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I’m listening to the Moral Maze on the leaked BNP membership list and the performance of the BNP organizer is a rather striking example of why you shouldn’t give these people a platform. Rational debate is a precarious thing, relying on a reciprocal willingness to give and evaluate reasons. Where that willingness is one-sided and the other party is well prepared and intelligent, purportedly rational debate becomes a farce. Contrary to the postmodernists, there’s a difference between rhetoric and rational argument, however contrary to the naive rationalists – and the not so naive rationalists who descend to this level (perhaps) to illustrate their faith in the wrongness of racists and their confidence in their own abilities to defeat the evil enemy – it requires more than an personal desire to debate rationally to ensure that the ensuing debate is indeed rational. Listen to the attempted interrogation of the BNP organizer by the panel on the program: rational critique is often rhetorically toothless. Careful probing driven by a desire to defeat a political opponent with the power of ideas/words/reason more often than not appears effete when the opponent in question has a well planned rhetorical strategy. It’s easy to have such a plan if you’re a full-time political organizer who has had the same questions and accusations thrown at you thousands of times.
It’s possible to debate rationally with people who vote for the BNP, just not the hardcore neo-nazis who make up the core of the operation and inevitably it’s these people who are subject to no platform policies. No platform these people and oppose them in any way possible, while engaging with those with whom their rhetoric has force because, at the end of the day, what they’re saying does speak to people who feel ignored and alienated by a morally bankrupt liberal political-sphere devoid of real politics. If you have well-rehearsed rhetorical points made by a decent speaker that speak to real and long-standing grievances then it’s always going to be able to have an effect. To make this argument doesn’t imply that the people in the audience are stupid, it simply proceeds from actual empirical premises about how people interpret and respond to rhetoric, rather than an anachronistic and deeply normative notion of rationalism – equating clear reasoning with human dignity and any attack on the former as being an attack on the latter – which often seems to be more trouble than it’s worth.
Well I’m going to go back on my post of last week and now resolve to update my blog regularly. I’m realising that it’s very good for me to have a place to spew forth the overly-abstract rubbish that occupies my mind 99% of the time. It clarifies my thinking and helps get rid of the sense of being surrounded by unanswered questions. In short it chills me out and it’s something I enjoy doing it even if it occasionally feels like it’s something I’m doing because I ought to.
Did you expect it all to stop
At the wave of your hand?
Like the sun’s just gonna drop,
If it’s night you demand.
Well, in the dark we’re just air,
So the house might dissolve.
Once we’re gone, who’s gonna care
If we were ever here at all?- Connor Oberst
I just came across this rather striking quote from Mick Jagger in 1968 talking about his fears that immigration was going to “break up British society” because “they are just different and they do act differently and they don’t live the same, not even if they were born here they don’t”. Something worth quoting back to anyone who tries to present the man as a worthy counter-cultural icon?
I came across this fantastic program on the BBC yesterday, which goes on into some detail about an episode of American history which, though detailed all over the internet, was difficult to uncritically accept without any more authoritative source. There’s a background to it on wiki here. It seems there was a fairly serious and extremely high-level attempt to carry out a fascist coup against Roosevelt which, the BBC interestingly suggests, had far more chance of succeeding at the time – when the American military and domestical law enforcement was much weaker – than something tactically similar (500,000 ex-veterans to directly ‘take the Whitehouse’) would in the present day. It’s a telling example of the reactionary force of established power when it feels its status threatened. Unfortunately this has become a rather unknown episode of American history rather than a salutary warning about the threat of tyranny eminating from American elites. Those involved were never called to account and many of their descendents (direct descendents) in some cases still have their hands on the levers of power. It’s a bit of a shame really isn’t it?
Well I seem to be failing to update this blog on any sort of regular basis. It’s not because I’ve gone off the idea of blogging – far from it – I’m just finding it increasingly difficult to sit down and write anything when my mind is in a million places at once. This is a fairly new thing for me, having spent the first 22 years of my life bored as shit because my mind didn’t have enough places to be at once. Hopefully I’m going to get used to it fairly promptly – I’d rather be interested and stressed than bored and unhappy – but till then my blog posts might be a tad intermittent.
There’s an interesting program on radio 4 about a former internet executive who now holds that web 2.0 is undermining intellectual standards, enshrining a cult of the amateur and proliferating a new digital narcissism. Leaving aside his obvious persecution complex and slightly irritating demeanor, I think he makes a very strong case. The sort of cultural democratization the internet enables, as all content-producers compete on an increasingly (though still far from) even footing, inevitably carriers the potential to erode intellectual standards. Along with a multifaceted culture of liberal individualism that, tacitly or otherwise, gives epistemic priority to first person experience, the modern web gives a certain degree of previously lacking authority to people who – for want of a better term – might be talking complete shit. The conspiracy theories and internet rumors that spread under these conditions play themselves in macro-political arenas. The paranoia, cynicism and obscurantism they proliferate – as well as, in the recent US election, the blind optimistic mania that is their recently emerging counterpart – fuel an empowered and skeptical but ultimately atomizing engagement in political life. Passionate debates play themselves out in hyperbolic bubbles obscuring the real issues at stake and undermine the sort of critical and normative engagement which democracy requires.
It’s important to be able to recognize these dangers without lurching into a reactionary condemnation of the web on behalf of a class of cultural producers who feel their status threatened. In reality they’re merely being widened and dispersed away from the old centers of economics and politics to include the ranks of esteemed bloggers. This is not necessarily a bad thing. What’s crucial though is that a commitment to intellectual standards doesn’t get swept away in the wave of voices that the modern web is unleashing.
A brilliant example of how to diffuse moralism in politics. Hopefully there’s going to be a lot more of this over the next 4 or 8 years.
the immediate problem is the financial system. The roots go back to the early 1970s, when finance was liberalized; it was freed from the constraints of the post-war period. Now, the constraints of the post-war period, roughly 1945 to 1970, they were instituted by the United States and Britain for a reason, one, because it was assumed correctly that allowing governments to control capital movements and currencies would provide a basis for rapidly expanding growth and trade and so on, which indeed happened. That’s called the golden age of modern capitalism. Whereas freeing these constraints would retard growth and development, as indeed it has done. But there was a second reason, which isn’t being discussed much: allowing governments to control capital movements provides them with a certain space for introducing what we call welfare state programs. If capital movements are free, attacks on currencies are free, there’s what economists call a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders who actually vote, every minute in fact. If they don’t like what a government is doing, they attack the currency, there’s capital flow…
When the $700 billion bailout was announced, the public was outraged. There was furious objection, so much so that the House of Representatives had to vote it down. Now, on the surface, that looks like an exercise of democracy, but it isn’t. Even in a dictatorship, if the dictator does something outrageous, the public can riot and he’ll have to back down. Now, in a democracy, functioning democracy, what happens is different: not just shouting “no,” which is what happened, but active popular organizations like unions or political clubs or whatever would be coming forth with specific proposals and demanding that their representatives implement them.
And there are proposals; there’s quite a lot of proposals on the table. Joseph Stiglitz, who’s [inaudible] from outer space, made a very simple point. He said if we put money into the banks, pour liquidity into the banks, we can pour it in, and they’ll pour it out—mergers and acquisition, anything—for their own benefit, ’cause that’s what they’re in business for, for their benefit, not for our benefit. So he said we have to have veto power. Well, veto power means voting rights, and if it’s a real democracy, voting rights means popular participation and initiative. Well, the initiative should be coming from the population, like with health care, where the population has definite views. But the country is so depoliticized that popular views are considered politically impossible, lacking political support. Well, that’s what’s called a democratic deficit: formal democratic institutions, but not functioning. And we have to overcome that. That underlies lots of issues.
t’s well known among economists that markets are inefficient from the narrowest perspective. So let’s make it simple. Suppose you sell me a car, okay? We may make a good deal for ourselves, but we’re not taking into account the effect on him. It’s what’s called an externality. And there’s an effect. If you sell me a car, it increases gas prices, it increases pollution, it increases congestion. And that extends very broadly; these so-called externalities can be very large.
Now, in financial institutions it’s far worse. They are in the business of taking risks. If they’re well managed, say, Goldman Sachs, they calculate the potential cost to themselves if there’s a loss. But the important words are “to themselves.” They don’t calculate in what’s called systemic risk, the effect on the whole system if I go bust, you know, and it has a huge effect. The result is that risk-taking is under-priced, meaning there’s a lot more of it than there would be in a reasonable system. And so, therefore, it was predicted right off that when financial liberalization took place, there would be more regular financial crises and deeper ones. And this particular one is accelerated by the fact that there was a subprime housing bubble and many other factors, so it became far more severe than anyone expected. But it’s built into the system. Now, this was kind of combined with a kind of religious market fundamentalism based on doctrines of, you know, self-regulating markets and so on, which are pure fantasy. So the regulatory apparatus was dismantled. Well, that accelerates the pace of potential financial crisis. And along with that came the creation of highly exotic financial instruments.
Well, all of this combined, it was pretty clear the early part of this decade that a major crisis was brewing. Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, refused to prick the bubble as could have been done in simple ways, on the basis of religious belief in self-regulating markets. And finally it came to this catastrophe where there’s a credit freeze, the system’s freezing up. Something has to be done, and it’s interesting what the choices are. It goes back to our earlier discussion. So this morning on the radio, George Bush announced that the government is intervening in the banks, but we want to make sure that we go back to the profit motive, not policy motives, not political motives. What are political motives? Well, that means participation of the population in making decisions. So we hate democracy; we don’t want the public to be involved in decisions about things; we want to go back to the profit motive, meaning that a private tyranny, which is what a corporation is, should look out for itself, not for the public interest.
In the last hour I’ve found scores of websites detailing how Obama is an Islamic terrorist, a socialist, a communist and a black insurrectionist. What the fuck has gone on in America in the last decade? Obviously at least some of this must be down to the colour of his skin, the sheer exoticness of the man, as he stands on the verge of being elected leader of a nation facing an ever more uncertain future. Did the rot set in before this? Is it something confined to a vocal and shrill minority who use the internet to good effect? Or does it extend beyond them…?
