I'm pleased to report that I have finally overcome one of the great banes of my existence. The deference that I've always habitually shown to those of more experience and learning is a thing of the past. I'm now 30 years old and have no excuse to pretend that I'm not a full adult and after the result of the council/European Parliament vote, it is clearly time that my generation exerted a fuller influence on national and supranational politics.
This being the case, there is a settled and persistent theory among the generations coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s that they are the ones who have been hit by the last 20 years of integration and normalisation into fiscally conservative social democracy. Or socially liberal neo liberalism if you prefer.
As a Scotchman, I don't have too much direct acquaintance with the UKIP following, but I do follow the arguments of their leadership quite closely. The grievances that have led to the so-called 'protest vote' in the European elections seems to emanate largely from a section of older, working class males who have seen a decline in their living standards at the same time as an influx of EU migrants have done more to effect productivity in the skilled and unskilled areas of manufacturing, hospitality, domestic and retail services. Perhaps they should look at the their opinions on economic structure to ensure that people who do valuable work are remunerated accordingly? Nah. That's Communism obviously.
The irony of course is that UKIP is fully in favour of laissez faire capitalism. Except for when the free run of the market is of disadvantage to themselves. The Conservative Party are routinely being described as being put on the back foot by this phenomenon with prominent Torys feeling like their best hunting ground is being taken over. In reality however, the rise of UKIP is actually purging them of the central contradiction which has made the party unelectable as the sole party of Government for most of my lifetime. It was Europe that sunk John Major and it was Europe that disbarred the party's best candidates from assuming leadership until the Cameron brand came along. If Cameron himself is discomfited by this change, I see no evidence of it. I would predict that we're about to see an audit among the right wing, which will finally put the EU issue to bed as a national issue and entrench the Conservatives as the natural party of Government until the next seismic political shift.
Fortunately, there are several things to be resolved first. Is renegotiation going to pacify or inflame the anti-EU vote? Is it going to be conducted by the current coalition or a more ardent right wing coalition or by Labour? Granted the latter seems unlikely, but likely voters in a general election might just squeak Labour into the largest single party, but definitely not the majority party.
History seems to suggest that the anti-EU vote will simply never be able to challenge for national favour. In the meantime, the Tories are pretty clever about distancing themselves, while remaining vigilant about European chicanary like the Human Rights Act and free movement of peoples. My sense is that the more UKIP do to identify themselves as the party of the anti-EU vote, the stronger the Tories become amongst former Liberal Democrats and New Labourists.
If we look at the actual facts from the last 4 years of this parliament, we find that the Liberal Democrats are nearly extinct. Nick Clegg himself will very likely lose Sheffield Hallam next year (I'd been told this repeatedly by his constituents, but polling is now available) and UKIP will have a strong showing at the very least. When I try to actually look at the projections suggesting a UKIP MP, my brain rebels.
Labour in the meantime have been trying to Blairise Miliband with the insane choice of David Axelrod as senior strategic adviser. It's as if a group of West Wing fanboys were running the Labour Party and trying to recreate the performance of Martin Sheen with Rowan Atkinson. I was a Labour child. I was a Labour teenager. I was a Scottish Socialist for about 10 minutes. I can no longer look at the current left without feeling like they are deliberately trying to alienate me.
Of course, they are most likely doing so in order to attract others. But who? Who in their right mind is being attracted by the vapid regurgitation of piss-weak populism from Ed Miliband? WHO GODDAMMIT? The intellectually self-confident? As the mob boss says: if you have to say you are, you probably aint.
If anything, I can only look at the current Labour edge as a mildish rebuke to the coalition. If David Cameron gets Ed Miliband up on the stage on his own, God help us all. The Torys might get a majority outright.
The Tories have franchised their radical right to UKIP soothing the fears of sensible conservatives and through cooperating with them have exposed the fundamental bad faith of the Liberal Democrats. While this seems to have caused a midterm dip in popularity for the Conservatives, it is no more than that. If the Cameronians can keep Boris and David Davies on a short leash for the next year, there is no party in a better position to sweep the board at the General Election.
#VoteYes
Tuesday 27 May 2014
Sunday 28 April 2013
The Bangladeshi Tragedy and the Failure of Values
In the aftermath of a garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed almost 300, which followed a November fire in a garment factory there that killed another 112, the debate is heating up again as to whether Western apparel brands and retailers should shoulder the costs to ensure things like fire and building infrastructure safety.
If this rings a bell at all it is because this debate has been reheated so many times it is almost entirely now a matter of routine. But this time it happened in Bangladesh. For reasons that those who know me will easily appreciate, the fires and collapses at textile factories used by suppliers of many high street and fast fashion outlets, have been giving me nightmares.
Before I left my University's politics programme, I put a lot of work into attempting to advance the argument that although the colonial era was over, a financial imperialism remains. This is not my theory. If you are interested in the concept of neo-colonialism but have no context for the study of it, please don't follow the link just now; it's a total rabbit hole.
To restate the facts of this particular story; 350 are dead. 900 are missing. It is not unusual that large factories supplying mass market textiles should catch fire or collapse. The Bangladeshi minimum wage is $37.00 (£23.89) per month. So without employing hyperbole or indeed any rhetorical device to underline the point, here is the case:
Bangladeshis work in death traps for just over a dollar a day to produce cheap clothing for us. Sometimes they die doing so. Sometimes they are physically crushed doing so. Sometimes they suffer 3rd degree burns all over doing so.
Okay, I'm getting creeped out and heading for one of those morose and sickening tailspins... let's return to rhetoric shall we?
If you were to place say... an imitation tweed/wool mix jacket side-by-side with a month of the labour of the seamstress who finished it... it is possible that the RRP would show that the jacket is worth twice as much. How can this be? And, more importantly, what is being done about it?
Well some pressure is being brought to bear on the Bangladeshi government by large retailers. Some demand that they should raise the minimum wage, while others say they will pay for improved workplace safety measures if all the other large firms kick into the pot too. You will note that the answer to my original question could be summarised as, 'nothing at all.'
The retailing high ground here is taken by those who regularly audit their factories and prevent such accidents. This completely side-steps the issue of workers' dignity and the value of the labour, but to do so much at least shows that this kind of imperialism is indirectly acknowledging a duty of care and is not sociopathically driven to consider their workers as organic machinery.
If it can be conceded that the people making the clothes are people, surely it follows that they're human rights should be equally as inviolable as our own (i.e. only up to a point).
The fact that this is not acknowledged leads us toward a deeper economic truth. If you do consider the seamstress an organic machine, she is a highly sophisticated machine. There are many spares to choose from, true and you can pay her off in very small installments. If she were a component of a loom, what would the supplier pay to have it replaced? Half the price of one garment of which she will run off thousands? That seems like a very low price to me.
Over the last 5 years (inconveniently since the date of my graduation) an economic tectonic shift forced us to confront the true quantity and value of our product as a nation and a hemisphere. Our prior perception had been so warped and distorted that the correction was, and continues to be, violent. It is also incomplete.
Imperial economics, or gunpoint economics still abound in every part of the so-called 3rd world. While factories are collapsing or union reps and their families are spirited away in the dark, we are denying the true value of labour. This is the single largest distortion of the global free market and it will destroy our current model.
I tried to write about Thatcher last week but found that I could not address the subject dispassionately. My critique is encapsulated in this way. She cheapened the entire fabric of the British economy. Devalued the price of Labour in Britain certainly. Made it close to impossible to be a viable low-tech manufacturer. The true evil done however was in creating an illusion of wealth that was fuelled by trapping overseas nations into creating products at such a low cost that we were still able to purchase them. This despite the fact that the majority of us produce almost literally nothing in exchange.
Foremost among the tropes of the political class in this country is that we are now a 'services nation'. Financial services, customer services, retail services, legal services: all lucrative concepts that are entirely consistent of the addition of imagined value. To provide telephone and email services for a high street retail outlet can easily be remunerated at a rate roughly 35 times that of the actual production of their stock.
This is the miscalculation inherent in our economic system and so long as we keep freely imagining value in such a madcap fashion, we will be forever teetering on the edge of a financial catastrophe and millions of others will suffer the cruellest exploitation. In Bangladesh, people will continue to die in swathes and even in death their industry's estimation of their value will be measured by their bickering over whether to install a few smoke alarms or build a factory that might stay up.
Imagine it was you. Wouldn't you be thinking pretty seriously about organising?
If this rings a bell at all it is because this debate has been reheated so many times it is almost entirely now a matter of routine. But this time it happened in Bangladesh. For reasons that those who know me will easily appreciate, the fires and collapses at textile factories used by suppliers of many high street and fast fashion outlets, have been giving me nightmares.
Before I left my University's politics programme, I put a lot of work into attempting to advance the argument that although the colonial era was over, a financial imperialism remains. This is not my theory. If you are interested in the concept of neo-colonialism but have no context for the study of it, please don't follow the link just now; it's a total rabbit hole.
To restate the facts of this particular story; 350 are dead. 900 are missing. It is not unusual that large factories supplying mass market textiles should catch fire or collapse. The Bangladeshi minimum wage is $37.00 (£23.89) per month. So without employing hyperbole or indeed any rhetorical device to underline the point, here is the case:
Bangladeshis work in death traps for just over a dollar a day to produce cheap clothing for us. Sometimes they die doing so. Sometimes they are physically crushed doing so. Sometimes they suffer 3rd degree burns all over doing so.
Okay, I'm getting creeped out and heading for one of those morose and sickening tailspins... let's return to rhetoric shall we?
If you were to place say... an imitation tweed/wool mix jacket side-by-side with a month of the labour of the seamstress who finished it... it is possible that the RRP would show that the jacket is worth twice as much. How can this be? And, more importantly, what is being done about it?
Well some pressure is being brought to bear on the Bangladeshi government by large retailers. Some demand that they should raise the minimum wage, while others say they will pay for improved workplace safety measures if all the other large firms kick into the pot too. You will note that the answer to my original question could be summarised as, 'nothing at all.'
The retailing high ground here is taken by those who regularly audit their factories and prevent such accidents. This completely side-steps the issue of workers' dignity and the value of the labour, but to do so much at least shows that this kind of imperialism is indirectly acknowledging a duty of care and is not sociopathically driven to consider their workers as organic machinery.
If it can be conceded that the people making the clothes are people, surely it follows that they're human rights should be equally as inviolable as our own (i.e. only up to a point).
The fact that this is not acknowledged leads us toward a deeper economic truth. If you do consider the seamstress an organic machine, she is a highly sophisticated machine. There are many spares to choose from, true and you can pay her off in very small installments. If she were a component of a loom, what would the supplier pay to have it replaced? Half the price of one garment of which she will run off thousands? That seems like a very low price to me.
Over the last 5 years (inconveniently since the date of my graduation) an economic tectonic shift forced us to confront the true quantity and value of our product as a nation and a hemisphere. Our prior perception had been so warped and distorted that the correction was, and continues to be, violent. It is also incomplete.
Imperial economics, or gunpoint economics still abound in every part of the so-called 3rd world. While factories are collapsing or union reps and their families are spirited away in the dark, we are denying the true value of labour. This is the single largest distortion of the global free market and it will destroy our current model.
I tried to write about Thatcher last week but found that I could not address the subject dispassionately. My critique is encapsulated in this way. She cheapened the entire fabric of the British economy. Devalued the price of Labour in Britain certainly. Made it close to impossible to be a viable low-tech manufacturer. The true evil done however was in creating an illusion of wealth that was fuelled by trapping overseas nations into creating products at such a low cost that we were still able to purchase them. This despite the fact that the majority of us produce almost literally nothing in exchange.
Foremost among the tropes of the political class in this country is that we are now a 'services nation'. Financial services, customer services, retail services, legal services: all lucrative concepts that are entirely consistent of the addition of imagined value. To provide telephone and email services for a high street retail outlet can easily be remunerated at a rate roughly 35 times that of the actual production of their stock.
This is the miscalculation inherent in our economic system and so long as we keep freely imagining value in such a madcap fashion, we will be forever teetering on the edge of a financial catastrophe and millions of others will suffer the cruellest exploitation. In Bangladesh, people will continue to die in swathes and even in death their industry's estimation of their value will be measured by their bickering over whether to install a few smoke alarms or build a factory that might stay up.
Imagine it was you. Wouldn't you be thinking pretty seriously about organising?
Sunday 10 February 2013
Women and Fundamentalism - Part 1
Three stories coincided this week, which formed that perfect kernel of poignancy, which one feels cannot help but reside in the world's consciousness. These are the dots in the matrix of history that can smudge and bleed over one another. They leave an impression in the typescript that cannot be tidied up or skipped over; the reader is forced to return to the passage to check and inevitably to conclude that either the printer made an error or something here went very wrong in the writer's mind.
Malala Yousafzai was returning home on a school bus when militants boarded the bus and shot her twice. Once in the head and once in the neck. Malala is often described as being a 'teenage education activist', by which we might suppose that she were an undergraduate developing a political consciousness. Malala is 15 and has been actively writing and speaking on education for girls for 4 years. Her improbable survival, which hinged on incredible medical expertise and a level of goodwill not necessarily available to all, is a great relief to the soul.
Across the Pakistan/India border, in what many consider to be a more civilised country, an unnamed woman's murder/rape trial is to be held in what is being seen as a moment of national self-reflection. The details of this crime are horrific enough but the news, by hinting at further, unpublishable horrors, leaves the reports with a sense of the unheimlich. To put it as baldly as possible, it appears that a group of 6 men, including the driver of the bus on which the attack occurred, set out one evening to capture and rape a woman. In a statement from the driver, which may yet prove to have been coerced by police, the driver described the motive as being the pursuit of 'a lot of fun'.
Which is one of those things after which you cannot help but take a new paragraph. Somehow the movement of breath and pulse demands it.
Again to be as crisp as one can, the group carried out their intent. A young woman of 23 was being escorted home on the bus by a male friend when they were set upon by the group. The man was beaten with a metal bar to incapacitate him while the woman was raped and assaulted to the point of death. They were then thrown from the bus. Whether the statement was coerced or not, these things were certainly done. A group of human beings made a collective decision to put their desire for some form of atavistic pandemonium ahead of the most basic form of human solidarity. There is no relief for the soul here.
In the meantime - across the globe at Westboro Baptist Church - a tiny but beautiful symbol of hope arose at the heart of western bigotry and patriarchy.
For those unfamiliar with the WBC - this church was the one who protested at fallen US soldiers funerals, coined the term 'God hates fags' and generally sat like a bleeding sore on christian America's conscience for the past 57 years. Despite their relatively small number, the WBC distinguished themselves by their gift for media manipulation and stirring up of controversy. The face and voice of the WBC in the media was a lady by the name of Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of community founder Fred Phelps. In several memorable TV appearances, Megan would duck and weave and was always identified by the presenter as the one with whom they could tangle safely. Because she was nice.
Before you call come at me with sharp sticks for suggesting that someone could be nice and clearly a bigot at the same time, Megan left WBC with her 19-year-old sister, Grace and has renounced the church's positions on homosexuality and the responsibility of the Jews for the death of Christ. She was born into a family who loved and cared for her and expected her to join the family religion. At 27, she has finally broken free and has written well on her own behalf on her reasons for leaving WBC.
What these stories together have captured for me is the need for a renewed political solidarity with the women's movement. For my lifetime after the age of consciousness, feminism has been at a standstill; creative industries and service industries were close to conquered by the end of the eighties. Together these sectors seem to cover so much of daily life that many declared the struggle over. The stereotype of the angry feminist could then be safely mocked our of existence again.
Well I say that that is a very poor show indeed. The violation, brutalisation, subjugation and annihilation of womankind is happening right now across the world. There is a spectre haunting the regressivist politics, which it dare not face and in order that it need not do so, it has bound that face in cloth. In America, actual politicians proposed the use of 'trans-vaginal ultrasound' which is exactly what it sounds like - medicalised rape - as a mandatory procedure for patients seeking abortion.
In Britain, our Prime Minister is a comfortably polite misogynist, capable of addressing parliamentarians as if they were maids if they happen to be women. Until we have a new Feminist International, with the power to exert influence on the wealth, health and sex lives of men in the Swat Valley, at bus stops in New Delhi and Kerala and within the Westboro Baptist Church compound, the standstill will remain.
Imagine what kind of momentum might be gained however, if women like Malala Yousafzai, Megan Phelps-Roper, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy could come together in a recognised cause. It is not merely a gender taboo that keeps women oppressed - it is the prohibition on sexual freedom that unites all forms of oppression. Whether totalitarian, theocratic or the cruel mixture of both, the subjugation of women is a function of the cheap thrill of domination and will only end once the perverted torturers are forced to step back.
Malala Yousafzai was returning home on a school bus when militants boarded the bus and shot her twice. Once in the head and once in the neck. Malala is often described as being a 'teenage education activist', by which we might suppose that she were an undergraduate developing a political consciousness. Malala is 15 and has been actively writing and speaking on education for girls for 4 years. Her improbable survival, which hinged on incredible medical expertise and a level of goodwill not necessarily available to all, is a great relief to the soul.
Across the Pakistan/India border, in what many consider to be a more civilised country, an unnamed woman's murder/rape trial is to be held in what is being seen as a moment of national self-reflection. The details of this crime are horrific enough but the news, by hinting at further, unpublishable horrors, leaves the reports with a sense of the unheimlich. To put it as baldly as possible, it appears that a group of 6 men, including the driver of the bus on which the attack occurred, set out one evening to capture and rape a woman. In a statement from the driver, which may yet prove to have been coerced by police, the driver described the motive as being the pursuit of 'a lot of fun'.
Which is one of those things after which you cannot help but take a new paragraph. Somehow the movement of breath and pulse demands it.
Again to be as crisp as one can, the group carried out their intent. A young woman of 23 was being escorted home on the bus by a male friend when they were set upon by the group. The man was beaten with a metal bar to incapacitate him while the woman was raped and assaulted to the point of death. They were then thrown from the bus. Whether the statement was coerced or not, these things were certainly done. A group of human beings made a collective decision to put their desire for some form of atavistic pandemonium ahead of the most basic form of human solidarity. There is no relief for the soul here.
In the meantime - across the globe at Westboro Baptist Church - a tiny but beautiful symbol of hope arose at the heart of western bigotry and patriarchy.
For those unfamiliar with the WBC - this church was the one who protested at fallen US soldiers funerals, coined the term 'God hates fags' and generally sat like a bleeding sore on christian America's conscience for the past 57 years. Despite their relatively small number, the WBC distinguished themselves by their gift for media manipulation and stirring up of controversy. The face and voice of the WBC in the media was a lady by the name of Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of community founder Fred Phelps. In several memorable TV appearances, Megan would duck and weave and was always identified by the presenter as the one with whom they could tangle safely. Because she was nice.
Before you call come at me with sharp sticks for suggesting that someone could be nice and clearly a bigot at the same time, Megan left WBC with her 19-year-old sister, Grace and has renounced the church's positions on homosexuality and the responsibility of the Jews for the death of Christ. She was born into a family who loved and cared for her and expected her to join the family religion. At 27, she has finally broken free and has written well on her own behalf on her reasons for leaving WBC.
What these stories together have captured for me is the need for a renewed political solidarity with the women's movement. For my lifetime after the age of consciousness, feminism has been at a standstill; creative industries and service industries were close to conquered by the end of the eighties. Together these sectors seem to cover so much of daily life that many declared the struggle over. The stereotype of the angry feminist could then be safely mocked our of existence again.
Well I say that that is a very poor show indeed. The violation, brutalisation, subjugation and annihilation of womankind is happening right now across the world. There is a spectre haunting the regressivist politics, which it dare not face and in order that it need not do so, it has bound that face in cloth. In America, actual politicians proposed the use of 'trans-vaginal ultrasound' which is exactly what it sounds like - medicalised rape - as a mandatory procedure for patients seeking abortion.
In Britain, our Prime Minister is a comfortably polite misogynist, capable of addressing parliamentarians as if they were maids if they happen to be women. Until we have a new Feminist International, with the power to exert influence on the wealth, health and sex lives of men in the Swat Valley, at bus stops in New Delhi and Kerala and within the Westboro Baptist Church compound, the standstill will remain.
Imagine what kind of momentum might be gained however, if women like Malala Yousafzai, Megan Phelps-Roper, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy could come together in a recognised cause. It is not merely a gender taboo that keeps women oppressed - it is the prohibition on sexual freedom that unites all forms of oppression. Whether totalitarian, theocratic or the cruel mixture of both, the subjugation of women is a function of the cheap thrill of domination and will only end once the perverted torturers are forced to step back.
Saturday 26 November 2011
Speaking as an idiot...
It's around fifty years since the coming into force of the political law of identity, where all pretence of principled solidarity was discarded in favour of outright factionalism. It is an extremely misleading coincidence that over this period, we have been more prosperous, inclusive and peaceful than at any previous point in recorded history. These things are not positively correlated.
I hate identity politics and not just the crazy-eyed personality cult "call me Tony" nonsense.
I hate that there is thought to be such a thing as the Black Community, the Scottish Perspective and the Arab Street (why do Arabs just get a street by the way?). Regardless of subtextual slights, the whole idea is nonsense and is based on the idea that genetically similar people must think along roughly the same lines.
And it's not confined to race. A close relative of mine who otherwise has an extremely sophisticated sense of his own racial identity, told me recently that Dundee United supporters are all wankers.
The lesson of the enlightenment is that the ancestral paths of thought are not necessarily the ones to which we are most sternly attached. At age 8, I was shown a diagram and explanation of the Big Bang and some luridly coloured illustrations of the formation of our galaxy. This single intrusion into my anthropocentric universe eventually led to my studies in Celtic origin myths and fractal infinity theory (I prefer this latter term to chaos theory - fractals are not chaotic and nor do they sound like a 90s pop-punk band).
The point is that although gene theory suggests that our actions are conditioned on the preference for the survival of our closest genetic relations, this does not mean that our intellectual understanding of life need be similarly hamstrung.
And yet I have participated in seminars devoted to 'queer theory', 'postcolonial theory', 'marxist theory' and 'femenist theory'. As if a straightforward Historicist approach to the problems would not have turned up the shock result that women, homosexuals and former subjects of the empire had been oppressed and persecuted by the forces of capital, phallocracy and theism.
Each of these seminars were marred and stultified by a continuous choir of people offering points no more detailed than 'Speaking as a <insert identity group here>, I think <insert author/politician here> is a desperate bigot.' Well of course they fucking were!
Closer to the present we have Tories in the present government insisting that the reason for their continual local election defeats is the failure of their leadership to adhere to the interests of their core voting bloc... Or the far-right view in America that Obama retained everything except Indiana because of moral weakness on the part of a minority coalition who want 'stuff'. In these cases the identity group responsible is, the white nearly-poor who have been around forever but are transitioning into a new political identity. In truth the enduring popularity of their old-guard Conservative leadership is close to unbelievable and seems to be only attributable to a headmasterly demeanour that seems to play on the old class system. It's like Richard Curtis had written a Prime Minister/President and plopped them down into their respective cabinet rooms.
My point is that when we come up against someone whose motives and character are similar to our own and who comes to different conclusions, we must think 'Are they in the right?'.
This is good. A sign of sanity even. The problems arise when those who have not thought too deeply about anything, ever apply this type of thought. The calculus changes from 'has this person come to a better conclusion than I have?' to 'is that the conclusion I would have come to had I actually thought about it?'
One may spot such malingerers in the public discourse by their propensity to start their contributions with the words, 'Speaking as a... <insert identity here...>' I don't mean to point fingers at any particular group here. In the West we are preoccupied with race, gender, class and occupation. If, for example you are one of those people who believe that the moral health of the nation requires that the Doctor regenerate into a woman, stop it.
If you believe that it is the turn of a black person to lead one of the major political parties in the UK, stop it. There are no turns. To believe that there are is to reinforce the myth that the rules of natural justice exist independently of human conceit. To believe this in turn is to believe that exploitation of the weak by the strong is something that will sort itself out by itself. How has that worked out in the Congo or Somalia or the Russian Federation?
The gains of the past fifty years were achieved in a very short space of time immediately following the horrors of the Second World War. A war entirely caused by a sense of an injustice imposed upon a particular national group that was warped into a teleological race myth. Every step we have taken back towards identity politics since then has been a step back into the quagmire of early 20th century, modernist loathing and separatist ideology.
We have every right to say that we and our fellows must be treated the same as you and yours. We do not have the right to say, we and our fellows are facing a problem therefore the solution applies to all.
I hate that there is thought to be such a thing as the Black Community, the Scottish Perspective and
The lesson of the enlightenment is that the ancestral paths of thought are not necessarily the ones to which we are most sternly attached. At age 8, I was shown a diagram and explanation of the Big Bang and some luridly coloured illustrations of the formation of our galaxy. This single intrusion into my anthropocentric universe eventually led to my studies in Celtic origin myths and fractal infinity theory (I prefer this latter term to chaos theory - fractals are not chaotic and nor do they sound like a 90s pop-punk band).
The point is that although gene theory suggests that our actions are conditioned on the preference for the survival of our closest genetic relations, this does not mean that our intellectual understanding of life need be similarly hamstrung.
And yet I have participated in seminars devoted to 'queer theory', 'postcolonial theory', 'marxist theory' and 'femenist theory'. As if a straightforward Historicist approach to the problems would not have turned up the shock result that women, homosexuals and former subjects of the empire had been oppressed and persecuted by the forces of capital, phallocracy and theism.
Each of these seminars were marred and stultified by a continuous choir of people offering points no more detailed than 'Speaking as a <insert identity group here>, I think <insert author/politician here> is a desperate bigot.' Well of course they fucking were!
Closer to the present we have Tories in the present government insisting that the reason for their continual local election defeats is the failure of their leadership to adhere to the interests of their core voting bloc... Or the far-right view in America that Obama retained everything except Indiana because of moral weakness on the part of a minority coalition who want 'stuff'. In these cases the identity group responsible is, the white nearly-poor who have been around forever but are transitioning into a new political identity. In truth the enduring popularity of their old-guard Conservative leadership is close to unbelievable and seems to be only attributable to a headmasterly demeanour that seems to play on the old class system. It's like Richard Curtis had written a Prime Minister/President and plopped them down into their respective cabinet rooms.
My point is that when we come up against someone whose motives and character are similar to our own and who comes to different conclusions, we must think 'Are they in the right?'.
This is good. A sign of sanity even. The problems arise when those who have not thought too deeply about anything, ever apply this type of thought. The calculus changes from 'has this person come to a better conclusion than I have?' to 'is that the conclusion I would have come to had I actually thought about it?'
One may spot such malingerers in the public discourse by their propensity to start their contributions with the words, 'Speaking as a... <insert identity here...>' I don't mean to point fingers at any particular group here. In the West we are preoccupied with race, gender, class and occupation. If, for example you are one of those people who believe that the moral health of the nation requires that the Doctor regenerate into a woman, stop it.
If you believe that it is the turn of a black person to lead one of the major political parties in the UK, stop it. There are no turns. To believe that there are is to reinforce the myth that the rules of natural justice exist independently of human conceit. To believe this in turn is to believe that exploitation of the weak by the strong is something that will sort itself out by itself. How has that worked out in the Congo or Somalia or the Russian Federation?
The gains of the past fifty years were achieved in a very short space of time immediately following the horrors of the Second World War. A war entirely caused by a sense of an injustice imposed upon a particular national group that was warped into a teleological race myth. Every step we have taken back towards identity politics since then has been a step back into the quagmire of early 20th century, modernist loathing and separatist ideology.
We have every right to say that we and our fellows must be treated the same as you and yours. We do not have the right to say, we and our fellows are facing a problem therefore the solution applies to all.
Friday 18 November 2011
#NudePhotoRevolutionary
Very rarely does a subject come up where the right and wrong sides are so clearly demarcated and yet a debate goes on.
Aliaa Magda Elmahdy is a young Egyptian woman who, in full control of her senses and with the intention of making a point about her freedom to do so, posted a photo of herself, wearing no clothes bar a pair of stockings, on her blog.
http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com/
Clearly this has caused a fuss among those who say that the bodies of women are profane by nature, but frankly; fuck 'em. What really concerns me is the pseudo liberal attitude that says, 'This girl doesn't know what she's doing - this will only inflame anger.' You're damn right it will. That's why she did it and yes, she did understand that that's what it would do. She is now a known dissident. Her blog has now been viewed over 2,600,000 times and the counter is rising all the time. That's what I call getting your point across.
If you are tempted to downplay the significance of this, then let's remember what censorship and sexual repression did to the UK. The Victorian era saw examples of the most hideous immorality and cruelty it is possible to imagine. It took eighty years for the people warped by that sensibility to die and leave us alone.
Who misses that era? Who misses jail for homosexuals? Who misses the requirement to cover their flesh? Who misses the terrifying otherness that a female body represents to a young man before he discovers their touch?
Yet these oppressions and worse are being foisted upon people every day of their lives in countries of conservative culture and law. In the article below, Mona Eltahawy gives an account of the cases of women who live their lives under the rule of men. I don't really have the stomach to describe it here. Suffice it to say that it involves one of the most shameful combinations of two words imaginable: 'virginity test'.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/18/egypy-aliaa-mahdy-patriarchs-mind?newsfeed=true
As Bill Maher has been shouting at anyone nearby the last couple of days, the only adequate moderating influence on the reptilian instincts of the male brain is the presence of empowered women. Look at the industrys, institutions and cultures where women are marginalised. Leave aside that particular injustice for a moment and then look at the health of the subject. Catholic Church, anyone? Football? Freemasonry? Investment banking?
What is finally going to lift the middle east out of its two hundred year spiral of decline is the empowerment of the other half, not the restoration of a lost empire. That's what lifted the UK out of the exhaustion of the postwar era and it is the only thing that has ever healed an injured society anywhere. So show some solidarity with Aliaa Elmahdy. She's exposed herself in more ways than one.
http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com/
Clearly this has caused a fuss among those who say that the bodies of women are profane by nature, but frankly; fuck 'em. What really concerns me is the pseudo liberal attitude that says, 'This girl doesn't know what she's doing - this will only inflame anger.' You're damn right it will. That's why she did it and yes, she did understand that that's what it would do. She is now a known dissident. Her blog has now been viewed over 2,600,000 times and the counter is rising all the time. That's what I call getting your point across.
If you are tempted to downplay the significance of this, then let's remember what censorship and sexual repression did to the UK. The Victorian era saw examples of the most hideous immorality and cruelty it is possible to imagine. It took eighty years for the people warped by that sensibility to die and leave us alone.
Who misses that era? Who misses jail for homosexuals? Who misses the requirement to cover their flesh? Who misses the terrifying otherness that a female body represents to a young man before he discovers their touch?
Yet these oppressions and worse are being foisted upon people every day of their lives in countries of conservative culture and law. In the article below, Mona Eltahawy gives an account of the cases of women who live their lives under the rule of men. I don't really have the stomach to describe it here. Suffice it to say that it involves one of the most shameful combinations of two words imaginable: 'virginity test'.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/18/egypy-aliaa-mahdy-patriarchs-mind?newsfeed=true
As Bill Maher has been shouting at anyone nearby the last couple of days, the only adequate moderating influence on the reptilian instincts of the male brain is the presence of empowered women. Look at the industrys, institutions and cultures where women are marginalised. Leave aside that particular injustice for a moment and then look at the health of the subject. Catholic Church, anyone? Football? Freemasonry? Investment banking?
What is finally going to lift the middle east out of its two hundred year spiral of decline is the empowerment of the other half, not the restoration of a lost empire. That's what lifted the UK out of the exhaustion of the postwar era and it is the only thing that has ever healed an injured society anywhere. So show some solidarity with Aliaa Elmahdy. She's exposed herself in more ways than one.
Wednesday 22 June 2011
Killing Bin Laden and Taking it Personally
On September 11th 2001 I was 17 years old and was exposed - along with the rest of the world - to an act of televised, real-world atrocity. It is one of those moments that instantly transcended the experience of living through it. In the hours and days following, I thought I had witnessed a cultural paradigm-shift.
Murder like this, I thought, has never been witnessed in such a way.
Within that one day, the nineties seemed to become history. Embarrassing uncle Tony Blair became midlife sanctimonious nutter, Tony Blair. Perhaps because that was also my last year in secondary education, the before and after were so stark that I became intensely fascinated with the event and its repercussions. I read books about neo-imperialism, the Mujahiddeen, Arab cultural sentiment and Islamic beliefs. And Michael Moore (blush). Anyone slightly younger than myself would have no memory of the pre-2001 perception of Islam. Does anyone else remember the soft-focus, celebrity-led BBC documentaries about the rich tradition of faith and peace? I sometimes think I made it up.
In any case, the irony to me has always been that the actions of 12 men, funded and supported by a tiny proportion of the Islamic hard-right changed the world. It was the direct confirmation of Margaret Meade's (disputed) quote:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
It was at that age and in that time, that I started to suspect that life was not going to be as much fun as I thought. And so it was to prove. Having meticulously plotted out the course of my life up to my mid-thirties, the noughties saw each step of my road map besieged by disappointment, dullness and incomprehensible fatuity. In politics, in art and in life.
But most of all in the internet. If there is one thing that kills curiosity, it is keeping your newspapers in the same place as your porn. And not just porn - sitcoms, almanacs, horror movies, home movies. Do you remember how little of a life these things took up before they were all available in one place? As broadband followed dial-up and fibre followed DSL, we are getting ever closer to the point of critical videomalaise.
The larger point, which I'm failing to get to is that the War on Terror(TM)and the internet grew up together. Bin Laden was the internet's first big shot at propaganda and it performed admirably on every side. It spread the message at and from every angle. There was the White House youtube channel, the jihadist websites, people going to jail for sharing information and the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
Having been hungry for information, I took active interests in every opinion I could locate. Did I get wiser and gain a mature understanding of the situation? No. I got into a funk of hatred, doubt and self-aggrandising social networking.
In a way that my education is supposed to resist, the turn of the century is fixed in my mind as a genuine point of paradigm shift. Digital photography brought about an exponential boom in the presence of imagery. The advent of broadband then acted like the nuclear reaction at the centre of this boom. The majority of life (work, consumerism, socialisation, education, curiosity and correspondence) was absorbed by the new, digital platform. But the platform is abstract. Non-tactile. Insubstantial. Two dimensional. (Yes, I struggled to find the right synonym.) Ultimately, the digital platform is shallow.
And how were we to defend ourselves against the accusations of the Bin Ladenists (and incidentally the Russians and Chinese) that the European and American cultures had become decadent and superficial? The President of the United States should have been the one winning the argument on our behalf, but in the case of GWB his mere existence seemed to lose it. We began to feel guilty for the attacks ourselves.
The governments of the west had declared the end of history in 1989. Triumphalism had trumped relief in the zeitgeist and suddenly a liberal utopianism settled over us. The dotcom boom and the mapping of the human genome seemed to confirm that the end of overt hostilities had unbound us to view the future as a limitless canvas for our vindicated genius and virtue.
Meanwhile, back in the actual theatres of war where our proxies had been destroying their neighbours on our behalf... they were abandoned. Their wars were not over and the sores of conflict became infected with new bacteria. Iraq was being driven into the ground and (yes I'll say it) the Hussein mafia had allied itself publicly with the jihadist movement. Yugoslavia too, descended into atavistic barbarism.
It's one thing to say that they were necessary to resist the Stalino-fascism of the Soviet Union, but it's quite another to say that our governments are absolved of responsibility for these conflicts. On a sidenote, we intervened in Bosnia where the muslims were slavic, but the darker your skin, the less likely we were to consider your conflict worthy of attention.
Out of this chaotic disenfranchisment of the warrior caste, emerged the perfect enemy. Osama Bin Laden. I never hated Bin Laden. He was doing what he was asked to do. What he was feted as a hero for doing (not least by agents of our side) and what he believed to be right. The effect of what he did however, was to sicken me deeply inside. I'll never be the same person who spent the afternoon of September 11th 2001 (we weren't told anything at school) rehearsing for a doomed production of Return to the Forbidden Planet. I'll never again be honestly able to say that nothing can touch the heart as powerfully as art. I'll never be able to write a story about a child with an unexpressed crush on his friend (this project was abandoned around a week later).
As I began by saying, the attacks on the twin towers felt like a trigger. Like a beginning. But that was because I had no idea where this attack came from or who Bin Laden was. Now his death is being paired with the Arab Spring to imply that this narrative has come to an end, but it hasn't. The horror will go on and on until Niall Ferguson owns up about how much of a cock he is. This nightmare will not end.
I'm not a historical determinist. I believe in free will, but I'm also realistic about the hierarchy of wills. At the top of that particular pyramid lives a group of sociopathic olympians who actually enjoy the historic nightmare from which the rest of us are trying to awake. Bin Laden was a minor adept of this cult and has already been replaced by Ayman al Zawahiri, an equally grotesque harbinger of armageddon.
So we shot him in the face. Fine. I still saw it. Over and over again.
Murder like this, I thought, has never been witnessed in such a way.
Within that one day, the nineties seemed to become history. Embarrassing uncle Tony Blair became midlife sanctimonious nutter, Tony Blair. Perhaps because that was also my last year in secondary education, the before and after were so stark that I became intensely fascinated with the event and its repercussions. I read books about neo-imperialism, the Mujahiddeen, Arab cultural sentiment and Islamic beliefs. And Michael Moore (blush). Anyone slightly younger than myself would have no memory of the pre-2001 perception of Islam. Does anyone else remember the soft-focus, celebrity-led BBC documentaries about the rich tradition of faith and peace? I sometimes think I made it up.
In any case, the irony to me has always been that the actions of 12 men, funded and supported by a tiny proportion of the Islamic hard-right changed the world. It was the direct confirmation of Margaret Meade's (disputed) quote:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
It was at that age and in that time, that I started to suspect that life was not going to be as much fun as I thought. And so it was to prove. Having meticulously plotted out the course of my life up to my mid-thirties, the noughties saw each step of my road map besieged by disappointment, dullness and incomprehensible fatuity. In politics, in art and in life.
But most of all in the internet. If there is one thing that kills curiosity, it is keeping your newspapers in the same place as your porn. And not just porn - sitcoms, almanacs, horror movies, home movies. Do you remember how little of a life these things took up before they were all available in one place? As broadband followed dial-up and fibre followed DSL, we are getting ever closer to the point of critical videomalaise.
The larger point, which I'm failing to get to is that the War on Terror(TM)and the internet grew up together. Bin Laden was the internet's first big shot at propaganda and it performed admirably on every side. It spread the message at and from every angle. There was the White House youtube channel, the jihadist websites, people going to jail for sharing information and the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
Having been hungry for information, I took active interests in every opinion I could locate. Did I get wiser and gain a mature understanding of the situation? No. I got into a funk of hatred, doubt and self-aggrandising social networking.
In a way that my education is supposed to resist, the turn of the century is fixed in my mind as a genuine point of paradigm shift. Digital photography brought about an exponential boom in the presence of imagery. The advent of broadband then acted like the nuclear reaction at the centre of this boom. The majority of life (work, consumerism, socialisation, education, curiosity and correspondence) was absorbed by the new, digital platform. But the platform is abstract. Non-tactile. Insubstantial. Two dimensional. (Yes, I struggled to find the right synonym.) Ultimately, the digital platform is shallow.
And how were we to defend ourselves against the accusations of the Bin Ladenists (and incidentally the Russians and Chinese) that the European and American cultures had become decadent and superficial? The President of the United States should have been the one winning the argument on our behalf, but in the case of GWB his mere existence seemed to lose it. We began to feel guilty for the attacks ourselves.
The governments of the west had declared the end of history in 1989. Triumphalism had trumped relief in the zeitgeist and suddenly a liberal utopianism settled over us. The dotcom boom and the mapping of the human genome seemed to confirm that the end of overt hostilities had unbound us to view the future as a limitless canvas for our vindicated genius and virtue.
Meanwhile, back in the actual theatres of war where our proxies had been destroying their neighbours on our behalf... they were abandoned. Their wars were not over and the sores of conflict became infected with new bacteria. Iraq was being driven into the ground and (yes I'll say it) the Hussein mafia had allied itself publicly with the jihadist movement. Yugoslavia too, descended into atavistic barbarism.
It's one thing to say that they were necessary to resist the Stalino-fascism of the Soviet Union, but it's quite another to say that our governments are absolved of responsibility for these conflicts. On a sidenote, we intervened in Bosnia where the muslims were slavic, but the darker your skin, the less likely we were to consider your conflict worthy of attention.
Out of this chaotic disenfranchisment of the warrior caste, emerged the perfect enemy. Osama Bin Laden. I never hated Bin Laden. He was doing what he was asked to do. What he was feted as a hero for doing (not least by agents of our side) and what he believed to be right. The effect of what he did however, was to sicken me deeply inside. I'll never be the same person who spent the afternoon of September 11th 2001 (we weren't told anything at school) rehearsing for a doomed production of Return to the Forbidden Planet. I'll never again be honestly able to say that nothing can touch the heart as powerfully as art. I'll never be able to write a story about a child with an unexpressed crush on his friend (this project was abandoned around a week later).
As I began by saying, the attacks on the twin towers felt like a trigger. Like a beginning. But that was because I had no idea where this attack came from or who Bin Laden was. Now his death is being paired with the Arab Spring to imply that this narrative has come to an end, but it hasn't. The horror will go on and on until Niall Ferguson owns up about how much of a cock he is. This nightmare will not end.
I'm not a historical determinist. I believe in free will, but I'm also realistic about the hierarchy of wills. At the top of that particular pyramid lives a group of sociopathic olympians who actually enjoy the historic nightmare from which the rest of us are trying to awake. Bin Laden was a minor adept of this cult and has already been replaced by Ayman al Zawahiri, an equally grotesque harbinger of armageddon.
So we shot him in the face. Fine. I still saw it. Over and over again.
Tuesday 26 April 2011
Two Weeks Out - A Short Precis of the Scottish Parliamentary Elections
Say you're a straightforward Social Democrat with radical opinions about the role of the financial sector in the global economy. Well...? Go on and say it.
Good. Now that's out of the way, assume you're also eligible to vote in the Scottish election on May 5th. Chances are then you hold a political belief system equivalent to mine. Who do you vote for?
I've been arguing against the SNP with friends and relatives for months. I'm not comfortable with the notion of a Scottish National Party because it is not committed to any brand of politics besides identity politics. Their ideological framework seems to derive from Hume's common sense approach, which is fine except that it means that when circumstances require it, they can perform a complete u-turn at any point and on any issue except independence (and they can do little shuffles around in there too).
This argument against shrivels the moment you perceive that the same is true of any party on the ballot.
So - I would vote Labour because the Scottish party is grounded in the SD values that I share. Great! But the current Labour candidate sheet is seemingly made up of idiots, cowards and villains. Dammit!
Right, so I look at the Lib D... oh. Right.
Greens? Well... yeah, but they are smuggling a sheer Socialist agenda under the foliage and I'm not interested in that any more. There is an argument for saying that a regional list vote will exert a small gravitational pull which is probably worthwhile, but really we're talking tiny units of force.
So let's break it down to what I want from Holyrood. Firstly, the independence referendum: let's get this done and out of the way. Is it not time? The Nationalist movement dogged us throughout the last century and shows every sign of dragging us into fantasies of the paragon state for the next one. Let's get the decision made and go on with one reality.
Second: Renovation of education. From early secondary onwards, I was misled about what I was working towards. I think that we need to demarcate whether we are pursuing an academic, a technical or a physical form of education. They are different things and the fact that they have been merged into one catch-all stream, is damaging to the effectiveness of all of them.
Third... third?
There isn't much of a third policy-wise as the pressing policy issues of any given time period will always fall under the powers of the UK Government. Financial reform has to be carried out globally to mean anything. Foreign policy is reserved to the UK. So what I really want is simply for things to work.
On these grounds, it can only be the SNP that one votes for. They have proven over the last parliamentary term that they are orders of magnitude more competent than Labour. They are also willing to work with any part of the political consensus to achieve progress. In their approach (if not their stated philosophy) they are shown to be progressive.
So it's Flash Alex again. Close your eyes and think of England I suppose...
Good. Now that's out of the way, assume you're also eligible to vote in the Scottish election on May 5th. Chances are then you hold a political belief system equivalent to mine. Who do you vote for?
I've been arguing against the SNP with friends and relatives for months. I'm not comfortable with the notion of a Scottish National Party because it is not committed to any brand of politics besides identity politics. Their ideological framework seems to derive from Hume's common sense approach, which is fine except that it means that when circumstances require it, they can perform a complete u-turn at any point and on any issue except independence (and they can do little shuffles around in there too).
This argument against shrivels the moment you perceive that the same is true of any party on the ballot.
So - I would vote Labour because the Scottish party is grounded in the SD values that I share. Great! But the current Labour candidate sheet is seemingly made up of idiots, cowards and villains. Dammit!
Right, so I look at the Lib D... oh. Right.
Greens? Well... yeah, but they are smuggling a sheer Socialist agenda under the foliage and I'm not interested in that any more. There is an argument for saying that a regional list vote will exert a small gravitational pull which is probably worthwhile, but really we're talking tiny units of force.
So let's break it down to what I want from Holyrood. Firstly, the independence referendum: let's get this done and out of the way. Is it not time? The Nationalist movement dogged us throughout the last century and shows every sign of dragging us into fantasies of the paragon state for the next one. Let's get the decision made and go on with one reality.
Second: Renovation of education. From early secondary onwards, I was misled about what I was working towards. I think that we need to demarcate whether we are pursuing an academic, a technical or a physical form of education. They are different things and the fact that they have been merged into one catch-all stream, is damaging to the effectiveness of all of them.
Third... third?
There isn't much of a third policy-wise as the pressing policy issues of any given time period will always fall under the powers of the UK Government. Financial reform has to be carried out globally to mean anything. Foreign policy is reserved to the UK. So what I really want is simply for things to work.
On these grounds, it can only be the SNP that one votes for. They have proven over the last parliamentary term that they are orders of magnitude more competent than Labour. They are also willing to work with any part of the political consensus to achieve progress. In their approach (if not their stated philosophy) they are shown to be progressive.
So it's Flash Alex again. Close your eyes and think of England I suppose...
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