Whatever is, is right. Yeah, right...

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

The great thing about David Graeber and his article Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit is that he makes you notice the bugs where the sales executives for our dominant ideology want you to see only features.

Look! More competition! More efficiency!

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things:

Work smarter, not harder, with IT!

Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone.

Honey, we shrunk Big Government! Just ignore that colossal, camouflaged, government-issue blimp we built out of several million tons of pork...

In fact, the United States never did abandon gigantic, government-controlled schemes of technological development. Mainly, they just shifted to military research—and not just to Soviet-scale schemes like Star Wars, but to weapons projects, research in communications and surveillance technologies, and similar security-related concerns ... One reason we don’t have robot factories is because roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in automating paper mills.

The Bonfire of the Red Tape, or Human Potential Unchained! A modern fairy tale:

And so a timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural life. It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. Those thinkers most likely to make a conceptual breakthrough are the least likely to receive funding, and, if breakthroughs occur, they are not likely to find anyone willing to follow up on their most daring implications.

What Graeber's demolishing here isn't some complex and abstruse economic theory, accessible only to experts, but the current iteration of the same dumb old Panglossian lie that's comforted the already comfortable and afflicted everybody else for centuries:

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

I don't think Graeber gets it right all the time; some of the constraints on innovation really are are technical, not ideological. Why don't we have a Lunar colony, giant wheel-shaped space stations and manned, nuclear interplanetary spaceships, like the ones in 2001 - A Space Odyssey? Arthur C Clarke himself lived long enough to give a more plausible account of why the real 21st Century looks different from the lots-of-people-in-space version he'd imagined.

Clarke's version is that, in the 1940s, when he was working on airfield landing approach radar and dreaming of geosynchronous communication satellites, he assumed that those satellites would have to be crewed. As, among other things, a technician working with cutting-edge, high-maintenance vacuum tube technology, he thought that you'd always need a human on site to fix, tweak and maintain the complicated, expensive kit he imagined people sending into space.

So his stories were filled with people who needed to be in space to get useful jobs of work done, from the everyday running and maintaining of communication networks to boldly exploring the final frontier. What he didn't anticipate was how quickly reliable, miniaturised electronics would replace the electronic Bertie Woosters of his youth, which couldn't get through the day without the intervention of some human Jeeves bearing a screwdriver (an actual one, not a reviving cocktail) to keep everything running smoothly.

In Clarke's imagined future and in his science fiction, most mindless human drudge work has been automated, leaving humans, (or at least ones with technocratic skillz), to do cool, fulfilling jobs, like being astronauts.

In the real Twenty First Century, there are plenty of humans doing machine-related drudge work, from assembling iThings in Chinese factories to data entry but, thanks to ultra-reliable miniaturised electronics, the vast majority of astronaut jobs have been automated. Which means that lots of things get done in space, but without the immense cool factor of humans actually being in those awesomely alien places.

Just keep banging the rocks together and you, too, could aspire to one of these!

Here's a bit from the novel version of 2001, where the last human survivor of the spaceship Discovery is about to become the first person to land on one of the moons of Saturn:*

The sun was now an object that no man would have recognised. It was far too bright to be a star, but one could look directly at its tiny disc without discomfort. It gave no heat at all; when Bowman held his ungloved hands in its  rays, as they streamed through the space-pod's window, he could feel nothing upon his skin. He might have been trying to warm himself by the light of the Moon; not even the alien landscape fifty miles below reminded him more vividly of his remoteness from Earth.

That sent shivers down my spine as a kid.

And here's how the real first landing on one of Saturn's moons happened, back in 2005. After travelling for over six years and two billion miles, an automated spacecraft was in orbit around Saturn. Human technicians kept it going, but they were sitting in front of screens on Earth, communicating over a data link with a one-and-half hour time lag. The mother ship released a probe, which landed on Saturn's largest moon and relayed pictures and other data back to waiting techies back in places like Pasedena and Darmstadt.

Or Milton Keynes, where the Open University team behind the probe's Surface Science Package was based. I remember my wife, who's an OU administrator, telling me that, on the day of the landing, the team put on an audio visual presentation in the lecture theatre, so that OU employees could see the fruits of their decade and a half of work.

It was a fantastic achievement and I'm full of admiration for everybody involved, but there's a huge dramatic gulf between the stark sci fi vision of the lone astronaut, floating in the black void a billion miles from home, looking back towards a tiny, shrunken sun and forward to the looming landscape of a frozen, alien world and a university administrator in a bland English new town, known chiefly for its concrete cows and traffic roundabouts, taking forty minutes away from thinking about tenders for photographic services at degree ceremonies to grab a coffee and catch up on the latest discoveries from the Saturn system.

It's less dramatic than sci fi, but maybe it's not lack of progress, just progress by less dramatic means. Although even 'less dramatic' is a relative term when you get an eyeful of this view of the Saturn system which I've shared before, but is well worth a second look (embiggen to full screen for enhanced awesomeness):

Speaking of administrators, I don't wholly take on board Graeber's anarchist view that all bureaucracy is a Bad Thing, or that all administrative jobs are necessarily bullshit jobs. I find it this bit too close to the prevailing right wing/libertarian orthodoxy that the human resources struggling to make large and complex organisations work smoothly must be mere dead weight, which needs shedding so that front-line staff can be "empowered" to break free from the bondage of red tape.

At least that's the theory. But when you get rid of all those terrible bureaucrats, somebody still ends up having to do the all boring admin - often those very front-line staff whose time could be far better spent doing other things:

...a study by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) which found the amount of time nurses spent away from patients, on non-essential paperwork, has doubled, with 2.5 million hours lost a week...
...Dr Peter Carter, General Secretary of the RCN said it was “vital” for the NHS to tackle duplication and free up staff so they could devote more time to patient care.
He said: “Tackling this burden requires smarter systems, proper admin support, well designed technology and better data sharing. [my bold]

The Telegraph

And some of Graeber's other thoughts sound, on first reading, like paranoid conspiracy theories 'There are many forms of privatisation, up to and including the simple buying up and suppression of inconvenient discoveries by large corporations fearful of their economic effects. (We cannot know how many synthetic fuel formulae have been bought up and placed in the vaults of oil companies, but it’s hard to imagine nothing like this happens.)'

But, even though he's not on the money every time, he probably has more of a point when he's sounding most paranoid. Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. The Phoebus Cartel was an actual thing and everyday scandals like Libor-rigging remind us that massive conspiracies against the laity are still being perpetrated whenever people think nobody's looking.

Sometimes it really is vested interests and power structures holding things back, rather than the inherent limitations and attributes of different technologies. The hard part is understanding when our failure to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire and re-mould it nearer to the heart's desire stems from the laws of nature, against which there really is no appeal process, and when we're only being held back by human cussedness, connivance and coercion. It's the grain of truth at the heart of that most clichéd prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

*They changed the setting to the Jupiter system for the film version.

Sounds a bit like "terrify"

Your word of the day is "Toryfy." Not "Torify", which is  a thing for privacy-conscious geeks, but a new coinage for on-trend political anoraks. First spotted (at least by me) in The Staggers, it describes the way that Ukip looks less like a real political party, and more like a home for disaffected Tories, every time another ex-Conservative MP defects to them. As in 'the defections are Toryfying the Ukip brand.'

This should terrify the Tories, as every ex-Con who joins Ukip will make the Kippers seem more welcoming and less threatening to disgruntled Conservative voters. It should scare Ukip, too, if they value their carefully-managed image as the anti-politics party from beyond the Westminster bubble.

A split in the right-wing vote like this should equal happy days for the opposition. But then again, Labour should also be able to convince voters that they could at least run a whelk stall, unlike George Osborne, who couldn't even serve a up portion of whelks without spilling the lot.

____________

Update - don't just take lefty bloggers' word that the Kippers and Tories are all members of the same big, dysfunctional family. Here's Boris Johnson's latest plea for unity on the right - 'It is only if the great conservative family unites and we stop Ed Miliband seizing back control of this country that we will be able to deliver the referendum that this country wants and deserves.' 

Further update - another Conservative Party donor has gone over to Ukip and says he'll bung Farage a £100,000 cheque. If any more good news about the breakup of the conservative family catches my eye, I'll park it in the updates to this post for the moment and maybe write something more considered if I feel the urge.

And more ... There seems to be some dispute over how much cash the Go Skippy guy gave the Tories before he switched horses. But there's no disputing that he's part of the 'Conservative family' - nobody but a real insider would lose a moment's sleep over being snubbed by William Hague,* of all people.

According to the Express, Skippy Guy's response to Hague not knowing who he was, was 'They called me a nobody now they know who I am', which is the kind of statement you get from an obsessive stalker who's just shot the rock star he once idolised.

A spurned William Hague groupie, splashing an extra £900,000 Ukip's way out of sheer pique? And members of the Conservative family call Ed Miliband weird?

*Yeah, that William Hague:

Now, when he was a teenager he didn't only address the Tory Party conference, he read Hansard in bed and he had a record collection that apparently consisted of one album by Dire Straits and dozens of speeches by Winston Churchill. His dad said: 'He was just a normal happy boy.'

from David Cameron's "tribute" at the Conservative Party Conference (keeping the oiks in their place with condescending put-downs dressed up as hearty banter is one of the esential life skills they teach you at Hogwarts Academy for potato-faced sociopaths).

Mad as a sack of badgers, the lot of 'em.

If you can't fix the economy you can't fund a war

David Cameron has admitted forgetting to mention the deficit in a keynote announcement intended to pave the way for an an open-ended, multi-billion pound United Kingdom military commitment to the latest instalment of the Middle East's generations-long orgy of war, violence and revenge.

A year after losing a vote to involve the UK in the conflict (on the other side), the gaffe-prone Prime Minister was mocked by chancellor George Osborne for forgetting that the Conservatives' troubled deficit reduction plan was central to the party's economic credibility. 'David Cameron didn't mention the deficit once. Extraordinary. If you can't fix the economy you can't fund a war', tweeted Osborne.

Cameron said it was 'one of the perils' of talking for more than five minutes without having thought about costings, an exit strategy, or the wisdom of becoming entangled in a convoluted, intractable conflict which he'd confidently announced could be fixed by bombing the other side only last year.

Critics, who consider that the threat to UK security from Islamic State has been wildly exaggerated , have questioned why the cash-strapped UK administration is so anxious to get involved in a war three thousand miles away, when its oil-rich "allies" in the region still have shed-loads of the weapons that we sold them and could better afford to fly a short distance in order to test the proposition that dropping a few extra bombs might help the situation in some unspecified way.

The Conservative leader dismissed critics who claim that he lacks credibility, saying 'Look at the pictures of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich! LOL!'

Diabolical liberty

First, the Pope came out as an objective deist. More recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury admitted that on some days he's not even a deist. Just how far can this relaxed ecumenicism go? Back when I were a lad, the Not The Nine O' Clock News team asked the same question:

Sadly, the Church of England still hasn't embraced Devil worship, which is a pity, because in some parts of the world, the Satanic community seems more than ready to do its bit for outreach and inter-faith dialogue. And they seem to be making rather a good job of it, if the joyous publication,The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities, currently being distributed by The Satanic Temple is anything to go by.

Okay, it is a bit tongue in cheek, but there is a serious point about liberty and tolerance there, too. Not to mention a paradox wrapped up in a paradox. The well-worn meta-paradox is that most Christian Americans, who live with separation of church and state, take Christianity far more seriously than most people in the UK's biggest constituent country, with its established church.

Within that wider paradox we have the sub-paradox of things like Satanic activity books for tots and the growing acceptance of Wiccans in the US military emerging in a country stuffed with Serious Christians, rather than in a country so irreligious that even the Archbishop of Canterbury struggles with the whole believing in God thing.

Mind you, even though we're behind the curve when it comes to religious tolerance for diabolists, at least the C of E have made a start by omitting the words 'reject the devil and all rebellion against God' from the baptism service in favour of something a bit more inclusive, so the more liberal wing of the church might still end up embracing the Devil and all his works some time before the Anglo-Catholics and Serious Evangelicals have accepted women bishops and gay clergy.

Fear and loathing in West Lothian

Well, the bookies made the right call. But here's another bang-on prediction, this time from somebody who seems to have been in the Yes camp - 'After a No vote, we will see a return to politics as usual as Westminster becomes preoccupied with the next UK General Election.' I reckon this prophecy's been fulfilled in near-record time - in his very first speech after the vote, David Cameron put a 'decisive answer' to the West Lothian question near the top of his to-do list.

Could the fact that 'The Tories are keenly aware that denying Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs the right to vote on English-only legislation could leave future Labour governments in office but not in power, handing the Conservatives an effective veto' have something to do with his sudden desire for a decisive quick fix for an intractable constitutional anomaly that's been baffling better minds than his since the Sex Pistols were in the charts?

It could be pretty frustrating to see an elected Labour government unable to make legislation happen. Although I can remember a time when this might not have been an entirely bad thing...

Without Scottish Labour MPs, English tuition fees wouldn't have been trebled to £3000 and there would have been no Foundation Hospitals. When you consider that these two policies laid the groundwork for £9k fees and the privatisation of the NHS, when you realise that these policies only affect England, the fact that they were passed despite most English MPs voting against them is not just an interesting constitutional quirk. It is an outrage.

His feet are the right size for his shoes

I just came across a blog post that reminded me of a bit from the Hitchhikers' guide to the Galaxy. Not from the first, perfectly-formed radio series, but from one of its later radio incarnations, where the narrative arc* was less powerful, but most of the whimsical digressions were still the right side of being annoying** and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was still building a bigger universe inside your head than movie makers with a squillion-dollar cutting-edge CGI budget can manage to this day.

The episode, which contained moderate peril and mild language, found our heroes on the planet Brontitall, being pursued by Hig Hurtenflurst, the risingest young executive in a monopolistic, pan-galactic shoe corporation and his poorly-shod foot warriors:

FOOT WARRIOR:	Er, yes sir. Awh, ohh!
[FOOT WARRIOR falls over again]
HIG HURTENFLIRST:	You two! Carry him to the projector scope.
ARTHUR:	What’s the matter with him?
HIG HURTENFLIRST:	His feet are the wrong size for his shoes.

Honestly, you just can't get the staff these days. As every micromanager since Procrustes could have told you, everything would be perfect, if it wasn't for maladjusted people failing to fit in. Fortunately, you can always stretch your human resources to breaking point, or chop them off at the knees for fun and profit:

Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised.
(Mark Fisher)
Having adapted or conformed suitably to new conditions, the well-adjusted go confidently about their business...

From the 'The Well-Adjusted' an awesomely good blogpost at Bat, Bean, Beam. Go to the related post 'You and Mark Aren't Friends' to see how a state of perfect well-adjustedness can be attained through the magic of a well-curated social media profile, without any of that tedious mucking about that goes with medicalising dissent.


*'Narrative circle' would be a better description of series one, since the story's a time-travel loop.

**As opposed to not entirely sucking.

Please don't break the global economy like we did

Deutsche Bank has compared a possible Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum to the mistakes which led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Speaking on the Today programme, the bank's global strategist Bilal Hafeez warned that "the economic uncertainty that would ensue from independence, the unstable banking system that would also result, would really result in the Scottish debt having to offer much higher interest rates to attract investors."

BBC 

I'm guessing that Scots who haven't been asleep since 2008 won't have taken very kindly to lectures on economic prudence from an organisation whose fingerprints were all over the last global economic crisis and the subsequent Eurozone crisis:

Deutsche Bank has long been something of a basket case. In 2007, when the first signs of the impending financial crisis began to appear, it was the most highly leveraged bank in Europe, with assets 68 times its Tier 1 capital. It narrowly managed to avoid sovereign bailout in the financial crisis, but it was a principal beneficiary of the US government’s bailout of AIG and it received liquidity support from the Fed and the ECB. But its problems weren’t limited to US subprime and toxic derivatives. The Icelandic journalist Sigrún Davíðsdóttir reports that Deutsche Bank had lent extensively to Icelandic banks and was left with the toxic loans when the Icelandic banks failed.

Deutsche Bank also turned out to have sizeable interests in Ireland’s teetering banks. When the Irish property market collapsed, the Irish government – partly at the EU’s insistence – bailed out its banks to prevent a chain of contagion spreading out across the Eurozone and risking the solvency of the large European banks such as Deutsche Bank. The banking crisis caused a deep recession in Ireland, while the bailouts caused a fiscal crisis, eventually resulting in sovereign bailout. The price of this has been five years of painful retrenchment by both government and private sector in Ireland.

But it didn’t end there. Deutsche Bank was also heavily exposed to periphery sovereign debt and associated credit derivatives. The exposure of German banks to Greek debt and credit default swaps was the principal reason for German nervousness about the private sector accepting losses: it was two years before the inevitable partial Greek default finally happened – by which time, of course, Deutsche Bank had largely unwound its exposures. It escaped serious damage in the PSI, unlike Greek pensioners whose funds were virtually wiped out. The ECB’s Securities Markets Program helped Deutsche Bank and others unload their toxic Greek debt (and other dodgy sovereign debt) at better than market rates. Guess who holds it now? Yes, the ECB does – and the ECB is of course backed by taxpayers. Yet another disguised bailout for Deutsche Bank.

Frances Coppola
 

Too gigantick to fail

Corineus and Gogmagog were two brave giants who richly valued their honour and exerted their whole strength and force in the defence of their liberty and country; so the City of London, by placing these, their representatives in their Guildhall, emblematically declare, that they will, like mighty giants defend the honour of their country and liberties of this their City; which excels all others, as much as those huge giants exceed in stature the common bulk of mankind.

Thomas Boreman - The Gigantick History of the Two Famous Giants and Other Curiosities in Guildhall, London, via Faerie Lore

That's 'liberties' in the old-fashioned sense of the word:

Libertas in Medieval Latin conveys the idea of a right to exclude others from your property, your franchise. To be free of something is to enjoy exclusive rights and privileges in relation to it. The freedom of a town is a privilege, to be inherited or bought. So is a freehold estate.

Christopher Hill - The Century of Revolution 1603-1714.

But back to the giants themselves. Faerie Lore reveals their dark, gritty origins story:

The myth states that the Roman Emperor Diocletian had 33 wicked daughters whom he married off to 33 husbands who curbed their unsettling ways. However the daughters were so wicked, led by the eldest sister Alba, they plotted to cut the throats of their husbands as they slept. As punishment for this crime, they were set adrift in a boat with a half year’s rations of food, shunned forever. They drifted ashore the isles of what later became “Albion” (named after the eldest). Fornicating and coupling with demons, they populated the wild windswept island with a race of giants... When Brutus, great-grandson of Æneas, in company of his most able-bodied warrior Corineus, fled the fall of Troy, they by fate found themselves on these islands of Giants. Brutus was impressed with these isles so much that he named the Islands after himself, which later became called “Britain”. The leader of the Giants was a detestable monster named Goëmagot (Gogmagog), who stood in stature twelve cubits, and of such prodigious strength that at one shake he pulled up an oak as if it had been a hazel wand. Brutus and Corineus faced “Gogmagog“, had combat, and hurled him from a high rock to his death... As a reward for this defeat, Corineus was given the western part of the island, which many say is how Cornwall was called after him. After this defeat, Brutus travelled to the East and founded the city of New Troy, which eventually became known as “London”. [Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th century Historia Regum Brittaniae]...
...Another mythos to their origins tell that the 33 infamous daughters of Diocletian who were captured and chained at the gates of Guildhall as guardians had given birth to numerous sons who were deemed to be “Giants”. The last two survivors of these offspring, were “Gog” and “Magog”. This comes from the lore around the carved giants guarding the gates of Guildhall during the reign of Henry V. They were added to the Lord Mayor’s Show in 1554 which were labelled in 1605 as Corineus and Gogmagog. 

Of course, some spoilsport had to come along and let the facts ruin a good story:

The tale chucks up more questions than I can answer. When did Gogmagog switch from one creature into two separate giants? ...We know it’s mostly toss because the fall of Troy was about 2300 years before the reign of Diocletian, and the name Gogmagog is a mangled borrowing from the Old Testament. But these histories were accepted as fact for centuries.

The history may have been toss but, sadly for the common bulk of humankind, fact has caught up with ahistorical fiction. The modern City and its privileges really are guarded by scary giants with a dodgy back story:

 As the Independent Commission on Banking led by Sir John Vickers noted, the assets of UK banks were nearly five times the size of GDP in 2009. In Germany and France, the figure was around three times, whilst in the US it was one-to-one.

This is not an exercise

Given this lack of preparedness among the higher echelons of the Pacific navy, it should come as no surprise that when the attack [on Pearl Harbor] began men and women on the base and on those ships simply could not believe their eyes...

...Commander Logan Ramsey was on Ford Island when a Japanese pilot dived down: he and another officer ran out to get the number of whatever young idiot had decided to pull off such a dangerous stunt.

Harry Mead was astounded that American planes were bombing a hangar: ‘Boy… is somebody going to catch it for putting live bombs on those planes’.

Frank Stock, a fireman on the Vestal was struck by how red discs had been painted on the attack planes to add realism in a military exercise.

A marine Roy Henry bet another Marine that it was the Army surprising the Navy with false torpedoes.

Harry Mead saw something drop from a plane and thought ‘some mechanic is going to catch hell for that’, as explosions began he asked himself why they were using live ammunition.

Sailors on the USS Sumner were struck by the army flying planes on a Sunday.

Joseph A. Pesek thought that the bombing was strange but assumed that the navy was out to destroy a target in the water.

A group watching on Ford Island saw the Navy practising with water bombs and when an oil tank exploded in flame one commented that the pilot would get in trouble. When a disc was spotted on the wing of a plane, meanwhile, another commented: ‘There goes one of the red team’...

This piece in Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog perfectly captures the reality lag after a black swan has glided into plain sight. Everybody from the overlords of the Westminster/press bubble to this obscure English blogger knew that Scottish Independence was a theoretical possibility, but complacently assumed that it might happen some other time, maybe never. Now the captain and crew are about to find out whether that's a real torpedo heading for the ship of state.

As Sir Walter Raleigh said of Elizabeth I...

I see that the spoof Jacob Rees-Mogg Twitter account, previously closed down due to 'threat of legal action' has reappeared, complete with a profile pic straight out of Monty Python's "Upper-Class Twit of the Year" sketch. Link here (for now, at least - don't be too surprised to find this link broken if the latest iteration gets taken down). Bonus blog link here.

I am told @DouglasCarswell 's alma mater is the "UEA" not the "UAE". I have never been to either; the one being too flat, the other too hot.

[on Alex Salmond] One is unlikely to trust a man to lead his country when he has failed to notice a lectern less than a foot from his elbow. 

Utterly appalled by EU ban on high powered carpet cleaners. Mrs Trower has been batting my rugs for years at no risk to herself or others

Meanwhile, the bona fide Rees-Mogg has been expaining to Sunday Stürmer readers that "we" 'must give Clegg's job to Nigel Farage ... and get in bed with Ukip.'* in an article almost as funny  as the spoof version:

Perhaps as a sign of good faith even the Minister for Europe could be a Ukip MP ... If the Prime Minister were to do this, no longer could his critics say – as Sir Walter Raleigh said of Elizabeth I – that he ‘did it all by halves’.

Sadly, the real Rees-Mogg's mots fail the <140 characters test, although he does get bonus points for unintended irony by actually being Jacob Rees-Mogg and being able to write, presumably with a straight face, that '[Farage] appeals to not only traditional Conservative members but also to those who have felt disenfranchised, people who feel that politicians are part of a too-cosy establishment while Ukip is shaking it up.'



*No link provided, as I'm sure you're smart enough to find the article if you're that interested. I leave it up you to decide whether clicking Mail articles is more likely to give aid and comfort to the enemy, or to crash and burn their business model.

Thoughtcrime must not go unpunished

Universities and colleges may, equally, encounter high performing employees who, although academically brilliant, have the potential to damage their employer’s brand. This could be through outspoken opinion or general insubordination. Irrespective of how potentially valuable these employees may be to their institutions, the reality is that, in consistently accepting unacceptable behaviour, institutions may be setting dangerous precedents to other employees that such conduct will be accommodated. From a risk perspective, it is also much harder to justify a dismissal, or other sanction, if similar conduct has gone unpunished before.

As much as employers may hope that unacceptable behaviour from key employees will be curbed without sanction, in reality the problems will persist, needing to be addressed further down the line. It remains to be seen whether Suarez is right when he says that he will never bite another player again, but he has made similar statements before. 

David Browne, writing on law firm SGH Martineau's corporate blog, as quoted here.

You heard that right - according to today's managerialist ideology, the 'insubordination' of daring to have independent opinions that that don't fit in with your employers' carefully-curated corporate brand image is a bizarre, pathological aberration, just like footballer Luis Suarez's weird compulsion to keep biting opposing players.

Remember that the employees Browne's talking about here are valued, capable ones in reasonably high-status occupations, working in institutions which ostensibly nurture enquiry, debate and questioning. Imagine what it's like for people who work in the sort of places where 'we don't pay you to think.' Browne just validated Nick Cohen's sobering observation that 'the moment you enter your place of work, you no longer reside within a governed democracy, but instead are enslaved to a systematic dictatorship.'

In a less screwed-up world, David Browne, would be in massive trouble with his bosses for irreparably damaging his firm's brand* in the minds of all reasonable people by blogging this astonishing attack on freedom of speech on the firm's website. After all, a reasonable reader would conclude that any firm which endorsed such views, must have a sinister, authoritarian, bullying ethos and would have no qualms about advising bosses to use legal threats and sackings to punish thoughtcrime.

In the topsy-turvey times we live in, Browne was able to get away with merely 'clarifying' his comments in response to the justified twitterstorm that his horrific blogpost provoked. A key passage of the "clarified" post reads thusly:

This [brand-damaging behaviour] could be through outspoken opinions (where these fall outside the lawful exercise of academic freedom or freedom of speech more widely) or general insubordination, e.g. a failure to comply with the reasonable requests of an employer, or other behaviour such as bullying or harassment of colleagues.

So, there you have it - you can open your mouth, but if you upset your bosses, they and their corporate lawyers might be alert for anything that might be construed to fall 'outside the lawful exercise of academic freedom or freedom of speech more widely' and won't hesitate to use it to get you sacked (see "chilling effect"). Plus you get a lecture on bullying and harassment from more powerful people who think it's fine to push uppity subordinates out of a job for daring to speak out of line.

Thank you for sharing your opinions and clarifications, Mr Browne. They have been duly noted. Now bite me, weasel boy.



*You owe me for one broken irony meter, Browne.

Dulce et decorum est

A hundred years on from the Great War, another cohort of youngsters ardent for some desperate glory is discovering that war's not that great after all:

One jihadist, claiming to represent 30 others who feel the same way, contacted university researchers in the past fortnight to say there is a feeling of disillusionment, as some who travelled to fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime are instead being forced to get involved in in-fighting among rebel groups.
He told the researchers: "It's not what we came for but if we go back (to Britain) we will go to jail. Right now, we are being forced to fight - what option do we have?" 

Irish Independent

Now this could be confirmation bias on my part, but it does tie in with a couple of things I've suspected from the start:

1. The fighting in Iraq and Syria is a clear and present danger to the people living there,* but the much-hyped threat of hordes of radicals coming back to Blighty to murder us all in our beds at home is self-interested fearmongering by the usual suspects.
2. The rush towards passport-snatching and state-sponsored re-education camps (AKA "de-radicalisation") is a counter-productive waste of resources by an unholy alliance of politicians eager to be seen to be doing something (preferably something "tough"), securocrats, self-appointed "community leaders" and "experts" and platitude-wielding members of the "British Values" brigade. An alliance that looks set to undo the good work of disillusioned Jihadis coming back to spread stories of Isil's lies and futile waste by alienating them from their home country, or re-framing their sobering reality checks as official propaganda (welcome back to the low-trust society).

*A danger that the US and its allies probably can't reduce by simply throwing a few extra bombs into the mix and hoping for the best. By the way, did Bill Kristol's infamous remarks remind anyone else of abbot Amalric's instructions before the massacre at Béziers ('Kill them all, God will know His own')? Better to have no strategy than Amalric's strategy, IMHO.

Use enemies to develop a bond with your prospects

Effective marketing in a low-trust world means developing a bond with your prospects through your content marketing. One great way to do this is to share a perceived common enemy with your readers.

Dave from PR, who, along with his light-fingered chums in big finance has spent the last few years moving us towards a a big low-trust society, totally gets this.

But he could still take a few tips from Vladimir, who has a lifetime's experience of getting ahead and prospering among the managing elite of an even lower-trust polity. Vlad could probably give detailed lectures on how to in use a common enemy to bury bad news and persuade downtrodden members of your big society that they really are all in this together. Even an ex-public relations professional, tasked with fronting for City kleptocrats, voyeuristic spooks and corporate über-scroungers could take cynicism lessons from the KGB's most famous alumnus.

You have to hand it to Putin - only a truly epic bullshitter could successfully bury a generations-deep pile of misery like this by taking his shirt off and blaming everything on foreigners:

In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality. By the mid-1990s, the average St. Petersburg man lived for seven fewer years than he did at the end of the Communist period; in Moscow, the dip was even greater, with death coming nearly eight years sooner...

...Russians did not start dying early and often after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “To the contrary,” writes Eberstadt, what is happening now is “merely the latest culmination of ominous trends that have been darkly evident on Russian soil for almost half a century.” With the exception of two brief periods—when Soviet Russia was ruled by Khrushchev and again when it was run by Gorbachev—death rates have been inexorably rising...

...Another major clue to the psychological nature of the Russian disease is the fact that the two brief breaks in the downward spiral coincided not with periods of greater prosperity but with periods, for lack of a more data-driven description, of greater hope. The Khrushchev era, with its post-Stalin political liberalization and intensive housing construction, inspired Russians to go on living. The Gorbachev period of glasnost and revival inspired them to have babies as well. The hope might have persisted after the Soviet Union collapsed—for a brief moment it seemed that this was when the truly glorious future would materialize—but the upheaval of the 1990s dashed it so quickly and so decisively that death and birth statistics appear to reflect nothing but despair during that decade.

The Dying Russians - Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books blog

Look and learn, Dave. If Vlad can carry on belligerently distracting his people from such catastrophic amounts of existential despair until he retires, he'll probably go on to command even bigger fees than Tony Blair on the leadership guru lecture circuit.

The greatest threat ever (since the last one)

Now/more than a decade ago is/was a good time to panic, because we live/lived in uniquely terrifying times:

"Why now?", people ask. I agree that I cannot say that this month or next, even this year or next, Saddam will use his weapons. But I can say that if the international community, having made the call for disarmament, now, at this moment, at the point of decision, shrugs its shoulders and walks away, he will draw the conclusion that dictators faced with a weakening will always draw: that the international community will talk but not act, will use diplomacy but not force. We know, again from our history, that diplomacy not backed by the threat of force has never worked with dictators and never will.

If we take this course and if we refuse to implement the will of the international community, Saddam will carry on, his efforts will intensify, his confidence will grow and, at some point in a future not too distant, the threat will turn into reality. The threat therefore is not imagined. The history of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda. The history and the present threat are real.

Tony Blair, September 2002

What we’re facing in Iraq now with Isil is a greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before.

In Afghanistan the Taliban were prepared to play host to al-Qaeda. With Isil we are facing a terrorist organisation not being hosted in the country but seeking to establish and then violently expand its own terrorist state.

We could be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean bordering a Nato State.

We are in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology that I believe we will be fighting for years if not decades.

David Cameron, end of August 2014

The endless note of urgency reminds me of those never-ending sales out-of-town furniture stores used to keep having. 'Hurry! Crazy bargains! Get your new existential threat while stocks last!'

If there's anything real behind the current rhetorical panic, it probably has more to do with the Ukip* insurgency than the Isil one. After all, finding a respectable-sounding excuse for getting tough on scary foreigners/non-white Brits might be Dave from PR's last best hope for plausibly ingratiating himself with the restive 'kipper-leaning wing of his party.

But maybe some things have changed in a slightly ironic direction. Where the ostensibly liberal-left Tony Blair looked embarrassingly hungry for the approval of his new best friend, George W, Tory Dave might not actually care about how much he's impressing right-wing Americans right now, so long as he can get Mr Angry of Clacton back on side.



*From now on I'll have to type "Ukip", rather than "UKIP", as the former spelling apparently offends some of the party's more paranoid supporters. Since choosing not to offend people would clearly be political correctness gone mad, which as any fool angry Ukip voter knows, is a contemptible form of tyranny, I am therefore obliged to uphold my freeborn birthright by being as casually offensive as possible, whenever possible. Nothing personal, you understand.

Cold calling update

I blogged about The Cold Call Elimination Team a while back. It's an outfit that makes telephone cold calls, then paradoxically tries to sell the callee an almost useless electronic gizmo which purports to block telephone cold calls (called "Call Blocker Pro"), along with an alleged listing on a suspect-sounding unregulated register of people who'd prefer not be cold called by telephone salespeople (without mentioning that a perfectly legitimate, regulated, free register called the Telephone Preference Service exists).

Turns out they're every bit as dodgy as they sound.

I've just witnessed The Cold Call Elimination Team in action for myself. They rang an elderly person and took a debit card payment in return for their useless gadget n' listing combo. Family members then alerted the victim to the existence of the free Telephone Preference Service and to the fact that signing up with The Cold Call Elimination Team is almost certainly a complete waste of money. The victim, who had no idea what to do with the electronic doohickey anyway, returned it with a note saying that it was too difficult to operate, and asked for a refund.

A less dedicated team of shysters would have simply ignored the request for a refund and hoped the complainer would eventually give up. But the enterprising scumbags at the Cold Call Elimination Team decided to go the extra mile.

Having retained the victim's debit card details, they decided to offer some unsolicited "help" by "upgrading" the victim to their "platinum" service, which is the same widget-plus-listing deal as before, except that "platinum" customers get a "pre-programed" Call Blocker Pro device. They seem to have used the retained debit card details to charge the victim an additional eighty-odd quid for the "upgrade" (although merchants can't legally retain the 3 digit security number on the back of a debit card, which would have been needed to process the new transaction), before sending out a confirmation letter with a new, "pre-programmed" Call Blocker Pro.

On the further advice of family members, the victim has now told the Cold Call Elimination Team that a refund, not an upgrade, was clearly requested. The Cold Call Elimination Team have promised to process a refund (at least of the "upgrade"), although, at the time of writing, the victim's bank account still needs checking to make sure that the refund is forthcoming.