I still have intentions of doing some proper rec posts of all the excellent fic that I read during my initial reading dive into the AO3 tags last spring/summer, but - since apparently that's not happening yet, I may as well start reccing as I go.
These are a couple of longer fics that I marked for later on my initial sweep through the archive and finally remembered to go back and read. One season one genfic, one late-season explicit fic in which I'm sure the main pairing will surprise no one.
My first chore today was to send off the information my tax guy needs for the part of the Ranch that is held as a corporation. Corporate taxes are due March 15, not April 15. Sigh. This afternoon I took the tractor down to the arena and spent a lot of time going in tight circles as fast as I could. According to someone I talked to that is the secret for leveling out an arena. My arena had big lumps in it where truck loads of sand were dumped. Over time the lumps have gotten better, but it has been easy to see that it was far from flat. The circles seems to have worked, the arena looks a lot better, but then it always looks better after it has been all stirred up and the footing is soft. Leslie Miller was there, she came to camp for the weekend. So were Glen and Alice. They all helped first clear the arena so I could work it up, and then set for this weekend's Obstacle Practice. It was fun up until I had to race back to the house to meet Denise who came and trimmed Firefly's feet. Off early tomorrow to finish setup and get ready to greet riders. Only 5 coming Sat and 7 on Sun.
Finally actually playing this after a brief stint where I was too annoyed to look at it. (The fact that you can't turn off auto-save in the game pisses me off.)
I'm not very far in yet; only made it to my first advancement match. I'm liking the story and the characters so far, but the gameplay... Look, I like turn-based gameplay. I'll probably at least try to knuckle through to the end of this, but I do miss that from the other games. Add to it the fact that the 3D camera is making me kinda dizzy, and, well.
Honestly, a replay of Fire Red and/or Leaf Green and watching the cut scenes/a Let's Play on YouTube is looking pretty appealing by comparison.
Today's digital world relies on a consistent view of the time. We achieve this with the Network Time Protocol (NTP). Given the extent of our reliance on an accurate time base it is surprusing that the NTP protocol has no security mechanisms to protect the integrity of time dissemination. Lets look at time, NTP and the recent efforts to add authenticity and temper detection to this protocol.
I'm writing this with a cat on my lap. I have to periodically remind Carter that he can't grab for balance at shirt. There are breasts under there, my dude, and your claws are unwelcome. Really. But I can't bring myself to knock him off my lap. That's partly because I love him, and partly because I know it won't do much good; in a minute or two, he'll be back on my lap. I have found myself repeatedly surprised by finding him back on my lap after dumping him - I don't even notice him coming up to my lap until after he's made himself comfortable and me uncomfortable. Cats. Go figure.
I'm worried I lost my kindle when I misplaced my red bag in which everything is. Well, not everything, but perhaps my kindle. Or maybe not. My kindle might be under my bed. If it's not under my bed, I'll have to replace it sooner or later. I'm a bit wary of looking and finding out one way or another.
Today was unseasonably warm and sunny, so I took pictures around the yard. The first few are from indoors, then the rest are the house yard. (See the savanna.)
Hey everyone, we have a Fireside this week and then next week we’ll get back to our somewhat silly break discussing the mechanics of warfare in Dune. But I did want to stop to chatter a bit about something that came up in that discussion, which is something about the nature of personalist regimes in both fiction and the real world.
Percy, having a nap on a cat bed on a cat bed. For whatever reason, he will ignore both of these cat beds separately, but when they are on top of teach other, he likes them.
First off, to clarify what I mean, we can understand the governance of polities to be personalist or institutional. Now if ‘the governance of polities’ sounds vague that is because it is: I want to include not only state governments but also the political systems of non-state polities (tribes, etc.) because these too can be personalist or – to a more limited degree – institutional in nature (though arguably a fully institutional system of government is purely a property of states – but of course ‘state/non-state’ is not a binary, but a spectrum from fully consolidated state to extremely fragmented non-state polities, with many points in the middle). So we’re talking about polities, political entities which may or may not be states.
Basically the issue here is that for personalist regimes, both power and the daily function of the political elements of the society are held personally, whereas in institutional regimes, that power is mediated heavily through institutions which are larger than the people in them. By way of example, in both kinds of regimes, you might have a ‘Minister of Security’ who reports to the leader of the country. But whereas in an institutional regime, the minister of security does so because that is the institution (he holds an office and his office reports to the office of the leader), in a personalist regime, the power relationship depends on that minister’s personal relationship to the leader. He reports to the leader not because his office does but because he, personally is connected – by ties of loyalty or patronage or family – to the leader himself.
The governments in Dune are fundamentally personalist in nature. Power is determined by a person’s relationship to the central leader – the Duke Leto Atreides or the Baron Harkonnen or the Emperor Shaddam IV. And that goes both ways: your position in the state is determined by your relationship, such that the Duke’s own personal private doctor, Yueh, is a powerful key political figure despite not overseeing, say, a health ministry. He is close to the Duke, so he is powerful. On the flipside, the Duke’s ability to run his government is fundamentally contingent on his relationship to his immediate retinue, since no man rules alone and since those sub-leaders aren’t really bound to him by institutional offices, but rather by personal loyalty (something that comes up in the book where Leto discusses the extensive propaganda necessary to conjure the aura of bravura he relies on to lock in the loyalty of his lower subordinates).
But what I wanted to muse on was not specifically the personalist governments of Dune but rather the prevalence of personalist systems in fiction more broadly. Speculative fiction in particular is full of such personalist systems (it is one of the great attractions, I suspect, of writing medieval-themed fantasy, that the time period being invoked was one of ubiquitous personalist rule), but equally other forms of fiction often effectively create personalist systems for the purpose of the fiction even out of systems which are institutional in nature.
And it isn’t very hard to understand why: stories are for the most part fundamentally about personal dramas and the characters in them. At the very least, a classic device of storytelling is to take an impersonal, institutional system and then represent it through a character who stands in for the whole institution. Think, for instance, of how in Game of Thrones, the Tycho Nestoris character ends up standing in for the institution of the Iron Bank (repeatedly stressed as an impersonal institution) to give it a single character’s face. Or in Andor how the imperial security bureaucracy is essentially personalized in the characters of Dedra Meero and Leo Partagaz. It’s a way of embodying an institution as a character by representing it as a character. Stories are often more compelling when they are about characters rather than institutions, so the political systems in our stories tend to be personalist ones centered on characters rather than institutional ones.
But of course stories are also a way we train ourselves to think about unfamiliar problems and here things get a bit awkward because while our fictional worlds are composed almost entirely of personalist systems of rule, the real world is a lot more varied. Absolutely there are personalist political systems in the world today, important ones. But one thing that has been demonstrated fairly clearly is that in the long run, institutional political systems are generally quite a lot better at coping with the needs of complex, modern countries – especially for those larger than a city-state. As a result, the largest and most successful countries generally have institutional rather than personalist political systems. Indeed, personalist systems seem strongly associated with stagnation and decline in a fast-moving modern world.
One of the other reasons why personalist regimes are, I suspect, so popular with storytellers, especially as villains, is that they are easy to defeat on a personal scale. If all of the power in the regime is tied up in the personal relationships of the ruler, then defeating or killing the ruler, the Big Bad, offers at least a chance that no one else will be able to take his place and the system will collapse. That’s not historically absurd – we see it play out in succession disputes repeatedly. The death of Cyrus the Younger at Cunaxa (401) instantly results in the collapse of his revolt, despite the fact that large parts of his army were undefeated – they were there to fight for Cyrus (or his money) and with Cyrus gone, there was no reason to stay. Likewise the death of Harold Godwinson at Hastings (1066) marked the end of effective Saxon resistance to the Norman invasion, because that resistance had been predicated on Harold’s claim to the throne. In the Roman Civil Wars, the flight or death of a given Roman general often resulted in the effective collapse of his faction or the mass desertion of his troops (e.g. the surrender of many Roman senators after defeat after Pompey’s flight from defeat at Pharsalus (48) or Antonius’ army’s defection after his flight at Actium (31), in both cases happening while the ’cause’ of the fleeing party was still very much ‘live’).
And that’s a really satisfying story narrative where the hero is able to defeat the enemy utterly by doing a single brave thing on a very human scale – throwing the Ring into Mount Doom sort of stuff. And for personalist regimes, that can actually work – such regimes often do not survive succession when the charismatic leader at the center whose relationships define power dies or flees. This can actually be exacerbated by the fact that many rulers in personalist regimes do not want to have clear successors, since a clear successor might easily become a rival. Thus not, for instance, the many dictators worldwide whose succession plan is just a bunch of question marks (e.g. Putin’s Russia). Anything else would be inviting a coup.
The danger, of course, is applying that same logic to an institutional system. But since the relations of power in an institutional system belong to institutions which are ‘bigger’ than the people who populate them – power belongs to the office, not the man – slaying the Big Bad Leader has very limited effect. It might briefly confuse their leadership system, especially if quite a lot of leaders are lost at once, but institutional logic triggers quite quickly because you’ve killed the leaders but not the institutions. So the institutions quickly go about selecting new leaders, using their existing, codified institutional processes.
Imagine, if you will, for a moment, that someone did, in fact, bomb an American State of the Union Address, killing most of Congress, the President and the Cabinet. Would the United States simply collapse? Would they be able to impose their own new leader into the vacuum? No, pretty obviously not. Within hours or days, each of the fifty states would be appointing, based on their own processes, replacement representatives, while the ‘designated survivor’ assumed the office of the presidency and quickly appointed new acting cabinet members. Such an act would, at most, buy a week or two’s worth of confusion and panic. Even if you kept striking political leaders (who one assumes would try to render themselves harder to hit) the system would just calmly keep replacing them. Tearing out the institutions in this way would demand blowing up basically every official more senior than Local Dog Catcher before you would actually collapse the institutions.
In practice you could never do that with individual strikes. The only way to tear out the institutions would be through occupation – through putting troops on the ground where they could impose their own systems of control directly on the populace. Of course in many cases that approach might be ruinously costly in both lives and resources, perhaps so costly not even to be contemplated. Which is one of the many reasons it would be important at the outset to distinguish between an institutional regime and a personalist one, to avoid being in a situation where a strike at the ‘Big Bad’ has failed to achieve objectives, leaving a plan trapped between the ground forces it is unable or unwilling to commit and the inability of assassinations and airstrikes to end a conflict once it has been begun.
Ollie, very much asleep on our sofa chair. He likes this spot too (and you get a great picture of his vampire overbite).
On to Recommendations.
Naturally with a major conflict breaking out in the Middle East between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran (and Iran’s regional proxies) on the other, there is quite a lot of discussion. One facet of the war that I expect will be increasingly relevant the longer it goes on are conditions in the Strait of Hormuz. I am not a shipping expert, but Sal Mercogliano is and has been offering daily updates on his channel discussing the implications. Close to a quarter of the world’s oil and natural gas moves through the Strait of Hormuz and most of that production has no other effective way to reach markets, making a disruption in the Strait – shipping there is currently at almost nothing and there have been multiple attacks on cargo and tanker ships – tremendously important globally as everyone’s economy relies on these sources of energy. As I write this, oil – at $90.80 a barrel – is up almost 50% from where it was mid-February and still rising in price. That is going to have substantial economic impacts if it remains that way.
The war in Iran is naturally a rapidly evolving one and I don’t want to say too much because I am not an area-specialist. I will simply note if you want to keep track of developments that you will generally find more careful and informed discussion in dedicated national security publications likeForeign Affairs, Foreign PolicyandWar on the Rocks as opposed to other news media and especially as opposed to 24 hour cable news; I also pay attention to business press like the news side of the Wall Street Journal. My own view, for what it is worth (I have not been shy in sharing on social media), is that this war is a mistake and potentially quite a severe mistake.
But let us shift to some Classics news. This week’s Pasts Imperfect was grim but necessary reading, a tally of five significant humanities programs (including two classics programs) being shut down, part of a larger wave of closures and department shrinkage across the humanities afflicting both history and classics and of course other disciplines as well. I know most people do not have this front of mind, but it is the case that we are, as a society, actively dismantling the infrastructure that discovers, learns about and teaches us the ancient past, actively inhibiting our ability to draw on those lessons for present or future crises.
That said, while scholarship in our fields is being reduced, it has no stopped entirely and I wanted to note (hat tip Sarah E. Bond who alerted me) that a brand new publication, Beacons and Military Communication from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, eds. M. Ødegaard, S. Brookes, and T. Lemm has just been released online by Brill in an open-access volume you can download for free, funded by UCL and the Research Council of Norway. European research grants increasingly are making open-access publication in some form a condition of funding (and paying for that kind of publication, which is expensive) and I really wish that grant funders in the United States would follow suit. Though, of course, that would require us to actually fund the NEH.
Finally for this week’s book recommendation, I wanted to answer a question I have been asked quite a few times since I noted that I was teaching Latin this academic year, which is some variation of, “if I wanted to teach myself Latin, what should I use to do it?” And the first answer is, ‘it is very hard to teach yourself a language, you should probably take a class.’ But if you truly are determined to try to self-teach yourself Latin, the book to work from is almost certainly (and this recommendation is going to surprise absolutely no one ) F.M. Wheelock and R.A. Lafleur, Wheelock’s Latin, 7th edition (2011). While this is the seventh edition, Wheelock turns seventy this year, which hopefully expresses how tried-and-tested the approach here is. Wheelock is what I would term a ‘grammar first’ textbook (as opposed to ‘reading first’ approaches like the OLC or CLC), which is going to be more appropriate for adult learners (whereas I think the ‘reading first’ approaches are probably better for Middle/High School contexts, but both approaches can work in any context). The ‘grammar first’ approach means that Wheelock does not have a fun little story for you to follow or characters to meet – it has explanations of grammar rules and practice sentences to practice those rules. But the advantage is that it can be wonderfully systematic, moving you logically from each rule to the next. The disadvantage is that in either a self-study or classroom environment, Wheelock demands that you bring 100% of the discipline and motivation necessary to push through the material.
The other great advantage of Wheelock, especially for the independent learner, is that because it has been the dominant English textbook for Latin for, again, seventy years there are an enormous number of resources built for it, that interface directly with the order and method with which Wheelock presents Latin grammar and vocabulary. Of particular note is R.A. LaFleur’s Scribblers, Sculptors and Scribes(2010) which is a primary source reader using real Latin inscriptions and texts designed to be used as a workbook moving in parallel with Wheelock. Meanwhile, once one has climbed the steep heights of Wheelock, the series is capped off by its own excellent reader intended for use after the main textbook, Wheelock and LaFleur, Wheelock’s Latin Reader: Selections from Latin Literature (2001). And because Wheelock is so old and so standard, there’s no lack of other resources designed to seamlessly hook into it.
Again, for anyone looking to learn Latin I would firstvery strongly recommend an actual Latin class – learning any language is hard – regardless of what textbook they’re using (I have experience with the OLC, Wheelock and Ecce, I’ve had students come in from the CLC and Lingua Latina, they all work in a classroom setting). But if you really do intend to try to self-teach, I think Wheelock is your best bet.
1) At the grocery this morning and their clothing displays mirror the seesaw of our weather – puffy coats next to sundresses. It was so warm today than when I came back to drop the groceries off, I had to change into a t-shirt before I went out again, and it was barely 10 AM.
2) Had a nice piece of luck as well. The grocery was running a $10 coupon for $100 or more of purchases. I had to drop my partner off at work this morning because he had an all-day thing, and in the rush forgot to take the grocery list. So as I was putting stuff in the trunk I remembered I'd forgotten his celery. Went back and decided to pick up a few more things since I had the $10 coupon now. Got to the register and realized someone had left that same coupon sitting in the machine when they left! So I got the $10 off and still have my coupon for next week.
It amazes me how people don't bother taking their coupons. It's usually for things they're buying anyway and a free item is not unusual. And this was literally $10 in cash sitting there, when groceries are so expensive! I didn't even know what it was at first, just saw that someone hadn't taken their coupon and figured I'd look to see if it was something I could use.
3) Also on the grocery front, I have recently become addicted to Sumo oranges. Came across them during a sale, and got just one bag because they're pricey. Came back home with 3 the following week.
Oranges have never been my favorite, even though we had incredibly good ones growing in our backyard growing up. These are the closest I've gotten to those. I never end up eating only one.
3) As part of marchmetamatterschallenge, I have been going through my tv_talk comments in case I discussed much about a show (mostly, no). However it was a good reminder about a great many shows I watched which I liked and would recommend, but might not think of if someone asked me.
Some of these were strong throughout, and some long running ones have some weaker seasons but still worth watching. In no particular order, just as they came up on my entries: ( Read more... )
4) One of the things reviewing all these past posts made me aware of is how much more TV I'm watching, but overall with less enjoyment. Every so often I hit a show I would really recommend, but usually they fall into the "ok" category or I just nope out of it a few episodes in.
I think the changes in TV have a lot to do with this. ( Read more... )
Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #999. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules.
At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite.
It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected happened at mealtimes. Meat: forbidden. Dairy: forbidden. Eggs: forbidden. Fish: feast-day only. Oil: regulated. But squid?
Squid had eight arms, no bones, and a gift for changing color. Nobody had bothered writing a regulation for that. This wasn’t a loophole born of legal creativity but an oversight rooted in taxonomic confusion. Medieval monks, confronted with a creature that was neither fish nor fowl, gave up and let it pass.
In a kitchen governed by prohibitions, the safest ingredient was the one that caused the least disturbance. Squid entered not with applause, but with a shrug.
Bonus stuffed squid recipe at the end.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Went up to Northampton on Wednesday for the screening of The Corinthians : We Were The Champions. This film is about the Manchester Corinthians women’s football team, who formed in 1949 - right in the middle of the FA’s 50-year ban on women playing on affiliated grounds - and kept going through to the 1980s, and were phenomenally successful, winning an overwhelming majority of their games played, including triumphs in two international tournaments abroad.
I wanted to see this film, not just because it was about a successful women’s football team, but because, apart from Gail Newsham’s magisterial book chronicling the Dick, Kerr Ladies, it was the first time anyone had made a concerted effort to tell a story of women’s football in England during the FA ban years, and because I’d made a contribution to the crowdfunder that made the film possible.
I’d let my friend Kathy, who lives in Northampton, know that I was coming, and she’d said she might be there.
The cinema, the Northampton Filmhouse, was a fringe venue, showing this film as part of the Northampton Film Festival, so there was a compact intimate feel with friendly front of house and bar staff. Screen 2, where the film was showing, was in a building off to the side of the main house. I took a seat with plenty of time to spare, and periodically scanned the audience for Kathy. I finally spotted her a few minutes before the start, and went over to her. We hugged and kissed and she said we’d chat at the end.
The film was fascinating. Ten surviving players took turns being shown on screen recalling events from the team’s playing days, from their being formed by their tireless manager Percy Ashley, through playing their matches on Fog Lane Park in Didsbury and having to wash in the duck pond, to their exploits playing matches all over Continental Europe and in South America. Much of their achievements were depicted in cartoon strip form, inspired by the old sports comics like Tiger, but there were actually some pieces of black and white footage of some of their games. Strikingly, while the football establishment here in England were reported as having taken the view that the team (and all women’s football) should be dismissed, ridiculed or ignored, the players recalled that much of the general public’s reaction to them was positive - while abroad, they got to play in grounds including the homes of Juventus and Sporting Lisbon, played to packed stadiums, and were treated like celebrities by the local populace.
Helen, the director, did an interesting Q&A session at the end. She said how Channel 4 and Channel 5 had both turned down her film proposal, thinking people wouldn’t be interested in a women’s football film. At the end of the session I went over to Kathy and her friend, and we all talked as we meandered to the foyer. She said she’d be at the Lionesses match in Nottingham at the weekend and we agreed to meet there.
Out in the foyer Helen was standing at a table selling tote bags and badges bearing the film’s logo. She was delighted when I told her I’d contributed to the crowdfunder and that I’d travelled from near Portsmouth. She insisted on giving me a complimentary bag and badge. I wished her luck with getting the film screened nationwide, and she asked whether I knew any cinemas round my way that might be interested. I mentioned the one in Southampton that showed Copa 71 two years ago and she said she might try them. Fingers crossed.
Back home yesterday, then today I travelled up to Nottingham for tomorrow’s Lionesses game.
Mood:: okay
Music:: Slip Slidin’ Away (live) by Simon and Garfunkel
Last time, we discussed Marc-William Palen’s Pax
Economica,
which looks at how the cause of free trade was taken up by a motley crew
of anti-imperialists, internationalists, pacifists, marxists, and
classical liberals in the nineteenth century. Protectionism was the
prerogative of empire—only available to those with a navy—and it so it
makes sense that idealists might support “peace through trade”. So how
did free trade go from a cause of the “another world is possible” crowd
to the halls of the WTO? Did we leftists catch a case of buyer’s
remorse, or did the goods delivered simply not correspond to the order?
To make an attempt at an answer, we need more history. From the acknowledgements of Quinn
Slobodian’s
Globalists:
This book is a long-simmering product of the Seattle protests against
the World Trade Organization in 1999. I was part of a generation that
came of age after the Cold War's end. We became adolescents in the
midst of talk of globalization and the End of History. In the more
hyperactive versions of this talk, we were made to think that nations
were over and the one indisputable bond uniting humanity was the
global economy. Seattle was a moment when we started to make
collective sense of what was going on and take back the story line. I
did not make the trip north from Portland but many of my friends and
acquaintances did, painting giant papier-mâché fists red to strap to
backpacks and coming back with takes of zip ties and pepper spray,
nights in jail, and encounters with police—tales they spun into war
stories and theses. This book is an apology for not being there and
an attempt to rediscover in words what the concept was that they went
there to fight.
Slobodian’s approach is to pull on the thread that centers around the
WTO itself. He ends up identifying what he calls the “Geneva School” of
neoliberalism: from Mise’s circle in Vienna, to the International
Chamber of Commerce in Paris, to the Hayek-inspired Mont Pèlerin
Society, to Petersmann of the WTO precursor GATT organization, Röpke of
the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, and their lesser
successors of the 1970s and 1980s.
The thesis that Slobodian ends up drawing is that neoliberalism is not
actually a laissez-faire fundamentalism, but rather an ideology that
placed the value of free-flowing commerce above everything else: above
democracy, above sovereignty, above peace, and that as such it actually
requires active instutional design to protect commerce from the dangers
of, say, hard-won gains by working people in one country (Austria,
1927), expropriation of foreign-owned plantations in favor of landless
peasants (Guatemala, 1952), internal redistribution within countries
transitioning out of minority rule (South Africa, 1996), decolonization
(1945-1975 or so), or just the election of a moderate socialist at the
ballot box (Chile, 1971).
Now, dear reader, I admit to the conceit that if you are reading this,
probably you are a leftist also, and if not, at least you are interested
in understanding how it is that we think, with what baubles do we
populate our mental attics, that sort of thing. Well, friend, you know
that by the time we get to Chile and Allende we are stomping and
clapping our hands and shouting in an extasy of indignant sectarian
righteousness. And that therefore should we invoke the spectre of
neoliberalism, it is with the deepest of disgust and disdain: this
project and all it stands for is against me and mine. I hate it like I
hated Henry Kissinger, which is to say, a lot, viscerally, it hurts now
to think of it, rest in piss you bastard.
two theologies
And yet, I’m still left wondering what became of the odd alliance of
Marx with Manchester liberalism. Palen’s Pax Economica continues to
sketch a thin line through the twentieth century, focusing on showing
the continued presence of commercial-peace exponents despite it not
turning out to be our century. But the rightward turn of the main
contingent of free-trade supporters is not explained. I have an idea
about how it is that this happened; it is anything but scholarly, but
here we go.
Let us take out our coarsest brush to paint a crude story: the 19th
century begins in the wake of the American and French revolutions,
making the third estate and the bourgeoisie together the revolutionary
actors of history. It was a time in which “we” could imagine organizing
society in different ways, the age of the utopian imaginary, but
overlaid with the structures of the old, old money, old land ownership,
revanchist monarchs, old power, old empire. In this context, Cobden’s
Anti-Corn Law League was insurgent, heterodox, asking for a specific
political change with the goal of making life on earth better for the
masses. Free trade was a means to an end. Not all Cobdenites had the
same ends, but Marx and Manchester both did have ends, and they happened
to coincide in the means.
Come the close of the Great War in 1918, times have changed. The
bourgeoisie have replaced the nobility as the incumbent power, and those
erstwhile bourgeois campaigners now have to choose between idealism and
their own interest. But how to choose?
Some bourgeois campaigners will choose a kind of humanist notion of
progress; this is the thread traced by Palen, through the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, the Young Women’s Christian
Association, the Haslemere
Group, and others.
Some actors are not part of the hegemonic bourgeoisie at all, and so
have other interests. The newly independent nations after
decolonization have more motive to upend the system than to preserve it;
their approach to free trade has both tactical and ideological
components. Tactical, in the sense that they wanted access to
first-world markets, but also sometimes some protections for their own
industries; ideological, in the sense that they often acted in
solidarity with other new nations against the dominant powers. In
addition to the new nations, the Soviet bloc had its own semi-imperial
project, and its own specific set of external threats; we cannot blame
them for being tactical either.
And then you have Ludwig von Mises. Slobodian hints at Mises’ youth in
the Austro-Hungarian empire, a vast domain of many languages and peoples
but united by trade and the order imposed by monarchy. After the war
and the breakup of the empire, I can only imagine—and here I am
imagining, this is not a well-evidenced conclusion—I imagine he felt a
sense of loss. In the inter-war, he holds court as the doyen of the
Vienna Chamber of Commerce, trying to put the puzzle pieces back
together, to reconstruct the total integration of imperial commerce, but
from within Red Vienna.
When in 1927, a court decision acquitted a fascist milicia that fired
into a crowd, killing a worker and a child, the city went on general
strike, and workers burned down the ministry of justice. Police
responded violently, killing 89 people and injuring over 1000. Mises
was delighted: order was restored.
And now, a parenthesis. I grew up Catholic, in a ordinary kind of way.
Then in my early teens, I concluded that if faith meant anything, it has
to burn with a kind of fervor; I became an evangelical Catholic, if such
is a thing. There were special camps you could go to with intense
emotional experiences and people singing together and all of that is
God, did you know? Did you know? The feelings attenuated over time but
I am a finisher, and so I got confirmed towards the end of high school.
I went off to university for physics and stuff and eventually,
painfully, agonizingly concluded there was no space for God in the
equations.
Losing God was incredibly traumatic for me. Not that I missed, like,
the idea of some guy, but as someone who wants things to make sense, to
have meaning, to be based on something, anything at all: losing a core
value or morality invalidated so many ideas I had about the world and
about myself. What is the good life, a life well led? What is true and
right in a way that is not contingent on history? I am embarrassed to
say that for a while I took the UN declaration of human rights to be
axiomatic.
When I think about Mise’s reaction to the 1927 general strike in Vienna,
I think about how I scrambled to find something, anything, to replace my
faith in God. As the space for God shrank with every advance in
science, some chose to identify God with his works, and then to
progressively ascribe divine qualities to those works: perhaps commerce is
axiomatically Good, and yet ineffable, in the sense that it is Good on
its own, and that no mortal act can improve upon it. How else can we
interpret Hayek’s relationship with the market except as awe in the
presence of the divine?
This is how I have come to understand the neoliberal value system: a
monotheism with mammon as godhead. There may be different schools
within it, but all of the faithful worship the same when they have to
choose between, say, commerce and democracy, commerce and worker’s
rights, commerce and environmental regulation, commerce and taxation,
commerce and opposition to apartheid. It’s a weird choice of deity. Now
that God is dead, one could have chosen anything to take His place, and
these guys chose the “global economy”. I would pity them if I still had
a proper Christian heart.
means without end
I think that neoliberals made a miscalculation when they concluded that
the peace of doux commerce is not predicated on justice. Sure, in the
short run, you can do business with Pinochet’s Chile, privatize the national mining companies, and cut unemployment benefits, but not without incurring moral damage;
people will see through it, in time, as they did in Seattle in 1999.
Slobodian refers to the ratification of the WTO as a Pyrrhic victory; in
their triumph, neoliberals painted a target on their backs.
Where does this leave us now? And what about Mercosur? I’m starting to feel the shape of an answer, but I’m not there yet. I think we’ll cover the
gap between Seattle and the present day in a future dispatch. Until then, let’s
take care of one other; as spoke the prophet Pratchett, there’s no
justice, just us.
Since I know all you Blade Runner fans need to know this, I was watching the Final Cut. Anyway, this was a good experience for the most part, if not "BEST FILM EVAR" level. The city was really interesting since I love world-building in films, and you could imagine spending time there if you could hack the weather and the general dystopia. Harrison Ford was very solid as Deckard, and I really grew to enjoy the 1980s notion of what future tech would be. No smartphones or LCD screens in 2019, folks, you heard it here first! I dunno, maybe they'd just have all seized up in the rain.
I mean, I do kind of get the feeling that Ridley Scott thought up this incredible setting and then asked himself, "So, what about a plot?" because what I get from it is not massively original even for 44 years ago. Replicants, designed with a built-in expiry date, going rogue, your friendly neighbourhood blade runner (who amusingly cannot fight for toffee) has to sort them out. Aged less well in a few points, not least a thankfully short scene with Rachael that sits uncomfortably with today's views of consent. I get that it's playing on noir films that did similar, but still.
Okay, to the "Tears in Rain" speech. It was... okay, I guess. I suspect having seen it everywhere for decades has robbed it of the power it probably had in 1982, since the underlying concept is still worthwhile. The movie's slow pace is nice for the most part, especially in the city driving shots. That bloody ESPER image enhancer scene went on and on and on, though. Vangelis's music works well, and seeing big ads for Pan Am is amusing more than distracting. Oh, and there's a unicorn, so yay for that. ★★★½
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