Walter Benjamin foresees Trumpism

Monday, June 05 2017

Metafilter member You Can't Tip A Buick suggested that The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is newly relevant. He is right. In particular, the Epilogue:

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

 

Responses: No comments Tags: Walter Benjamin ⋅ politics ⋅ fascism

A book outline

Sunday, April 02 2017

I want to write something along these lines and have been collecting material for some time. Would you read it? What would you want to see included?

Online voting in New Zealand

The history of and prospects for attempts to automate New Zealand's democracy

Introduction

Online voting is a problem of interest in its own right, but also a good example of how we think about technology in government.

This work seeks to answer these questions:

by bringing together political science (voting), computer science (cryptography, security), information technology (project management, procurement, security), humanities (situating the foregoing in a continuing discourse about progress, voting as a signifier of civic and national health, ...).

Motivated by increasing calls both for and against [but need review to justify claim of "increase" here, maybe this isn't so], against background of secular trend in voter participation, rapid change in technology, above all rapid change in expectations of technology.

Current scene

Define "online" voting -- for our purposes, voting over the internet, through a web browser or mobile phone application. That is, not US-style voting machines.

Review the last couple of decades in NZ and bring to present:

Review Electoral Commission and other local research on non-vote.

Survey of technology: options, pros, cons

Review basic requirements.

Security. Threat models.

Distinguish:

Survey of public sector IT projects

Review of literature on project success and failure, looking at definitions of success, relationship to budget size, other factors.

Is NZ like other places? Look at Gauld and Goldfinch (Dangerous Enthusiasms). [Check whether there have been advances since...]

Central vs local government.

Recent high profile cases [success as well as failure, failures are dramatic but success has lessons too].

Implications for online voting projects.

Review of discourse

Review media for statements from politicians and other commentators.

Summarise typical arguments, distinguishing normative arguments based in technophilia or technophobia, and anxiety about democratic project, from supporting arguments about ease, practicality, security.

How has sentiment moved in recent years? Can we have an empirical view on the terms, the language used? See whether sentiment analysis of news media or social media tells us anything.

Overseas experience

Having got up to speed on all the issues, we can look elsewhere in a sensible way:

Pulling it together

Return to the questions from introductions and summarise the answers:

Responses: 8 comments Tags: online voting ⋅ book ⋅ writing ⋅ study

Yes, this is the only part of the matzo you can eat

Saturday, March 18 2017

Puawai asked for my chicken soup recipe, and I responded with my early rather inadequate guidelines. I wasn't able to help with matzo balls -- I enjoy eating them, but I've never made them. My sister, on the other hand, is justly famous for light and fluffy yet coherent matzo balls. Here is her recipe:

Matzoh balls

4 eggs
2 tsp salt
1/4 cup oil
1 cup matzoh meal
1/4 cup water, soda water (which I prefer) or broth
 
Set a large pot of salted water to boil. There needs to be enough room for the matzoh balls to swell nicely.
 
Lightly beat eggs, add oil and salt. Add matzoh meal and mix well. Add liquid and mix gently (trying not to take all the fizz out of the soda water).
 
Put in fridge while you wait for water to boil - about 10-15 minutes.
 
When water is boiling, wet your hands (not with the boiling water) and take golf-ball+ sized amounts and with a very light touch, shape into balls and drop into water. When water is boiling again, lower the heat, cover, and cook for 35 minutes. I recommend leaving them to cool in the cooking water, unless you are transferring them straight into the soup. Makes around 12 big puffy matzoh balls.

Stephen notes:

I strongly suspect our ancestors would have used rendered chicken fat for shortening. In New Zealand, you sometimes see matzo meal in Wellington supermarkets around Passover, and maybe in central Auckland too -- otherwise, you might have to make enquiries with the local Jewish congregations, which generally have small retail operations for specialty kosher food. Ground-up water crackers might or might not make a workable substitute.

IMG_20161025_201348

Responses: No comments Tags: food ⋅ recipes ⋅ matzo balls ⋅ chicken soup

This music is accessible

Saturday, March 11 2017

As I was in the shower this morning, for some reason the theme music to Close To Home popped into my head. If you are around my age, or older, it will be very familiar. In 1975 I was 5 years old, and we had a little black and white television. The main motif, daa DEE da-da-da daa DEE is catchy, but it's overlaid on itself in various loops and configurations: it's memorable theme music, but in no way a theme tune. Perhaps all the more ear-wormy for that, because it's hard to completely forget and even harder to reproduce. The composer was the late Jack Body, a giant of NZ classical music.

Among my many false starts in life I did first year composition at Victoria in my ill-fated first year at university. It was not a good year.

I can see now that I was badly depressed, unable to seek help, and struggling with the way what should have been a liberating and exciting adventure was turning into a string of disappointments, not least with myself. I was failing things for the first time in my life because I had never learned how to study things I wasn't fundamentally interested in. Among other things composition, as taught, turned out to be boring and discouraging. I can still hear Jack praising some cacophonous, phony nonsense (or so it seemed then) from another student and then simply noting that my piece was "accessible". What's wrong with writing music other people might like without training, I thought to myself, and after a few more exchanges like that (not just with Jack but with others) I gave up.

I suppose a real artist would have either listened to them and taken advice, or ignored them and kept writing. Anyway I didn't know at the time that Close to Home's music was Jack's work and maybe if I had, I would have seen him slightly differently, understood that criticism differently. I don't know. I did eventually take composition all the way to third year, some years later, at Waikato, where a sympathetic lecturer was interested in orchestration and the nuts and bolts of traditional techniques, but music had already become a sideline for me instead of the main event. Some days I wonder what my life would be like if I had more stickability and less fear of poverty. Some days.

Listen to this music here. It's really very good. And accessible.

Responses: No comments Tags: music ⋅ Close To Home ⋅ Jack Body ⋅ depression

Cellmates

Tuesday, February 14 2017

I wrote, in 2011:

Dear Minister

I write to express my concern over your recently reported statement on the subject of looters in Christchurch: "I hope they go to jail for a long time – with a cellmate."

It is hard to see this as anything other than condoning rape in prison.

Is it now your policy that ad hoc sexual violence be part of our corrections regime? If so, may I remind you of the murder of Liam Ashley and suggest that apart from the gross violation of human rights this would represent, such a policy would have heinous unintended consequences.

I am dismayed and repelled to hear this kind of thing from a Minister.

Yours sincerely

Stephen Judd

She replied:

Dear Mr Judd

I have never made any such suggestion around sexual abuse and I am frankly appalled that anyone would seek to accuse me of it.

Yours faithfully

Judith Collins

Today I read:

A repeat sexual offender who violated his teenage cellmate in prison may be kept behind bars indefinitely.

She needs to resign in shame. Not that she will.

Responses: No comments Tags: justice ⋅ injustice ⋅ corrections ⋅ judith collins ⋅ correspondence ⋅ politics

Amerika gibt es nicht

Monday, January 30 2017

»Ich«, sagte der Mann, von dem ich die Geschichte habe, »ich war noch nie in Amerika. Ich weiß nicht, ob es Amerika gibt. Vielleicht tun die Leute nur so, um Colombin nicht zu enttäuschen. Und wenn zwei sich von Amerika erzählen, blinzeln sie sich heute noch zu, und sagen fast nie Amerika, sie sagen meistens etwas Undeutliches von >Staaten< oder >Drüben< oder so.« Vielleicht erzählt man den Leuten, die nach Amerika wollen, im Flugzeug oder im Schiff die Geschichte von Colombin, und dann verstecken sie sich irgendwo und kommen später zurück und erzählen von Cowboys und von Wolkenkratzern, von den Niagarafällen und vom Mississippi, von New York und von San Francisco.

Auf jeden Fall erzählen alle dasselbe, und alle erzählen Dinge, die sie vor der Reise schon wußten; und das ist doch sehr verdächtig.

"I", said the man who told me the story, "I have never been to America. I don't know if there is an America. Probably people only said so not to disappoint Columbus. And if two people talk about America to each other, they still blink at each other today, and almost never say America, they mostly say something meaningless about 'States' or 'over there' or whatever. Probably they tell the people who want to go to America on a plane or a ship the story of Columbus, and then they hide somewhere and come back later and talk about cowboys and skyscrapers, Niagara Falls and Mississipi, New York and San Francisco.

In any case they all talk about it the same way, and they all speak of things that they already knew before the trip. And that's really very suspicious.

Amerika gibt es nicht, Peter Bichsel.

Responses: No comments Tags: alternative facts ⋅ German ⋅ stories

Everything I know I learned at primary school

Friday, January 06 2017

One of my earliest coherent memories is of my first few days at primary school. I had just turned five.

At lunchtime I did not play with the other kids. They all knew each other from kindergarten, I had gone to Playcentre. Their games all had rules that I didn't know and found frustrating to learn. I wandered off to the edge of the field -- a long way away, it seems in my memory -- and sat down and day-dreamed.

The bell rang in the distance, but I stayed where I was. Possibly I had been told that you have to go back when the bell rings? I can't remember. I stayed and I thought and I looked at the sky and played with the grass.

Eventually, the emptiness of the field got to me. I felt bored and scared and I wandered back to my classroom. The teacher yelled at me. In hindsight, it's bad to lose a five year old, so I don't blame her for being angry.

This were the first lessons I learned at school, and actually, because I ignored teachers and just read and read, the only ones I learned until my mid-teens when the material caught up. Namely:

And these lessons have been true of almost every organisation I have been part of.

Responses: One comment Tags: school ⋅ memories ⋅ childhood

Rendered at 2017-06-23 19:44:00