The FT, the Guardian and Deep Throat

In his obit of Mark Felt, FT 20^th December, Jurek Martin concludes with this:

“He escaped implication in Watergate for years but Mr Felt did encounter legal problems of his own. After leaving the agency which he joined in 1942, he was convicted in 1981 for unauthorised FBI break-ins at homes of alleged radicals in the 1970, but was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan. He then retired to California.”

The Guardian, that noble little bast...ion of liberal values, didn't see fit to tell its readers this, at least in the paper version I saw. There is something in the online version here.

It's something I've noticed- the FT actually is MORE willing to talk about state power, and to give extreme left artists etc a fair hearing, than the Guardian. Can I prove this? No, I haven't had the time or the patience to do a comparative analysis, a la Herman and Chomsky. Someday mabe...

Other comparison- I watched Silence of the Lambs at the cinema in Australia and on video in the US. In the latter, somebody had edited out this bit

Jack Crawford: I remember you from my seminar at UVA. You grilled me pretty hard, as I recall, on the bureau's civil rights record in the Hoover years. I gave you an A.
Clarice Starling: A-minus, Sir.

This sort of censorship is not uncommon. And the bigger picture is that movies “critical” of the US military get no co-operation from said military. The classic, but trivial, example is the “Gene Hackman goes mad” cold-war thriller Crimson Tide...

PS The break-ins that Jurek Martin mentions were part of a programme that went all the way up to murder...)

PPS See also Cril Payne's "Deep Cover", for an extraordinary account of an undercover agent virtually stranded by the uncertainty around the Hoover succession.

Do I like kids? Yes, but I couldn't eat a whole one...

My niece is kind of angelic (as long as you get to hand her back when she's being grumpy. Now that she's in the terrible twos, that's a lot of the time).

Was at a Turkish restaurant in London- the wonderful Ev- a couple of weeks back, with the wife, the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law, the brother-in-law and the said niece.

What struck me, between courses of excellent food, was just how much energy and time the kid's parents (and us too, but we're hardly central) put into her. There's toys, there's books, loads of interaction (attention, love etc). They're coaching her into her pleases and thank yous etc. And that is of course as it should be but isn't for far far too many kids. (I could insert here various horror stories about 'parents' with huge TVs and DVDs while their children live in utter deprivation through a door in the same house). And this is all about the inculcation of a certain habitus.

And the Turkish waiter and waitresses were basically non-violently fighting as to who got to play with her and fuss her. And this of course lead to speculation on non-Anglo societies and their actual love of children (as opposed to mere protestations of love). Barbara Kingsolver has some good essays on this, in one of her books. Example I think from the Canary Islands, if memory serves.

Anyway, I'd love to close out with that great Far Side cartoon of an Alien Family dinner, with all the full grown aliens sitting at one table, their kids at another, with one popping up out of the food and the caption "Mom, Bobby Joe's playing in the turkey again." But copyright, kicked off blogspot blah blah. For what it's worth, it's on page 16 of the Far Side Gallery 3.

bait and switch, feet of clay...

Here's a blog posting that never got beyond scribbles on a (now unearthed) bit of paper.

Back in August I did a workshop on "growth economics as a suicide machine" at a festival.

And although it was not bad, it was not good enough and rank hypocrisy.

Because it was supposed to focus on solutions, but it's easier to talk about problems.
Because it started interactive then got bogged down in the things "I" wanted to get across/off my chest.
Should have had the second half as small group work, instead of me boring on about a history of the world and useful concepts.

What I forget is that if I prepare really well, then I perform quite well. But I (yes, the number of Is is conscious) then forget this, ascribing my good performance to innate genius. And then I get lazy/complacent and turn in a mediocre performance. And am rarely honest enough to call myself on it. Or worse, I DO call myself on it, but them am not organised enough, disciplined enough, to do it how it should be done.

Human, all too human...

Fiction to read in 2009. Still no women...

The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth

The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil

Trance by Christopher Sorrentino

Sidetracked by Henning Mankell

Decision before Dawn by George Howe

Non-fiction books to be read and reviewed in '09

OK, here in no particular order are the non-fiction books I am definitely going to read and review in 2009. Crushingly white, and 28 out of 29 are by men. That's kind of appalling...

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Electric Universe - How Electricity Switched on the Modern World, by David Bodanis
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
A Brief History of the Future by John Naughton
Out of Control by Kevin Kelley
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment by Richard Lewontin
Hollywood Utopia by Pat Brereton
Will the Circle be Unbroken by Studs Terkel
Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses by Mark Curtis
The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn
Remembering Forgetting by Ciaran Riordan
Ant by Charlotte Sleigh
Tools for Thought by CH Waddington
The Ape and the Sushi Master by Frans de Waal
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott
The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
Developing Management Skills for Europe by Whetten and Cameron
Participative Web and User Created Content Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking OECD
Remnants of Auschwitz by Giorgio Agamben
The Salaried Masses by Siegfried Kracauer
13 Seconds by Philip Caputo
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
Phantoms in the Brain by VS Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
Why? by Charles Tilly
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Grant Hammond
Sex, Drink and Fast Cars by Stephen Bayley

Nobody knows anything (much)

Way back when I was young, shortly after the invention of the printing press, a book appeared by Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, Misery etc). It was called "Adventures in the Screentrade" and it was very good. I think I got it in a remainder shop in Edinburgh. In either that one or another- "Which Lie Did I Tell?" - he came up with his famous rule about Hollywood "Nobody knows anything."

It's a good memento mori (or perhaps memento incompetenci?) and John Authers authors a similar piece on the back of the Financial Times fund management (FTfm) supplement for December 15th-"Annus horribilis for the star investors". Resisting manfully the temptation to say something like "yes, these star investors were annuses," I'll simply say that youcan only buck the mean for so long...

On the broader subject of incompetence (and especially incompetent people's inability to perceive evidence that proves their incompetence), check out the Dunning-Kruger effect...

Of course, such radical epistemological doubt can be overplayed. Pilots do fly planes, surgeons do perform operations etc etc. There's quite a good riff in a David Lodge book about it. One of the later ones... hold on... Thinks. I think (ho ho)

Humans as nonviable organism? Chomsky

QUESTION: Right. Can I ask you about your position on the possibility of ecological constraints on the realisation of human needs? Do you think -- even if there were the political will to achieve it -- that it might be impossible, for ecological reasons, to provide the necessary conditions for continued human flourishing?

CHOMSKY: Humans may well be a nonviable organism.

QUESTION: Do you think they are?

CHOMSKY: It's very likely. From an evolutionary point of view, higher intelligence seems to be maladaptive rather than adaptive. Biologically successful organisms have a rigid character and are well adapted to a certain environmental niche. If higher intelligence helped adaptation you would expect it to have arisen over and over again. However, it didn't. It arose in a single, not particularly successful organism, Homo Sapiens. And while the human population exploded, human societies developed in a way that has caused enormous damage to the environment. The human race could destroy itself and much organic life as a result.

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199808--.htm

It's human nature- the FT and the Conservatives

We live- so the advertising slogan tells us- in financial times. We also live, especially since credit started crunching, in very interesting times.

The FT correspondents and pundits have been puzzling out loud this last year or so about all their old certainties (market, efficiency, light touch regulation blah blah). And they run columns from various other centrist/right figures that make for interesting reading too.

Jesse Norman (who he?- more below) had a column headed "Human beings are not mere selfish agents" on Friday December 5.

We are daily conditioned to think of human beings as "economic agents": as purely self-interested, endlessly calculating costs adn benefits and highly sensitive to marginal gains and losses.
But a problem arises when this economic image feeds back into society and becomes our default picture of human motivation. We secretly know this picture is wrong; and our best economists know it is wrong too. We are aware that it cannot explain such things as volunteering or philanthropy. We fret about excessive materialism. We yearn endlessly for the things money famously cannot buy: love, friendship, joy. Yet without an alternative picture of what a human being is, we have nowhere else to turn.
We need a different vision and a richer conception of humanity in our public policy. Such a vision starts by recognizing the limits of humna nature. It emphasises the importance of independent institutions, competition and entrepreneurship as factors driving prosperity. It rejects the idea that humans are merely passive vehicles for utility, in favour of a far more dynamic conception of human capability.

Well, this wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Resurgence or some such rich hippy publication. I think Norman (who he? again) is on about bounded rationality.

But then, I've read Noam Chomsky riffing on the utter poverty of the neo-liberal vision of human motivation in similar (well, better) terms. Except a few minutes of googling can't find it me. But I did find the following, from either Robin Hahnel or Michael Albert, authors of ParEcon: Life After Capitalism-

The first answer [in response to "human nature is bad and nothing can change"] I like to give I first heard from Noam Chomsky. Imagine you are in an upstairs window looking out over a nearly empty street below. It is a scorching hot day. A child below is enjoying an ice cream cone. Up walks a man. He looks down, grabs the cone, and swats the child aside into the gutter. He walks on enjoying his new cone. What do you think, from the safety of your distance from the scene, about this man? Of course, you think this fellow is pathological. You certainly don’t identify with him and think, that’s me down there, I would do that too. Instead you would be horrified and you would likely even rush down to comfort the child. But why?
If humans are greedy, self-centered, violent animals wouldn’t we expect that all humans, confronted with the opportunity to take a delicious morsel at no cost to themselves, would do so? Why should it horrify us when we see someone do it? Why should we find it pathological? The answer is that we actually do not think that people are innately thugs. We only gravitate to that claim when it serves our purposes to rationalize some agenda we hold for other reasons entirely, such as when we ignore widespread injustice because to do otherwise would be uncomfortable, costly, and even risky.

Remember the Replicants "I've seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate"? What couldn't they do? They couldn't feel empathy...

And now the punchline, for those of you patient enough to still be reading-

Jesse Norman is the Conservative candidate for Hereford and South Herefordshire. His book Compassionate Economics is published this week by Policy Exchange.

Yep, the same Policy Exchange who advocated de-populating Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford...

For another post- the fascinating article on the politics of the organic movement in the latest Lobster...

"But people die in Nursing Homes"

My best mate, "Dr Dave" was down for a visit. Somewhere in the haze of curry, porter and Aliens (the movie that is), we got to talking about death and euthanasia and all that stuff. Inspired by the recent documentary of a guy with MND taking the sensible steps. Or sensible sips, I suppose.

Dave related a story of how he had recently done a home visit, and ended up diagnosing someone with dementia, and then having a conversation with this person's spouse.

Dave: Well, if it gets to the stage where you find it difficult to cope, um... there can be social services input, home care etc. It may become necessary- if it all gets too much- to put [patient] in a nursing home.

Spouse: But people die in Nursing Homes.

Dave: " " [speechless]

Now, patient and spouse both in their late 70s...

WTF?

Did they not see what had happened to their parents? Their aunts and uncles? Their friends, by this age, FFS? Don't they get how life ends?

Me, I blame the War. When I qualified as a health care professional, there were still a few around who'd fought in it. They were, on the whole (without sinking into all that Greatest Generation guff), phlegmatic and realistic. They'd seen friends die, and they knew how life ends, and that they'd had 60 years or so that others hadn't. But those lot are mostly gone, so the people doing the dying now grew up in the 40s and 50s, and the war was a bit of a game, but rarely life and death.

Oh, and I also blame the Death of God. For the Victorians, death was no taboo, sex was. With fewer of us believing in a hereafter, those taboos have switched.

Best book I ever read about this- "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker.

Enough cod-sociology for one day I think...

Go with the Flow

I often think of states not just as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but also as being obsessed with regulating/encouraging free flows (e.g mercantilism to neoliberalism) of capital.

Of course, they're less keen on the free flow of people. That- “border patrols”- will need a separate posting.

Traffic lights are a trivial example of this:

The modern electric traffic light is an American invention. As early as 1912 in Salt Lake City, Utah, policeman Lester Wire invented the first red-green electric traffic lights. On 5 August 1914, the American Traffic Signal Company installed a traffic signal system on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. It had two colors, red and green, and a buzzer, based on the design of James Hoge, to provide a warning for color changes. The design by James Hoge allowed police and fire stations to control the signals in case of emergency. The first four-way, three-color traffic light was created by police officer William Potts in Detroit, Michigan in 1920. In 1923, Garrett Morgan patented a traffic signal device. It was Morgan's experience while driving along the streets of Cleveland that led to his invention of a traffic signal device. Ashville, Ohio claims to be the location of the oldest working traffic light in the United States, used at an intersection of public roads until 1982 when it was moved to a local museum

And of course, we regulate our own flows (toilet training, emotional “repression” and the whole Norbert Elias thing. This, from the wikipedia page about him gives you a taste:

Elias' most important work is the two-volume The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation). Originally published in 1939, it was virtually ignored until its republication in 1969, when its first volume was also translated into English. The first volume traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego." The second volume of The Civilizing Process looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.

And on the subject of flows, we have the in a good groove flow-

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

And then of course there's the (often) bad “going with the flow” (of other people/the norms) phrase. The quote below is from page 276 of an amazing book called “The Other Side of Time: A combat surgeon in World War 2”

In the course of an argument in the command post somebody said, "Oh, shit, let's be practical," and I looked over to see Manfred staring at the floor, shaking his head, muttering in German. When I listened, he was saying, "Oh, shit, practical again, here comes practical marching. I'll never be free from practical." I asked him about his little chant, and he told me his definitions of "practical." The word praktisch had been a two-syllable club he'd been beaten by fellow students and teachers and businessmen and clergy all through the nightmare years. "Stop being such a god-damned idealist" Be practical!"

"You know what practical is?

"Practical means I know right from wrong but I'm too fucking scared to do what's right so I commit crimes or permit crimes and I say I'm only being practical. Practical means coward.

"Practical frequently means stupid. Someone is too goddamn dumb to realize the consequences of what he's doing and he hides under practical.

"It also means corrupt: I know what I ought to do but I'm being paid to do something different so I call it practical.
"Practical is an umbrella for the everything lousy people do."

I handed Manfred a bottle of brandy. "A toast, Manfred. Here's to the destruction of the practical!"

"The cowardly, greedy, vicious, plausible practical!"

The ultimate flow though- the one that will render all the others moot- is the flow of carbon dioxide from its long term sequestration as coal, oil or gas, into the atmosphere...

So it goes..

Internet-related Attention Deficit Disorder, or “IRADD, WTF?, QED, OMG”

For years I've been saying that I was glad I'd done one undergraduate degree/developed some writing and research skills before the internet came along. Looking at people skimming and blagging their way through degrees, I've thought "that technology you're using is making you lazy." Hell, I'm even old enough to have been forced to learn my 12 times tables, while other kids were playing around with their new-fangled pocket calculators.

Anyway, now I have even more anecdotal evidence to "back up" my gut instinct.

Three articles I've read recently (as part of my general way-leads-on-to-way google-binging) are worth quoting at length.

The first is a fascinating and sad account of "The History of Flight Simulators: Two Cambridge Inventions" by John M. Rolfe. I only got it via a Googlecache, and even that seems to be gone now.

Anyway, here's the relevant bit, from a report by Frederick Bartlett in December 1940:

"Signals in the periphery of his field of attention tend increasingly to be neglected. Thus he will fail to respond to a falling indication fo the petrol gauge by turnign on to the reserve supply. He becomes increasingly distractable. And, increasingly, feelings of bodily discomfort begin to obtrude upon his consciousness. If he becomes aware of his diminised accuracy of performance, he is apt to attribute this, not to his own shortcomings, but to imperfections that have developed in the apparatus."

Then Nicholas Carr asks "Is Google making us stupid?"

The whole thing is worth reading, as opposed to "skimming"

As in, he quotes a "recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London"

"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."

Personally I think Carr's gloss on Frederick Taylor is a bit crude, and historically inaccurate, but there's plenty of other good stuff here-

"The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

and

"As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

From that article on Atlantic Monthly, I was only a click (after stopping for a breakfast of pancakes) from this-

The Autumn of the Multi-taskers by Walter Kirn

Oh, the whole thing is good.

"But on to the next inevitable contraction that everybody knows is coming, believes should have come a couple of years ago, and suspects can be postponed only if we pay no attention to the matter and stay very, very busy. I mean the end of the decade we may call the Roaring Zeros—these years of overleveraged, overextended, technology-driven, and finally unsustainable investment of our limited human energies in the dream of infinite connectivity. The overdoses, freak-outs, and collapses that converged in the late ’60s to wipe out the gains of the wide-eyed optimists who set out to “Be Here Now” but ended up making posters that read “Speed Kills” are finally coming for the wired utopians who strove to “Be Everywhere at Once” but lost a measure of innocence, or should have, when their manic credo convinced us we could fight two wars at the same time."

and this

"The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it."

Clifford Stoll made similar arguments in a book called "Silicon Snake Oil", which I rather liked at the time (1996 or so).

Of course, this whole- "growing up offline" was a trade-off - in the 70s and 80s I went around expecting the crispy end of the world any and every day. Now we've got the squishy, and slower, end of the world to worry about. So it goes.