You've been framed

You saw it in the later part of last week - the Met getting its ideological retaliation in first, trying to shape the 'information battlespace' by worrying publicly about violence at the Put People First March. (And here's the other Met worrying about climate change).

And then there was the ritualistic distancing by various trades unions types. The fringe benefit for our apolitical friends in blue is that time spent proclaiming your innocence is time you can't spend getting the (metaphorical) boot stuck into the Enemy (blue-eyed bankers, finance capital, the System, greed, Capitalism - choose your abstraction).

That's what they teach you on the first day of Perception Management 101, I assume.

But anyway, two other examples of 'framing' recently - an "obvious" one from the front page of the Financial Times for March 10, about Youtube pulling official music videos from its site:

“I don’t think anyone is going to be happy about this, but there’s general understanding that we all need to work under terms that are reasonable for our businesses and we’re hoping we’ll come to a quick resolution,” Patrick Walker, YouTube’s director of video partnerships in Europe, told the Financial Times.

In a blog note, Mr Walker said the costs would be prohibitive, with YouTube losing significant amounts of money on every playback under the proposed PRS terms.

He said there was also a lack of transparency – PRS was unwilling to tell YouTube what songs were included in the licence so it could identify works on the service.

PRS for Music is a collecting agency that issues “mechanical” and performing licences for music to be used online, or performed or broadcast.

Steve Porter, chief executive of PRS for Music, said the organisation was “shocked and disappointed” at the last-minute notice of YouTube’s “drastic action”. “We believe [this] only punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent.”

Both sides trying to make the other guy the bad guy, obviously enough.

But then, if you really want a master-class in this stuff, get your eyes around this from the latest Private Eye. If it stands up (and Private Eye stories often do), it's delicious...

Ponzimonium!

"Some thought his returns might have been based on front-running- using the information from his brokering business to benefit his asset management clients. Sophisticated confidence tricksters have used a similar tactic for thousands of years. The fraudster hints at impropriety, but implies that the target will be the beneficiary rather than the victim. The suggestion... has two advantages. It provides a possible explanation of the source of the promised gains. And it encourages the victims to keep quiet until- perhaps even after- the deception is exposed."

How the “Madoff twist” entices the financially astute John Kay, FT March 18th

The FT has, understandably, been considerably exercised by the Bernie Madoff thing. Many of their heavy hitters (I liked what Alex Callinicos's description of Martin Wolf as 'primary intellectual ornament')

And this weekend's FT has a lovely new neologism (that's a deliberate redundancy, btw)

"US watchdog warms markets of 'rampant Ponzimonium'.

"Ponzimonium." Priceless.

See also:
A rather good book called "Pandemonium: the rise of predatory locales in the Postwar world."

It makes my brain ache

Reading my FT magazine on the stepper at t'gym, I finally looked at (having probably seen many times) a full page advert for "Neurozan" capsules." These wonderful products are sold by "Vitabiotics", "supporting the brain's neuro-chemistry through optimum micro-nutrition."

And of course, it's like motherhood and apple-pie- it's very hard to argue AGAINST eating a broad balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg. And why would you? But that's not quite what they're saying. They're saying these pills will "keep you at your razor sharp best." They're appealing to the classic middle-class/knowledge workers fear of losing their Edge.
The worried well is a nice market, especially in a credit crunch.

We get angry when states and corporations dress up their plans (GM, Nuclear) as value-free/hard "science", but we seem to give gentler/individual focussed 'solutions' a free pass.

So I googled, and sure enough, there's a de-bunking website "Holfordwatch" I advise you have a good read of before you go buying any of these capusles, which are available on the high street..

See also:
Ben Goldacre's astonishingly good Bad Science
a book by Kimberly Lau called New Age Capitalism
this about Matey Capitalism and the Appliance of Science

The upside of patriarchy and war

Needlessly and childishly provocative title aside, have a read of bits of these two letters that appeared in the FT earlier this year.

"When I joined the Australian Commonwealth Public Service in the 1970s, those in the senior positions (invariably male) had often started their working life during the Great Depression before serving in the second world war. Upon demobilisation they had patiently worked in a seniority-based promotion system for a modest salary in return for security of tenure and a superannuation scheme. By the time I left the service in the mid 1980s they were to be replaced by an increasingly university-educated mobile meritocracy on short and long-term contracts willing and able to transfer in and out of private enterprise. Since then many of the traditional areas of government service delivery (in Australia at least) appear to be constituted by web pages advertising mission statements and core values supported by call centres. Service is no longer a personal virtue but a commodity to be delivered."

Paul Stockley, Jan 31

&

"Pre-1974 there was an overall 17 percent quota limit on female medical students across the UK. The male-dominated profession was led by men who had been the backbone of military medicine during the second world war. We, their trainees accepted and enjoyed the challenge of long hours and the camaraderie of hospital mess life. Central to the "can do" philosophy was the continuity of care for every patient by a designated consultant team from admission to discharge. Society rewarded and respected this arduous work rate....
"What do we now face? The consequences are clear. Whereas my generation achieved consultant status after approximately 30,000 hours of broad and intensive training, the plan from April 2009 indicates that 6,000 hours is acceptable. imagine the outcry if airlines cut pilot training to 20 per cent of what was previously considered acceptable."

David Skidmore, Jan 5

There is of course the risk of rose-tinted spectacles. If things were that good, why did we need the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism etc. But in important ways, I think Stockley and Skidmore point to what has been lost (or stolen) along the way.

• an ethic of social solidarity/noblesse oblige
• an understanding that quality take time, diligence and patience and that the current "corporate culture"(sic) of karoshi and turbo-Taylorism has (steadily more visible) consequences

So, what is to be done?

The FT, the world soul and all that

On the back of the Life and Arts section in the weekend FT, they have the same three columns. Presumably, when bored plutocrats get restless on a Sunday afternoon, have done screwing the mistresses after a week of screwing the proles/taxpayers, they can get a little aspirational consumerism and aspirational anti-consumerism. A bit of hormesis does you good..

Those three columns-
a) "The Fast Lane" by some guy called Tyler Brule, who spends most of his life in airport departure lounges or five star restaurants, and who spends ages comparing Singapore Airport to Swiss chalets etc. Every bit as edifying as it sounds. Reminds me of the John Hurt character in "Contact"- dying and eking it out by never touching down.

b) "How to Give It", where in a different worthy answers the same questions "which is the first charity you can remember supporting?" "is it more important to give time or money?" and so forth. It throws up the occasional interesting idea, and if gets the noblesse oblige juices of a junior alien overlord going, then well, that defers the revolution by a nanosecond more.

c) [the point of this post] "The Slow Lane" by Harry Eyres, where you'll get paens and threnodies and elegies for this or that. Eyres covers all sorts of 'dissidents'. Frexample, he did a good piece on Ivan Illich recently. Of course, you can dismiss all this as feelgood flannel, and say that Eyres is only published to make readers feel good about themselves and their paper, before returning to the real work of screwing the proletariat and sending a death threat to every insect the following day. That's as maybe, but the stuff is still worth reading.

Here is an example from the January 3/4 issue

"The writer I find most illuminating on all this is the maverick American psychologist James Hillman. Hillman draws attention not just to the individual human soul, the locus of salvation or damnation for Christians, but to the world soul, anima mundi. According to Hillman, psychotherapies will never work unless they "take into account the sickness of the world... you have to see that buildings are anorexic, that language is schizogenic, that normalcy is manic and medicine and business is manic".
John Keats said that the world was the vale of soul-making. Now we need to reverse that saying. To restore our own souls we need to stop destroying the world's soul, which includes the habitats, eco-systems and species under the kind of threat that neither Keats nor Freud ever envisaged."

Possibly related to:
Don Delillo's World Hum
Leonard Cohen's Blizzard

"It literally changed my life"- what changed yours?

Hello all,

(or- given my viewing stats- "both"),

Two separate interviews, both in the only newspaper bar the Morning Star worth reading (yes, He's Banging On AGAIN about the Bloody Financial Times and how All Anti-capitalists Must Read It) have got me wanting to pose the question: what reading material has "literally" changed your life?

For me, I'd say Chomsky's World Orders, Old and New. I'd been softened up by a whole lot of other, liberal, stuff, but had only read a couple of short Chomsky pieces before.

What say all/both of you?

Those two quotes-

Rosie Blau writing in the Life and Arts supplement (which is a both bloody fantastic and a hot-bed of com-symps) on November 29th/30th last year entitled "Drawn from Memory"

"He was seven when he first encountered Mad, a monthly satirical magazine, and was immediately captivated by the drawings: "It literally changed my life." Unhappy at the thought of wasting money on comics, Vladek Spiegelman took to brinign home second-hand comic anthologies instead, inadvertaently introducing his son to titles banned from newsstands for their violent content."

and Ludovic Hunter-Tilney on Lou Reed "Why do I have to go through this?" June 21 2008

"Reed grew up in a middle-class Jewish household in suburban Long Island and attended Syracuse University. He identifies a short story by one of his tutors, the poet Delmore Schwartz, as a turning-point in his own development as a writeer. "'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities'", Reed says, "changed my life entirely and shaped the way I write, and everything along with it." It taught him the virtue of simplicity. "I don't think there's a single polysyllabic word there. The world shook for me when I read it."

Newspapers and their Meaning(s)

What does your reading of a particular newspaper say about you?

Reading ANY newspaper (and here I exclude the Commuter McNuggets of the Metro) says that you're part of a dying breed- young hip folks get what infotainment they need from tinterweb and tv. Like the 20th century dinosaurs they are, the newspapers' circulation is packing up, and they are stroking out with increasing regularity.

There's that old saw- hang on, let me Google it-

Jim Hacker: "Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers:
- The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;
- The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
- The Times is read by people who actually do run the country;
- The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;
- The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;
- The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;
- And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."

Sir Humphrey: "Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?"

Bernard Woolley: "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits."

Well, I used to read the Indie, but in between 18 and 25 either it changed or I did or we both did, so I then spent a wasted decade reading the Grauniad. For too long.
Then I spent years forcing myself to read the Financial Times till I got the knack.
Now I know what they mean by "No FT, no comment."

Reasons to love the FT
- quality of the writing (Matthew Engel, Gideon Rachman, Lucy Kellaway, Gillian Tait, Joshua Chaffin, Tony Barber etc etc)
- more facts per square inch, especially ones the other papers don't/won't print.
- virtually free of celebrity shite. There's no filtering that needs doing as you turn the pages.
- unashamedly capitalist; there's none of the tedious hand-wringing of the liberal press.
- actually takes anarchist and communist artists, film-makers seriously, without the patronising undertone (or overtone) of the Farringdon fuckwits.

And, if I'm honest, buying the FT is a a way of thinking myself (and trying to display to others) that I am Serious. And Diligent.

And I love buying the Morning Star alongside the FT, and doing a compare and contrast.

Hegel apparently said that reading a paper was one of the rituals of Modern Man. Not for much longer, but I for one will be sad to see the end of the FT, if and when that day comes.

Anarchy in the FT!

Ok ok, the title is a little disingenuous.

But on the stepper at t'gym, I encountered in the space of 10 minutes (or 200 calories), two snippets of interest to armchair beardies (ABs) like me.

In the FT Magazine for Feb 14/15 Anna Brooke does an interview with a Parisian sewer cleaner called Jose Lahaye. He talks about the vicissitudes of the job, and closes out with “Being a sewer man may be dangerous and dirty, but you receive a lot of praise and respect from both the public and the government, and that makes it all worthwhile.”

Which is what the ABs have argued in response to the puerile “well, if there was anarchy, nobody would do the unpleasant jobs” line. As if people who do unpleasant jobs are only motivated by money, or the threat of a bullet.

Later on in the same issue, the brilliant Matthew Engel (his piece on banking in Liechtenstein was fab) visits Summerhill, the (in)famous school Where the Kids Make the Rules..

“It is an illusion that Summerhill has no rules: Neill made a firm distinction between allowing children their own freedom and allowing them to interfere with anyone else's There probably isn't a school in the country with a thicker rule book.... It'sa also an illusion that kids dislike rules. They actually love applying them. They just resent the imposition of them by adults.”

Engel is not starry-eyed of course.

“It would be nice to believe that the absence of pressure to achieve perversely instils a thirst for knowledge and learning, but I saw no evidence of that.... Neil said: 'I would rather Summerhill produced a happy street sweeper than a neurotic prime minister.' But doesn't happiness come from fulfilment? Wouldn't a street sweeper who might have been PM be really neurotic.”

I've long noted that the Life and Arts section of the weekend FT takes artists/writers/film-makers etc who are anarchists and communists seriously, and manages to mention their political beliefs and actions without the standard sneer/smear/patronising chuckle of the Guardian etc. It's (yet another) reason to read the FT, as if all the others weren't enough.

Sigmund Freud, the FT, and parapraxis

Siggie Freud is known for a lot of things, which shan't detain us here.

[Funniest Freud thing I ever read was a play called “Le Visiteur” by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, set in 1938 Vienna. The Nazis are there, Anna's trying to get dad to London and someone turns up plausibly claiming to be God, wanting psychoanalysis because he's depressed about the coming 6 years... Check it out! But I digress]

Am just reading about him and the possible organic base for the “ego-defence mechanisms” in “Phantoms in the Brain”, a top notch popular science book by a journalist Sandra Blakeslee and an absurdly astute neuroscientist called V.S. Ramachandran. But I digress again.

One Freudian insight most people like is the “slips of the tongue” thing. It's technically known as parapraxis-

"A minor error, such as a slip of the tongue, thought to reveal a repressed motive."

Well, my favourite read, the FT, has lines worth reading between. And parapraxis.

In “California scheming”- an article on infotech/clean tech and the idea of a “smart grid” there is the following admission.

"While it prides itself on a brand of hypercapitalism defined by the self-reliance of its entrepreneurs and the almost constant state of creative destruction in which they work, the Valley has long been a big beneficiary of government largesse. From the defence build-up that helped to create the semiconductor industry to the birth of the internet (itself initially a project of the Pentagon), much of the research and early contracts for new technologies has been funded by the taxpayer."

This of course will come as No Surprise to anyone who knows the concept of Military Keynesianism. Noam Chomsky is extremely strong on this stuff. See here for a review of a good book about him, that has a quote about MK.

Enoch Powell, the FT and parapolitics

Enoch Powell was a High Tory as well as a racist. There's his infamous and career-ending “Rivers of Blood" speech but there's also the sharp understanding that Great Britain had, really, lost World War Two to the Americans, with the British Empire subsumed within the Pax Americana. (Empires often take over other empires as semi-going concerns- the Brits had done it with the Portuguese. But I digress...)

Powell also said something along the lines that British Foreign Policy (now) consisted of doing what the Americans wanted, before being asked.

And we have this in today's (15 Jan 2008) FT.

“The defence secretary, John Hutton, is to attack the commitment of the UK's EU allies to the war in Afghanistan, saying Europe can no longer continue “freeloading” on the back of US military security.”

And since we all know Obama wants an extra 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, I think we can see what signal HMG is trying to send him...

If you really want the skinny on “the Special Relationship”, and the mechanics of how the Americans have ensured a biddable British elite, then you need to look at “parapolitics”. And one of the best places to start for that is Lobster Magazine, issue 56 of which is reviewed here.

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.

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...