The worst mass shooting in US history, breaking a grisly record set just over a year ago. With depressing regularity some murderous arsehole turns his guns - and it is almost always men - on defenceless people and makes a pathetic name for themselves. Today Stephen Paddock, an otherwise unprepossessing Nevada native from a retirement village outside of Las Vegas has that infamy, though typical of all mass murdering gunmen he took his life before the police reached him.
We don't know a great deal about Paddock or his motivations. We don't know why he chose to kit out a hotel room at the Mandalay Bay with heavy duty weaponry, or the twisted narrative he concocted to justify these murders to himself. Sadly, because these things are far from uncommon, we almost do not have to. There is some suggestion of psychological problems, "weird behaviour" and large gambling transactions, but none of these in themselves are remarkable. Perhaps the gambling got out of control and Paddock snapped, but nothing about the crime suggests anything other than cool-headed premeditation. Assembling an arsenal with the appropriate range and selecting the right room overseeing the concert required methodical planning.
As we have seen in previous shootings of this character, an abiding motif is the gunman imposing themselves on the world. Where a situation has got out of control, a murder spree is the most extreme way of stamping individual authority, of forcing everyone not only to sit up and take notice but respond to a situation of their making. Typically if certain people or groups of people are held responsible for the situation the gunman finds themselves in, they are usually targeted. If it's impersonal forces then the victims are usually people unfortunate enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yet there is something slightly unusual about Paddock's crime. Typically mass murderers, whether non-political or of the white supremacist/IS kind, are there among their victims, as if the proximity to murder inflames them further and gives them the last minute rush of supremacy before either the police close in or they assert final control by turning the gun on themselves. Paddock, however, kept at a distance, as if his mind could only cope when his victims were reduced to small stick people in the street light. The screams, the terror, the blood, all this was at a remove, almost a concession to recognising the enormity of what he was doing. He wanted to do it but, unlike other mass killers, didn't want to be part of it. Yet this distance enabled him to inflict more suffering and take more lives. As military thinkers know well, separation makes killing easier.
Sad to say, we know this is not going to be the last time. Everyone knows this is going to happen again, that there are many more Stephen Paddocks. Yes, the stupid gun laws leave a lot to be desired and do nothing to stop an inadequate with a grudge from going out in an inglorious blaze of murder should they choose. But there are wider questions here of dog-eat-dog individuality, alienation, toxic masculinity, and a culture that glorifies redemptive violence. This is what Paddock was, a repository and an embodiment of all this shit. And as the roots of American mass killing lie close to inner city gun crime, military worship and the imagined hatreds, it's going to take more then pious sermonising and gun control to prevent similar tragedies from happening again, and again, and again.
Moar books from the last quarter.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Bell by Iris Murdoch
Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
Woman's World by Graham Rawle
Commonwealth by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Blindsight by Peter Watts
Marx and Foucault by Antonio Negri
Echopraxia by Peter Watts
Liquid Fear by Zygmunt Bauman
Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway
After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
Retrotopia by Zygmunt Bauman
Odyssey by Jack McDevitt
Cauldron by Jack McDevitt
Feeding Frenzy by Will Self
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State by Catharine A MacKinnon
Anti-Porn by Julia Long
Zone One by Coulson Whitehead
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
I started the summer with a monster and finished it in good time, by golly. How many people can say that? In truth, War and Peace is one of the finest novels ever written. Try and forget the size of the bloody thing and just enjoy it. The other stand outs from these three months, apart from Hardt and Negri as per loads of posts, were the MacKinnon and Long books. They offered a more nuance and sophisticated argument for radical feminism than I was expecting, proving yet again you should read what people say themselves instead of relying on second and third hand accounts. I also enjoyed the Will Self, and even had a bad try at imitating his style. Disappointing was Bauman's Retrotopia for stating the obvious in a convoluted and pretty slippery style, and weirdly the famous Gender Trouble, probably because I found it much thinner than expected.
That's the lot until after Christmas. What have you been reading recently?
The five most read posts this last month were ...
1. Happy Birthday Marx's Capital
2. No More Heroes
3. Jeremy Corbyn and the New Mainstream
4. Theresa May's Delusions
5. Labour's Bankrupt Brexit Rebels
Good old Marx cleaned up this last month on the blog, so that makes a nice change from the usual Labour Party fare. Unfortunately, what has been less welcoming was a collapse in the readership. Towards the end of last month page views suddenly and without warning dropped off a cliff, and have stayed there. From grazing the 200,000 mark in August to just over 87,000 in September - my lowest figure since last November - something must have happened. And it did. Three things entirely out of my hands are responsible.
There are the changes to Google search that have affected a number of leftist websites. Alternet, for example, reported a 40% loss of its audience between June and today. The World Socialist Website reports the same. Quite why this blog dodged the bullet until late September isn't known to me, but it has hit now. Google referrals are massively down.
We also have to talk about Facebook again. In July, Facebook changed the way auto sharing is done - Mike over at Vox Political has more. Again, for whatever reason it was late September that referrals from Facebook dramatically fell. It could partly be down to the changes to auto sharing, but I've also noticed the groups my Facebook account are subscribed to show much less frequently in my timeline than was the case previously. The result is nothing good for all leftist sites that use the networks enabled by Facebook to disseminate their content.
And speaking of sharing, serving up the pièce de résistance has been a couple of bans on my account from sharing things with Facebook groups. In what looks like an unannounced anti-spam campaign, yet again Facebook are clamping down on the networks that their business depends on.
Google and Facebook are panicked by the accusations of fake news spread via their platforms and know the law is increasingly minded to penalise them for carrying objectionable content. By developing new algorithms and instructing human operators to privilege "trusted" news sources, they are capitulating to the authoritarian impulse to clamp down on fakery (which always includes news and ideas not congenial to the powers that be) and, in the long run, undermining their business models. To use a little supply and demand theory, Google and Facebook's throwing up of obstacles mean, in time, people will simply go around them and find new ways to access the material they want to read.
Therefore next month I would not be surprised if viewing figures dip even lower, and though it is disheartening, especially taking the rip-roaring numbers over the summer, the blog is staying put.
Earlier this summer there was a press flap over R Kelly, the almost forgotten superstar of 90s R&B. Capturing the newswires' attention were allegations he ran a cult, that several young women lived with him, were manipulated by him, and were effectively forced into having sex with him. Sensational news that got the celebrity gossip columns singing not out of concern for the women involved, but because of its salacious character. It was new, eccentric, and entirely icky - the depressing but well-trod story of yet another male celebrity exploiting the differential in wealth and power to use young women for sex. Yet there was an establishment figure who not only did the same, but paraded his sex cult on an internationally syndicated TV show. Eyebrows were rarely raised, let alone questions asked about the character of these relationships. He was instead sometimes celebrated as a trailblazer and, occasionally, a friend of women. I am, of course, talking about the recently deceased Hugh Hefner.
The official blurb and friendly obituaries stylised him as a sexual revolutionary. He stood against censorship and fancied himself a champion of freedom, and indeed he backed reproductive rights for women as well as gay rights. As Christina Cauterucci notes, Hefner funded abortion-related court cases before the landmark Roe v Wade ruling by the US Supreme Court. It also turns out he put money into women's refuges and rape crisis centres, supported civil rights and added his voice to a range of progressive and liberal causes. Yet simultaneously he was opposed to feminism and attacked it from the pages of Playboy. And there is the small matter of the pornography, which puts his progressive creds into question - to put it mildly.
As per many feminist comrades, porn isn't just a bit of harmless fun. It repeats and recycles gendered power relations through the depiction of sexual acts. Or as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin put it in their famed but unsuccessful anti-pornography civil rights ordinance, "we define pornography as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words, that also includes women dehumanised as sexual objects ...". Porn is therefore an ideology, and like all ideologies it distorts the social world to the advantage of the powers that be. In this case the framing of women in pornographic terms reinforces patriarchal social relations, and therefore benefits men generally. It naturally suits the fraction of capital invested in the porn industry and the various markets that cluster around the exaggeration of gendered difference.
The MacKinnon/Dworkin ordinance goes on to describe the penetration, degradation and abuse of women's bodies which, to be fair, is far from characteristic of Playboy's output. Theirs are "tasteful" spreads of artfully photo shopped bodies entirely consistent with hegemonic feminine body types. Hefner's women were slim without a sliver of cellulite, skin unmarked by blemishes, and hairlessness that left no trace of the means by which this was accomplished. Playboy's women were to be ogled, but its sensibility and aesthetic privileged ornamental display over the explicit content one normally associates with porn. While there is a world of difference between this and the content to be found on PornHub and other tube sites owned by MindGeek, there is less a distance in business terms. The latter was formerly in control of Playboy's website and runs a number of TV stations with Playboy branding. Therefore the memorial decorating of their sites with graphical tributes to Hefner was in equal parts a tribute to the man who made them possible, and in remembrance of a previously close business relationship.
Nevertheless, despite the tame content Hefner has done substantially more to promote pornographic culture than his hardcore brethren. In addition to the magazine and its famed articles and interviews (which include not a few luminaries), the Playboy clubs, the bunny girls, and the merchandising ensured Playboy was something other than a skin magazine: it became a cultural juggernaut. The execrable The Girls Next Door/Girls of the Playboy Mansion wasn't the first product aimed at women, but carried through Playboy's ornamental theme. These were grown women reduced to children, who were required to appear non-threatening and sycophantic to papa Hef, and reinforce the message that women can get by if they submit to Western beauty myths, use their bodies to get ahead and prostrate themselves in front of men. Just like photos in the magazine, their personalities evacuated and transformed "the girls" into simulacra of human beings. As Holly Madison revealed in her excoriating memoir, this is because the young women who passed through the mansion were objects. Hefner wasn't very interested in the people these women were, just what they represented: trophies, lackeys, sex objects. We should not be surprised to find the pornographic imaginary he worked hard to inculcate in others was deeply embedded in his own relations with women.
How then to explain the progressive causes Hefner supported? A case of a guilty conscience and/or a touch of corporate responsibility? As a rule, I believe people should be taken at face value until there are reasons to believe otherwise. Hefner saw himself as a champion of sexual freedom against repression, and it's hardly shocking to observe that he had a material stake in the liberalisation of attitudes. Yet like all liberal takes, there is a blindness to wealth, power and privilege. While it is morally objectionable for rich old men to provide broke young women with bed and board in return for sex, as far as Hefner was concerned the women chose to be with him. This was economic compulsion and the lure of celebrity wrapped up in a toxic gendered mix. As Hefner was not a stupid man, it was not beyond his wit to realise this, it's just that he alternated between periods of not caring because he was living his stunted dreams, and lying to himself about the nature of his behaviour. Hefner is entirely typical of the parasitic class of capital owners vis a vis the myths they tell themselves. Following from this, because the women he patronised and degraded entered their arrangements "freely", he felt it his duty to support the freedom of more women to do the same without "repression" getting in the way - up to and including women as survivors of sexual violence and women wishing to end unwanted pregnancies. A less generous reading might position Hefner as a representative of liberal patriarchy, of wanting to extinguish traditional sexual mores centered on marriage and the family to make more women more sexually available to men. Male sexual supremacy was rewritten away from the right to the body of one's wife to the potential access to the bodies of all women, with the "women's causes" he handed cash to a means of maintaining/rationalising this state of affairs. I think there's merit to both arguments as they locate a consistency and not a paradox in his attitudes to women.
Hefner then was no revolutionary or sexual trailblazer. He contributed to the liberalisation of sexual attitudes, but did not challenge gender dynamics and identities, which is the hallmark of the true revolutionary. Indeed, through his magazine and other Playboy enterprises he promoted a reductive and stilted model of women's gender identity and one that is absolutely centered on a narrow range of female body types. The consequence of this was the inculcation of large numbers of men and women into the acceptance of this as normal and natural, when the logical consequences of his actions were to replace repressive with permissive patriarchal relationships. When we're talking about how Hefner will be remembered, it won't be as a celebrity or a "legend". No, to future generations he's going to be known simply as a pornographer.
Overall, 89,580 votes were cast over 63 local authority (tier one and tier two) contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. For comparison see Quarter Two's results here.
Party | Number of Candidates | Total Vote | % | +/-
Q2
| +/- Q3 2016 | Average | +/-
Seats |
Conservative | 62 | 27,431 | 30.6% | -8.8% | +2.6% | 442 | -6 |
Labour | 59 | 33,706 | 37.6% | +8.9% | +8.7% | 571 | +8 |
LibDem | 51 | 10,648 | 11.9% | -6.4% | -6.1% | 209 | -1 |
UKIP | 22 | 1,801 | 2.0% | -1.6% | -7.3% | 167 | -3 |
Green | 32 | 4,614 | 5.2% | +0.1% | +1.5% | 82 | +2 |
SNP* | 4 | 4,240 | 5.2% | +5.2% | +1.3% | 1,060 | 0 |
PC | 0 | | | | | | 0 |
Ind*** | 26 | 5,429 | 6.1% | +2.8% | +4.2% | 209 | +1 |
Other**** | 11 | 1,681 | 1.9% | +0.3% | -0.3% | 153 | -1 |
* There were four by-elections in Scotland
** There were no by-elections in Wales
*** There were four Independent clashes
**** Others this quarter consisted of A Better Britain - Unionist Party (858), Chase Independent Party (65 and 42), BNP (75), Demos (25), North East Party (80), Save Our Stretton (455), Scottish Libertarian (12 and 12), Yorkshire Party (19 and 37).
Last quarter proved to be pride before the Tory fall, both in terms of declining vote share and the gifting away of council seats while Labour's support continues to strengthen. What is interesting is how polarisation is working out. The LibDems are falling back, UKIP are getting eviscerated and yet life is tickety-boo for the Greens and Independents.
Are we likely to see similar happen next month? Probably.
This month saw 51,321 votes cast over 32 local authority (tier one and tier two) contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. 15(!) council seats changed hands in total. For comparison with August's results, see here.
Party
|
Number of Candidates
|
Total Vote
|
%
|
+/-
Aug
|
+/- Sept 16
|
Average/
Contest
|
+/-
Seats
|
Conservative
|
32
|
14,074
|
27.4%
|
-11.1%
|
-2.3%
|
440
|
-7
|
Labour
|
30
|
18,824
|
36.7%
|
-4.2%
|
+9.8%
|
627
|
+3
|
LibDem
|
25
|
5,041
|
9.8%
|
-3.3%
|
-12.0%
|
202
|
+1
|
UKIP
|
13
|
1,156
|
2.3%
|
-0.7%
|
-9.0%
|
89
|
-1
|
Green
|
18
|
3,965
|
7.7%
|
+4.8%
|
+5.0%
|
220
|
+2
|
SNP
|
3
|
3,345
|
6.5%
|
+6.5% |
+3.8%
|
1,115
|
0
|
PC**
|
0
|
|
|
|
|
|
0
|
Ind***
|
10
| 3,352
|
6.5%
|
+4.6% |
+3.0%
|
335
|
+2
|
Other****
|
9
|
1,564
|
3.0%
|
+2.8%
|
+2.3%
|
174
|
0
|
* There were three by-elections in Scotland this month
** No by-elections in Wales
*** There were two Independent clashes
**** Others this month consisted of A Better Britain - Unionist Party (858), Scottish Libertarian (12 and 12), Chase Independent Party (65 and 42), BNP (75), Demos (25), Yorkshire Party (19), Save Our Stretton (455),
And so it goes. While not quite as pronounced this month thanks to decent showings from the SNP, the Greens and the Independents, polarisation is the name of the game as the two main parties remain light years ahead of the rest of the pack - even though the Conservatives suffered a big monthly fall. Just look at the year-on-year figure. Last autumn we were talking about the LibDem surge and now, well, their vote has collapsed back to their "traditional" historic range. And as for UKIP, not the best story to greet their anonymous new leader with.
Yet what does annoy is despite Labour being the largest political party in Europe and the Tories languishing with a reputed hundred thousand members, at least where by-elections are concerned the blues persistently out-organise the reds. They may scrape the barrel for their candidates but it matters they are on the ballot paper more than we are.
For the electoral supergeeks, please find below the outcome of each by-election contest by date.
7th Sept
Barbergh Sudbury South: Lab gain from Con
Cannock Chase Hednesford Green Heath: Lab gain from Con
Cannock Chase Hednesford South: Grn gain from Con
Colchester Shrub End: Con gain from Lib
Croydon South Norwood: Lab hold
East Cambs Ely South: Lib gain from Con
Glasgow City UA Cardonald: Lab hold
Herefordshire UA Golden Valley South: Ind gain from Con
Lancaster BC Skerton West: Lab hold
Lewes DC Ouse Valley & Ringmer: Grn gain from Con
North Lanarkshire UA Fortissat: Lab gain from Con
Peterborough UA Eye, Thorney & Newborough: Con hold
Staffordshire CC Hednesford & Rawnsley: Con hold
Suffolk CC St Johns: Lab hold
14th Sept
Mid Devon Council, Westexe: Con gain from UKIP
West Dorset DC, Lyme Regis & Charmouth: Ind gain from Con
Trafford MB, Bucklow St Martins: Lab hold
21st Sept
Holmebrook: Lib gain from Lab
Oadby Uplands: Lib gain from Lab
Waveney, Oulton Broad: Con hold
28th Sept
Barnsley MB, Kingstone: Lab hold
Breckland DC, Thetford Priory: Lab gain from Con
Durham UA, Trimdon and Thornley: Lab hold
East Staffordshire BC, Stretton: Con hold
Harlow DC Toddbrook: Lab hold
Harrogate BC Washburn: Con hold
Lancaster City Council, Halton with Aughton: Lab gain from Ind
Northampton BC Eastfield: Lab hold
Northampton BC Nene Valley: Con hold
St Edmundsbury BC Chedburgh: Con hold
St Edmundsbury BC Hundon: Con hold
The Highland UA, Tain and Easter Ross: Ind gain from Lib
