and his performing skills are still those of the seminar room rather than the TV studio. Jon Stewart was visibly awed by Gates (as well he might be), who described his work since retiring from the day-to-day running of Microsoft, the most important part of which is investing his own millions into malaria vaccine research.

Since malaria kills more people than just about anything else in the world, and since Big Pharma finds it unprofitable to pursue, this is an unquestionably philanthropic exercise - but Gates still managed to make it sound boring by nerdy attention to detail. Paradoxically enough, I found this quite refreshing compared to the boastful, predatory boosterism we usually hear from US business moguls. 

originally posted 27 Jan 2010 11:27 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 27 Jan 2010 17:14 ] 

Que Sarah, Sarah

I don't usually find the strain of environmentalism espoused in the pages of the Guardian very persuasive, too clearly descended from a long tradition of British Puritanism, principally concerned with feelings of personal moral superiority and showering blame onto unrepentant sinners. I shudder at the sort of new world imagined: soya gruel, donkey carts and hempen tee-shirts with your carbon footprint printed on them... 

However at least one of these columnists, George Monbiot, has recently revealed a new depth and passion in his critique of contemporary capitalism. It appears that public reaction to the recent "Climategate" emails shook Monbiot deeply, revealing the true depth of malevolence among climate-change sceptics, and a desperate desire among the public of affluent nations to delude themselves that business as usual is possible after all.

Personally I'm a climate sceptic of a different kind: I think it's pretty certain that the amount of carbon dioxide we've pumped into the biosphere is having an affect on the world's climate. The climate is a vastly complex web of interacting systems, and the increasing greenhouse effect adds energy to these which must change established patterns, generate more extreme events, and possibly even trigger one of several feed-back processes that lead to even greater instability. However science doesn't understand these systems well enough yet to precisely predict the resulting changes (for example the sea level in 5, 10, 20 years). Basing policy on imprecise predictions merely offers a hostage to those real sceptics who will pounce on every wrong one (like the current cold snap in the UK) to further their case. The public is untutored in statistics, impatient and uncomprehending about scientific cautions over the precision of results, and it seems more and more unlikely that a democratic will to do anything serious about carbon emissions can be aroused. Monbiot seems to have felt this sea-change, and it's added a trenchancy and eloquence to his recent writings, like this from the Guardian 14th Dec 2009:

"A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands."

Stirring stuff, he's now arguing on broader grounds, no longer talking solely about environmental matters but about that whole mindset which Thorstein Veblen characterised as "predatory". Veblen saw a deep division that runs through whole societies as well as through individual psyches, between the "predatory" and the "industrious" instincts. The predatory hunts what it needs from nature and despises drudgery; it admires courage and prowess; believes in luck and the supernatural; loves pomp, ceremony and sport. The industrious makes the pots and tills the land; it bows to economic reality by cooperative labour; believes in causal rather than magical explanations; values diligence and craftsmanship. Veblen saw this deeper division as underlying the classes described by Marx - the predatory caste became kings and aristocrats, generals and priests, capitalists and bankers, shunning toil in favour of ruling the industrious majority by confiscating their surplus product. Such predators invented the Judeo-Christian-Islamic notion of Divine Providence, whereby God gave the Earth to man to exploit as he wishes - an idea which has permitted scientific capitalism to bring us to our current state of unprecedented wealth and freedoms, and unprecedented hazard.

Perhaps the most terrifying manifestation of Divine Providence nowadays is Sarah Palin (wherever she spoke during the 2008 presidential elections, redneck audiences chanted "Drill, baby, drill!") and it's not entirely inconceivable that she could become the next president of the USA, should Obama stumble very badly. Were that to happen then Monbiot's finishing flourish - "This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands" - would gain a whole new resonance...  

originally posted 13 Jan 2010 16:39 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 14 Jan 2010 14:32 ]

The Avatar Effect

Took young grandson to see James Cameron's "Avatar" in 3D today, through the blinding snow. Was expecting to be bored, except perhaps by the special effects, but was totally gripped all the way through. The special effects were indeed staggering, probing a whole new level of virtual realism, but the story line surprised by not being so crypto-fascist as most American sci-fi blockbusters have been  (StarWars, Dune, Starship Troopers, Armageddon, Independence Day etc. etc). Sure it's simplistic, melodramatic, romantic - just as popular story telling has to be. The surprise is that it over-simplifies in an anti-corporate, anti-imperialist direction for a change.

The US Right is furious - this is a product of Murdoch's Fox don't forget - with lots of websites telling people not to go and see it (some chance). One of the milder comments is "Cameron needs to stop making anti American films. The United States invades foreign countries when necessary" [from  www.topix.com]. But what's quite amusing is to watch leftish British commentators desperately trying to think of reasons to hate the movie anyway:

"Avatar is overlong, dramatically two-dimensional, smug and simplistic" - Philip French, Observer

"Even more tedious than the film's plot is the ideology enshrining it. In punctilious compliance with liberal pieties" - David Cox, Guardian
Several critics sought to belittle the film by comparing it to "A Man Called Horse" and "Dances With Wolves", but it owes at least as much (which is not very much) to "Seven Samurai" and "Viva Zapata". Avatar is indeed smug and simplistic, but then propaganda always was and always will be. Of course the British Left has entirely forgotten how to do propaganda, being so far up itself with political correctness and post-modern pseudo-radicalism. Avatar might indoctrinate a whole generation of under-16s that American militarism is the problem, which is certainly simplistic. But ever since Star Wars, blockbuster movies have been indoctrinating them that American militarism is the solution, and I know which I prefer... 

originally posted 21 Dec 2009 22:05 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 22 Dec 2009 05:08 ]

Don't be a Tourist

A most obstinate fact that faces any would-be critic of modern Western society is that social changes over the last half-century that constitute the so-called  "consumer society" have been accompanied by a considerable levelling of social (and to lesser extent economic) barriers between classes. We live in a more demotic culture than ever before: MPs and television presenters sport regional accents; air travel is no longer the preserve of the upper classes; a wide swathe of social classes aspire to consume luxury goods and services once the preserve of an elite (fuelled until recently by cheap credit). Deference toward social hierarchies and institutions has been vastly reduced. This is a real effect, not mere smokescreen, even if it hasn't so far been accompanied by equivalent reform to democratic institutions.

There's been a corresponding increase in snobberies of various sorts whose purpose is to maintain signs of social superiority in the face of this levelling down. Perhaps the most obvious one concerns food - contrasting those wretches who shovel down "junk food" with one's own consumption of scarce and organically-grown products. Wine snobbery (both against beer consumers, and in terms of superior wine knowledge) is another. Air travel has its own snobbery, that unseemly craving for an "upgrade", the disparaging jokes about "turning right" at the doorway. But one that really fascinates me, as a keen photographer, is that surrounding cameras.

It's considered naff in many photographic circles to use point-and-shoot digital cameras because the great unwashed use them, because they work so well and so easily that they de-skill an arcane art, and because of the unattractive stance they provoke  - holding the camera away from the body and gawking at the LCD rather than peering intently through a viewfinder like a pro. The alternative is the single-lens reflex DSLR used by almost all professionals, which thereby aquires a certain cachet. These are large, heavy, expensive and complicated, but those very properties begin to undermine them as status symbols: learning to use one demands time and patience, a nerdish enthusiasm that's very unwelcome in cool circles. This poses a dilemma, but one which Olympus has now brilliantly attacked with its TV and cinema ad campaign for the new digital E-P1 Pen model.

This camera is almost as small as a point-and-shoot compact but has interchangeable lenses like a DSLR. It's easy to use and to carry but most important it has a cool retro look redolent of San Tropez in the '60s. Kevin Spacey is the chosen presenter, and the slogan is.... "Don't be a tourist!"

This slogan plays off yet another of the new  snobberies, that about travel. So many people can afford to visit so many places around the world that it's essential to distinguish oneself from them: they are tourists, I'm a traveller, out to broaden my mind.  Olympus's agency cleverly piggy-backs on this snobbery to sell a camera that's otherwise rather unremarkable. Carrying one will soon be compulsory on the smart beaches, replacing the pastel-coloured Canon Ixus on a neck-string... 

originally posted 26 Dec 2009 21:15 by Dick Pountain

Spectacular Christmas

posted 21 Dec 2009 11:40 by Dick Pountain

If any more proof were needed that Guy Debord died in vain, all the faked fuss about which mediocre pop record would be the No 1 hit this Christmas provides it. In the same week that the Copenhagen talks ended in failure, journalists who claim to represent the opinion of the nation's youth are seriously claiming the victory of Rage Against the Machine as some sort of act of resistance: the purchase of one record owned by Sony has triumphed over another record owned by Sony, and in the real world nothing has been changed (not even Sony's balance sheet). I don't think this is what Gramsci meant by cultural hegemony, but it is very much what Debord meant by spectacle. If you want a symbolic Christmas act that has real purchase on reality, how about roasting the X-Factor judges with apples in their mouths?

Not so Relaxed?

posted 12 Dec 2009 20:38 by Dick Pountain 
 

Alistair Darling's bonus supertax appears to be upsetting people in the City of London. Tim Linacre of brokers Panmure Gordon said "This piece of legislation was cobbled together over a weekend. It is politically inspired and economically illiterate. It is vague, unclear and nobody knows what it means." On the contrary, I know what it means, and so I believe do a lot of other people. It means that a Labour chancellor, standing at the steps to the scaffold for his government, has briefly re-acquired sufficient balls to hurt the people who've been looting the public purse for private enrichment for so long. Vince Cable has called the tax "an embarassment". There's truth in both these critical comments: the tax is politically inspired (hoorah), and it is too an embarassment, if that means the opposite of "intense relaxation"...

In Memoriam: Nina Fishman

posted 11 Dec 2009 00:14 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 14 Dec 2009 20:01 ] 
 

Nina Fishman, who died on Dec 5th, was a well-respected historian of the British labour movement and a much loved friend of mine. In the late 1970s Nina led me back from a wilderness of post-situationist disillusion into realistic left politics; Nina shamed me into overcoming my adolescent contempt for opera and introduced me to some of the best musical experiences of my life; in 1987 I helped Nina organise the first attempt to use tactical voting to unseat the Tories (it took two more elections to catch on); Nina launched the political supper club that supplied a bunch of North London lefties with mental stimulation for a decade. Before succumbing to her final illness, Nina completed her political biography of Arthur Horner the great miners' leader, to be published next year by Lawrence and Wishart. She will be sorely missed.

You can read Donald Sassoon's full Guardian obituary of Nina here and there is now an archive of Nina's writings.

Scabs and Abscesses

posted 12 Dec 2009 11:03 by Dick Pountain

Bill Clinton is the last source I'd expect for the most useful political distinction I've heard in years, but he supplies exactly that in "The Clinton Tapes" by Taylor Branch (excellent review by David Runciman in 17 Dec issue of London Review of Books here). Clinton told Branch that his most successful and satisfying foreign policy initiative was the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, while his greatest disappointment was lack of progress over Israel/Palestine. He explained the difference thus:

" Peacemaking quests came in two kinds: scabs and abscesses. A scab is a sore with a protective crust, which may heal with time and simple care. In fact, if you bother it too much, you can reopen the wound and cause infection. An abscess, on the other hand, inevitably gets worse without painful but cleansing intervention. ‘The Middle East is an abscess,’ he concluded. ‘Northern Ireland is a scab.’ "

Appropriately grisly and medical as it is, I find this metaphor very powerful. It derives from the operation of self-healing systems in the human body, and I'm always attracted to comparisons between the individual body and the "body politic".  Such parallels are always more than coincidence: both systems are complex and self-organising, and since the one (the human individual) is the "atom" from which the other is constructed, resemblances are not too surprising. The interesting question is, how does a practising politician tell a scab from an abscess? A modern doctor would send off samples for bacteriological tests, but a politician or a Victorian doctor would almost certainly have to rely on intuition. Clinton had good intuition about this, though very bad about certain other things. 

Warm and Cold Lies

posted 5 Dec 2009 17:44 by Dick Pountain

Lies and deceptions have always been potent political weapons, from the Trojan Horse all the way to the Zinoviev Letter. They are not the sole preserve of either Left or the Right, despite what adherents of those two wings would have you believ. We all know how Stalinism distorted the truth and rewrote history, the faces that disappeared from the photographs. However during the last decade lies have become a particular speciality of the Right, culminating in the deceptions used to launch the Iraq invasion, but most hilariously illustrated by the Bush neo-cons references to "making our own reality".

It's in this context that you should judge those recent leaked emails from climate scientists. It may be the case that believers in the reality of Global Warming have been "fine-tuning" the data to make their case look stronger. The sceptics' side prefer the newer, Bush/neocon style of lying, by just flat out denying the facts on  the (observably effective) principle that any lie you tell three times becomes true. None of this matters a damn though, because lies only have any effect on human minds, not on nature. If the planet has decided to fry us all it will continue to do so whatever nonsense we spout about the matter...

Fear and Loathing in the Bagging Area

posted 26 Nov 2009 16:07 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 26 Nov 2009 16:27 ]

Dont'cha just love supermarkets' self-checkout machines? Whether they were invented to cut staff jobs or to speed customers' exit, they fail on both counts thanks to their crummy user-interfaces. On approaching the one in my local Sainsbury it offers a choice between "Start" and "I am using my own bag". Hmm, tough call, do I prefer to get out of here or do I prefer to brag about my green credentials? Obviously the latter, so I press it and end up staring at a button called "Done", while a female voice nags me about foreign objects in the bagging area. A helpful assistant presses "Done" for me in order to start the transaction. There appear to be more assistants helping people self-checkout than there are on the tills... 

Crooked Crux

posted 26 Nov 2009 13:38 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 26 Nov 2009 14:16 ]

The events of the last year offer a lot of support to a popular view that all politicians, bankers, journalists and perhaps businessmen in general are crooks. No doubt this comes close to being true in some parts of the world, but for us in the developed West it's a counsel of despair that cannot survive closer inspection - if all politicians were in fact real crooks then they would never have allowed the press to disclose their petty expenses fiddles, nor rolled over so supinely once discovered. Nevertheless an article in the current New York Review of Books called "Illicit Money, Can it be Stopped?" (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=23465) makes for deeply disturbing reading. The authors,  Eva Joly and Raymond Baker, explain how the colossal scale of money laundering, tax evasion and false commercial transactions taken together now account for over $1.5trillion annually, which would have paid for the US bank bailout, or several years of Obama's health reform plans. They describe the three main sources of these illicit money flows, which are bribery and theft; organized crime; and dodgy corporate dealings such as tax evasion and price fixing. Bribery and theft are endemic in many parts of the world, often carried out at the very highest levels of government. The largest modern example is Russia, where oligarchs have stolen between $200 and $500 billion of former state assets since the "privatisations" of the early 1990s. Organised crime includes drug production and trafficking, people smuggling, prostitution and pornography. Corporate shenanigans mainly involve tax evasion by the establishment of offshore entities through which goods are sold at false prices - a carefully structured scheme can ensure close to zero tax liability in the country of production, a hidden profit in the offshore company, and even a loss offsettable against tax in the country of final sale. What over 60% of these illicit money flows have in common is that they are disguised as international trade. To move dirty money abroad, you sell some commodity to a foreign customer at a falsely lowered price - they either give you a kick-back (agreed verbally and not invoiced) of the difference in cash, or else they are party to the false accounting, which makes the transaction almost invisible to investigation. Companies from Barclays and BAE to Enron and WorldCom have indulged in such practices, which may be quite legal given loopholes and weaknesses of international law. The Mafia buys up cover companies to use in laundering drug money by similar schemes. All such schemes depend upon pliable banking institutions, like those of Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Cayman Islands and Vanuatu to operate. The article outlines some of the legal measures that governments like the EU and US, and the World Bank could (are in some cases are) taking to tackle these scams. What interested me most though is the picture it paints of a world economy in an advanced state of decomposition being slowly picked apart by predators and scavengers. The best exposition of this state of affairs that I've read in recent years is by James K. Galbraith (son of the other J. K. Galbraith) in his 2008 book "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too" (Free Press). He suggests that, far from dismantling the social democratic institutions of economic control established in much of the West following WW2, neoliberal ideologues who have held power - in government, corporations and banks - for much of the last 30 years merely adapted them as levers with which to loot the economy. When Peter Mandelson claimed to be "intensely relaxed about people getting rich" he was equally relaxed about appending "...by legal means".

Fat Harvest

posted 22 Nov 2009 16:45 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 9 Dec 2009 03:04 ]

 
The Guardian ran a far more macabre fat-related story (peru-gang-killing-human-fat). A Peruvian gang has been arrested for murdering people to harvest their body fat and sell it on to the cosmetic surgery industry as an anti-wrinkle treatment. Now fans of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club" (and David Fincher's excellent movie of it) will recognise this as one of its more bizarre and incredible plot devices - our heroes steal waste human fat from liposuction clinics and make it into luxury toilet soap to sell in smart shops. Did the Peruvians get the idea from the movie, did the movie get it from the Peruvians? Is the story even true? The gang is supposed to have been operating in an area where the Shining Path guerillas are active, so it might just be black propaganda put out by the security forces.

I don't know, nor do I care enough to find out: the important point is that such doubts are now immediate and automatic. We're well into that epoch which Guy Debord prophesied in "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" where fact and fiction become inextricably mixed: "With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer..."

Fat in Fire

posted 22 Nov 2009 12:18 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 9 Dec 2009 03:04 ]
 
What a fuss about Kate Moss's anti-eating quote that "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". Knives are out, accusations fly that Moss is pandering to the "pro-anorexia" lobby, and by implication is almost a murderer. The whole furore is just one more example of the hysterical moralism that's spreading through all levels of our society: carbon footprint; paedophilia; anorexia; you name it. Witches and communists are really old hat I'm afraid.

What really interests me about this row though is a huge reversal it reveals, if you examine the quote closely. Throughout most of human history hunger has been a pain, a punishment even. Voluntarily giving up eating was the province of ascetics, mystics, martyrs and political dissidents, and it was considered as a self-chosen *harm*. Kate's dictum though is based on a utilitarian calculus - feeling skinnier than, hence superior to, the next person, feeling good about your appearance, is a *pleasure* that outweighs the pain of hunger (and maximising pleasure is definitely the goal). So long as we in the rich half of the world have more food than we can eat, narcissism and hedonism will remain our ruling ethic - but for how much longer will that be the case?   

Quantum of Dumb

It feels as though the media reporting of science hit an all-time low this week. This morning the Guardian had the following headline about the Hadron Collider restart on Friday:

• 
  

  Cern prepares to resume 'big bang'

  Particles will begin whizzing around Large Hadron Collider again on Friday following explosion

Not just one but two references to bangs, to cater for those readers who believe it's going to blow us into another dimension, and the nicely ambiguous placement of "following explosion". Last night BBC 2 showed the worst "Horizon" I've ever seen (which is the more heartbreaking since it had been getting steadily back to form over the last year). They let that "nice Alan Davies" - who'd made a fairly amusing Horizon with Marcus du Sautoy about mathematics last year - have another go, this time to explain the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Then they chose the two most eccentric-looking physicists they could find to be his guides; filmed them in such a way as to make them look barking mad at all times; Seth Lloyd's explanation of quantum locality and Schrodinger's Cat was so inept that most viewers will have concluded it's all rubbish; and Alan Davies kept moaning all the way through to prove his credentials as a paid-up cool anti-intellectual.

It had me shouting at the screen for the first time in my life, and reinforced a growing suspicion that maybe the Copenhagen interpretation is rubbish (though not of course the phenomena that it purports to explain), merely a sop to quasi-religious idealism; that Einstein was right; and that maybe Carver Mead is the only person who's still in touch with reality (http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm).