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The New Reactionaries

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Tim Hall

Charlie Stross dives down the rabbit-hold of fringe politics to find New Reactionaries and other, stranger sects:

This we come full-circle. The Trotskyites of old have donned the Armani suits of libertarian and neoliberal think-tank mavens. And the libertarians have begun to search for a purer pre-modern framework with which to defend themselves against the searing vision of the radiant future. Welcome to the century of the Trotskyite monarchists, the revolutionary reactionaries, and the fringe politics of the paradoxical! I hope you brought popcorn: it’s going to be nothing if not entertaining.

I’m not totally convinced by Stross’ suggestion that new reactionary Mencius Moldbug is a great writer despite his unpleasant belief system. What I’ve seen suggest he’s more of a pompous windbag who’s deeply in love with the sound of his own voice. The way he takes saloon-bar bigotry and sprinkles it with classical references to make it look profound reminds me far too much of the late Enoch Powell.

As for the former trots turned libertoids, the way some leftists go so far to the left they go off the edge and reappear on the right is a well-known phenomenom; witness how many neocons on both sides of the Atlantic were former Trotskyites, or the way Tony Blair’s home secretary John Reid turned from a Stalinist to a right-wing thug.

It’s often said that politics is circular or horseshoe-shaped in the way the hard left and hard right frequently have more in common with each other than with pragmatic moderates. I’ve even semi-seriously suggested than AD&D alignments explain politics more effectively that “left” and “right”.

But perhaps the real divide is between pragmatists and utopians? This explains why, when a utopian ideology is found wanting, many of those who abandon it don’t become pragmatic moderates, but find another utopianism to cling to.

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Clique Politics

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Tim Hall

Good quote from Damien Walter on Twitter

There’s always a perfectly reasonable inner logic to clique politics. Which allows members to feel like victims when their victims speak out

When you observe any political clique from the outside, regardless of what ideology or identity they follow, you tend to see very similar patterns; especially projection, and the demonisation of chosen out-groups. They’ve spend so long in their self-contained echo-chambers they lack the collective self-awareness to see themselves as others see them, and they see their opponents in terms of simplistic caricatures.

Is your polltics part of a clique?

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Why We Remember

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Tim Hall

PoppiesLast year I didn’t wear a Remembrance Poppy. I felt that the symbol was losing its meaning as memorial to the dead in the two World Wars, and had been taken over by jingoistic militarists, especially the racists of the far-right.

This year was different.

Back in September I went to see Fish play at the Arts Centre in Pontardawe in South Wales, on the tour promoting his new album. The centrepiece of that record is a twenty-minute song cycle entitled “The High Wood Suite”, inspired by the World War One Battle of the Somme in which both his grandfathers fought.

Fish gave a long introduction telling the inspiration behind it; his grandfather in the entrenchment division digging trenches through ground filled with the bodies torn apart by shellfire. He told the story of the Lad’s Battalions, drawn from small communities just like Pontardawe, who fought and died together, entire communities sometimes wiped out in a morning.

There was nothing heroic about this. No noble self-sacrifice for a justified cause. This, as Fish made abundantly clear, was mass murder on an industrial scale. Read this angry piece by Charlie Stross – World War One killed five percent of Britain’s adult male population, and crippled another ten percent. And French casualties were even higher.

This is what we must never forget.

I remember spending several minutes after the show staring at the war memorial right outside the venue, looking at the list of names.

I saw Fish again on the 6th of November on the final night of the tour. There were a great many poppies worn in the audience. I’lll let him have the final word: these lyrics are the closing verses of “The Leaving”, the sombre final song from The High Wood Suite.

It had to end, the armies broken
One side had lost but who had won
The ravaged land, the decimation
So hard to bear, the loss and pain

The men returned, the war was over
The bells rang out, a country cheered
Behind their eyes they stored the horrors
Behind their smiles they hid their fears

The medals and the honours were handed out
to those who served
The letters of condolences were kept
Reminding generations of the sacrifices made
The suffering and the torment
of the men most never knew,

Lest we forget

– Derek W Dick, 2013

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Make your own Daily Express headline

Posted on November 10, 2013 by Tim Hall

Daily ExpressYou too can be editor of the Daily Express, that infamous tabloid now owned by an Irish porn baron which has ambitions to be a poor man’s version of The Daily Mail.

All you need is one six-sided die and the table below, and you will at once be generated headlines day after day that match the exacting standards set by the paper.

  1.  Next week’s cold, wet or windy weather forecast described in apocalyptic terms.
  2. Spin minor fluctuations in the stock market as great or terrible news for millions of pensioners
  3. Announce a miracle cure for an ailment suffered by the elderly, while neglecting to mention the cure won’t be available until long after the paper’s current readership will have died of old age.
  4. Princess Diana conspiracy theory that sounds as though it’s based on something that a friend of a friend heard from some bloke down the pub.
  5. Reheat last week’s highly dubious Madeline McCann story in the microwave.
  6. And finally, a hysterical and completely made-up story about immigration, taking care to blame everything on the EU.

If you think I’m joking, just look at the actual Daily Express headlines for a few consecutive days and see for yourself.

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The Very Big Stupid

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Tim Hall

In The Frank Zappa Book, the late Frank Zappa defined The Very Big Stupid

THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.

If Enrst & Young’s report “Partnering for Performance” is anything to go by, The Very Big Stupid is alive and well

Step 4: “Ensure business decisions are driven by a data based single version of the truth. Discourage multiple interpretations of master data by different functional areas. Position finance as the owners of the data.”

In that single statement the destructive role accounting too often plays in the business rings loud and clear. A data-based single version of the truth, no interpretation other than that of accounting, which is the owner of the data.  You don’t often see such an off-the-charts level of arrogance and ignorance combined into a single statement.

The assumption that financial people know enough about the supply chain to elevate cost cutting over quality and service and drive all of the decision making is patently absurd, but that is the assumption many folks make.  It is incumbent on operations people at the sharp end of the value adding effort to learn the accounting rules and processes, as well as to learn, master and comply with corporate policies of all stripes, but the headquarters folks have no such need to master the first thing about how the company actually creates value for customers.

Never let the bean-counters make the important decisions.

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“The End of Britain”

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Tim Hall

The End of BritainYou can’t go anywhere on the web without seeing doom-laden ads talking about “The End of Britain” telling you “How to survive the coming financial apocalypse”. I know better than to click on such obvious link-bait, but eventually curiosity got the better of me. So I put the phrase into Google to see what came up. What came up was this lengthy blog post from Another Angry Voice.

And the whole thing turns out to be much as I thought it was. The End of Britain is a lengthy screed written by obvious free-market fundamentalists followed by a sales pitch for a “high-yield” investments that sound suspiciously like some kind of Ponzi scheme. Their version of post-war economic history is full of misuse of statistics, distortions, deliberate omissions and complete lies, but it’s what you’d expect from people who have read too much Ayn Rand and think public spending on welfare is the root of all evil.

And Another Angry Voice does a thorough demolition job on the whole thing.

Which all makes me wonder, why is so much internet advertising for transparently obvious scams? I’m thinking of these “One weird trick” belly-fat and anti-wrinkle treatments, all of which are essentially con tricks. Is separating fools from their money the only really profitable business on the interweb?

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Don’t Disengage, Vote Smarter

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Tim Hall

Russell Brand is wrong. We’ve got a terrible crisis of democratic legitimacy in Britain at the moment, but the solution isn’t to disengage with electoral politics altogether. Instead we need to re-engage and take back democracy from the elites who have subverted and captured it.

What we desperately need is a forward-looking, self-confident and strongly non-sectarian left in Britain. I don’t believe we need another new party; all that would achieve would be to split the vote and benefit the right. But we do need noisy and influential factions in both the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties to drag them away from being part of the beige dictatorship. Yes, both parties are badly compromised by past and present alliances, Labour with Tony Blair’s complicity in George W Bush’s war crimes, and the Liberals for enabling the worst of the Tories war on the poor, the disabled, the young and the old. But both parties need to be taken back from the faceless technocrats who have sold their parties to the Devil, and some of the present leadership needs to be put to the sword.

One thing we need to ask all candidates from all parties is this. “Would you ever vote against your own party on a point of principle, and if so, what principle do you hold that are inviolable”. If they answer “No” to that question, they do not deserve anybody’s vote, especially yours. We do not want or need machine politicians who make obedient lobby-fodder; backbench revolts are the stuff from which democracy is made. Vote for someone who will be the party whip’s worst nightmare.

Not voting isn’t the answer. If you are one of the 25% who live in a marginal constituency where you vote actually has a chance of affecting the makeup of Parliament, then regardless of whether it’s Labour/Tory, Tory/LibDem or LibDem/Labour, one of the two is always going to be the lesser of two evils.

If you live in a “safe seat”, any vote is a wasted vote as far as deciding who you sent to Westminster goes. But that’s not the only value of voting; local and national shares of votes have a longer term impact beyond the current election. And this is where voting for an “unelectable” smaller party isn’t any more wasted than voting for one of the three main parties. If you get significant percentages of the vote going to smaller fringe parties, it sends a strong message to any machine-politics technocrats in the other parties that the electorate wants “None of the above”.

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Cheap and Nasty Cars for Cheap and Nasty People?

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Tim Hall

From the department of “What the Hell were they thinking” comes this awful newspaper ad from Skoda Ireland.

This is the gender-reversed version. The original print ad was identical except it featured the bridegroom rather than the bride. But when an advertisement is equally demeaning to both genders, it’s splitting hairs on tecnicalites to argue whether it’s sexist or not.

What sort of picture or their customer base does this paint? Shallow, self-obsessed people who treat other human beings as objects or possessions?

Yes I know car adverts tend to be awful, selling a “lifestyle” with the implied subtext that you too will get the beautiful girlfriend if only you drove the right car. And they all come with magical traffic-free roads, because nobody would buy a car based on a truthful picture of the M25 on a wet Friday night.

But still, Skoda, do you think it’s still 1973?

Some of us remember the Skodas of years past, when the brand was the butt of every bad joke. They were the cars with heated rear windows to keep your hands warm while you were pushing them, and all that. The social attitudes behind this ad belong back in those days.

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RIP Norman Geras

Posted on October 18, 2013 by Tim Hall

UK political and cultural blogger Norman Geras, of Normblog fame has passed away after a long illness.

I am very sad to announce that Norm died in Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge in the early hours of this morning. Writing this blog, and communicating with all his readers, has brought him an enormous amount of pleasure in the last ten years. I know that since writing here about his illness earlier in the year he received a lot of support from many of you, and that has meant a great deal to him, and to us, his family. The blog and all its archives will remain online.

I had the pleasure of meeting Norman Geras a couple of times at Blogmeets in Manchester a few years back, in the heyday of British blogging in the years before social media really took off and blogs went into decline. Unlike many, he kept his blog going rather than migrate to Facebook.

In an age where politics has become increasingly polarised, and some bloggers and pundits make it personal, Norm never forgot the humanity of his political oppoments, as this post on the death of Margaret Thatcher demonstrated.

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Shutdown

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Tim Hall

The United States of America is trying to run the applications needed to support a modern nation on a 200 year old legacy O/S with far too many unpatched vulnerabilities.

So it’s not surprising that a group of black hats called “The Tea Party” have taken the whole thing down.

And it’s all because the far-right hates Obama’s healthcare reforms

Their supporters and useful idiots prattle about self-reliance versus dependency, but I suspect one of the big reasons the right hates these reforms so much is that they threaten to weaken the essentially feudal relationship between employers and employees. When healthcare is dependent on continued employment, employers have far more power over their staff, and nobody likes giving up power.

I’ve heard plenty of stories of people trapped unproductively in jobs they hate, because pre-existing conditions make personal health insurance unaffordable. Surely that’s a drain on the economy just like the vastly inflated costs due to the inherent inefficiency of the present system.

Sadly those who profit, directly or indirectly, from the present system can afford a lot of lobbyists and media pundits.

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