The Cedar Lounge Revolution

The London mayoral race May 7, 2016

Good piece by Owen Jones here. Khan’s victory was well-deserved. As a decent person (let’s take that word back from those who have traduced in the last decade) and a progressive, even if not quite left wing enough for many of us let’s keep in mind he is a progressive, and yes a Muslim he ran a good generous campaign. The Tories should hang their heads in shame – Goldsmith in particular. And Jones makes a further point.

After a decisive electoral victory, there is always the temptation to be gracious to the defeated. The victor shakes the hands of their competitor. All is forgiven: what was said amid the passion of the contest belongs to the past. Hearty applause is offered to the loser.

And:

Not this time. A candidate exploited and incited prejudice and hate. He undermined community cohesion. He indicated to young Muslims that there was no point engaging in the democratic process, because even the most progressive Muslim would be treated as aiding and abetting extremists. And in doing so, Zac Goldsmith became a recruiting sergeant for the very extremists he attempted to smear Khan with.

And I think Jones makes a crucial point here:

No forgiveness, no forgetting. Wherever Goldsmith now goes, he should be met with protests, regarded as persona non grata among an already reviled political elite. When politicians are accused of “doing a Zac”, they may end up complaining on account of the gravity of the slur.

That’s not sadism. If Goldsmith does not suffer these consequences, politicians may wage these campaigns of fear over and over again. They were already emboldened by the tawdry campaign of fear used to stop Scottish independence. “It worked!”, they exclaim, as though there was no lasting consequences on the Scottish political scene.

The ‘dead cat thrown on the table’ approach should not be normalised. Goldsmith is a a seemingly decent person too. But not decent enough not to use loaded terms like ‘radical’ and insinuate risible, but politically damaging, lines about Khan’s acquaintances.

And yet Jones notes that it wasn’t Goldsmith alone:

The decency of Tories like Peter Oborne – who called the campaign “repulsive” – and former Tory candidate Shazia Awan – who called it “racist” – shone through. But they were a small minority. Now senior Tories are condemning the campaign as “poisonous” and as “outrageous”. Too late. The damage is done. And by condemning any alleged antisemitism on the left, and staying silent about anti-Muslim prejudice on the right, they reveal they have no interest in fighting racism. For the Tories, racism is a convenience: a hammer to batter their opponents with, or to exploit for political advantage.

A jet aircraft as a home… May 7, 2016

There’s a part of me – perhaps my twelve year old self – that is oddly envious of this home…

Grant McLennan May 7, 2016

It’s been ten years, almost to the day, since Grant Mclennan of the Go-Betweens passed on – this is what I wrote a year later. I still can’t bring myself to listen to the last Go-Between’s album or the first Robert Forster after his death.

Here’s a piece from Faster Louder on Robert Forster’s tribute to him.

w/Steve Kilbey in Jack Frost

The psychological issues of living inside a Bernal Sphere May 7, 2016

I’m a real sucker for 70s space art. Some of you will remember Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier – an appeal for orbital space habitats. The concepts were good, but extravagantly ambitious given the state then (and now) of space technologies. A number of ideas were posited. Those familiar with Babylon 5 will recognise the long cylindrical design, now dubbed an O’Neill cylinder. But predating them were smaller Bernal Sphere’s which would have an enclosed environment.

Clarke County, Space by Allen Steele, written in the 1990s is set on one of those, and it’s a most entertaining outline of what life might be like on such an artificial habitant a mere thirty four years from now.

Nor do we have to restrict ourselves to fully artificial constructs. Hollow out an asteroid and spin it up (gently now, don’t want it to break apart) and you’d have a similar effect.

I’ve got to admit, I wonder what the psychological effects of living in a confined sphere, or a cylinder, where the land arced up around and over one to meet above, would be. Would one tend to perceive oneself as being in a space where the sky was threatening to fall on ones head, or trapped inside a cylinder and Or perhaps gravity itself would counter that, that the sense of down from gravity would be sufficient to outweigh the visual senses.

And speaking of which, this piece notes that:

The size of these habitats provides several quirks – for one, they would require a relatively slow rotation to maintain near-Earth gravity (only about 40 per hour). This would be slow enough to avoid causing motion sickness in almost everyone living aboard – although citizens would be able to detect spin by turning their heads quickly, or by watching the arcs of items dropped or thrown[4].

Hmmm… I wonder what the effects of that might be.

I can’t seem to find anything on potential psychological issues. Anyone know of any literature in the area?

Connolly Festival May 6, 2016

Full details here.

That’s no way to run a country… May 6, 2016

Jane Ruffino in the SBP this weekend skewered the idea that is sometimes put about that states should emulate digital start-ups. She notes that Silicon Republic had a piece asking whether Ireland should run itself like one and ‘what if we treated citizens as customers’.

Her response?

‘imagine the kind of dystopian world that would be’.

And she notes that ‘every time I think about a way to write this dystopia, reality gets in the way. From the outside start-ups look like they’re efficient, exciting, productive and able to move the glacier of The Old Ways by chipping away in short, iterative cycles funded by iceberg-sized piles of venture capital. Except that, first one of this is remote true. Second from the inside start-hips look a lot like the way Ireland is already being run’.

How so?

There is facing their growth. Nobody has money in the bank. There is dropping essential work onto the shoulders of unpaid interns and underpaid staff. Nobody is solving big problems, just the things they think they can solve before they run out of time or money. The CEO impends most of his time giving conference talks about the secrets of success. Everyone is wondering aloud where the women are, but nobody is willing to talk about structural inequality. In the wider landscape, almost nobody has a real vision, except the ones who are building worlds where people who aren’t economically prod five will have to constantly prove their value or be spat out due to a bad ‘culture fit’….

And if anything she gets more pointed:

The argument that somehow crowd funding and crowdsourcing should replace taxes and democracy is not some amusingly unnecessary reinvention of the existing system, it’s a wilful embracing of a culture that sees regulation as an enemy, that defines human value along economic lines, and that doesn’t have a healthy fear of the kind of ‘tyranny of the majority’ that caused things like the anti-equality Citizenship Referendum to be passed in 20115.

And how’s this for spot on?

The thing that makes startups a big joke is not that their offices look like day care centres or that everyone boating about agile is secretly flailing, it’s the deliberate conflation of ‘disruption’ with ‘gleefully and indiscriminately dismantling the entire social contract’.

She concludes:

Suggesting that everyone adopts entrepreneurial thinking or that we apply agile methods to projects that need long-term taxpayer funded commitment – like healthcare, transport, communications infrastructure and education – is the way we find ourselves chanting ‘hyper loop!hyperloop!’ and wondering why our bus service has been cancelled.
The neoliberal thing that underpins much of the tech industry is exactly why our hospitals are sick, our roads are impassable and our vin dances cater to the interests of investors.

Have to agree. It’s not that start-ups, innovation, enterprise in certain contexts, are bad in and of themselves. That energy is something leftists have to engage with and harness productively in future societies, but it is something that as a broader model as Ruffino so forensically puts it is completely bankrupt.

My own experience of working in public and private sectors (the former on contract throughout) has been one where efficiency in the latter is much talked about, but much more rarely seen. Where supposed determined decision making is often held hostage by ownership structures (i.e. the family who control an outfit want x y or z whatever the commercial logic or not of same or where boards of directors make bizarre or venal decisions to their own benefit). Or where there are weird hiring anomalies – timeservers or just those well able to play on the vanities of superiors remain in situ. There are many other examples, but in short this is a typical human institution. Even the best run, and one of the best I encountered was (ironically) an off shoot of the Murdoch empire, are still riven by petty jealousies and personality issues to the extent that often success seems in spite of, rather than because. And it never lasts.

So expecting – for all their virtues, start-ups to provide a template is entirely pointless. A product, service or app that hundreds of thousands purchase is not directly comparable to ongoing health-care (actually looking at the update histories of some apps one couldn’t think really of a worse model). They’re simply not the same as, nor fit for purpose as replacements of, state or semi-state structures. Good to hear such a cogent critique of same.

Assembly /UK Elections open thread May 6, 2016

As requested by Joe …..
Any news/thoughts on the Assembly elections in Northern Ireland as well as the Welsh, Scottish Assembly and other votes that took place in the UK yesterday.