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Courtney Stoker, Patriarchy, and Geek Misogyny

Tadhg — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:26:14 +0000

This is one of the better discussions on prejudice in geek culture that I’ve come across: “Courtney Stoker on Feminist Geek”. I like where Stoker is coming from—perhaps unsurprisingly, for like me she has an academic background in English literature and is also a science fiction fan. But she is far more community-oriented than I am; despite the fact that my geekery goes back decades and despite my involvement in something like Fantasy Bedtime Hour, my engagement with science fiction is primarily either private, or shared through meatspace discussion, or expressed on this blog. None of those things are involvement with large-scale communities such as those Stoker is discussing.

One of the reasons this particular interview with Stoker is important is that she sensibly addresses the influence of anti-geek prejudice on male geeks.

By “sensibly”, I mean she correctly points out that the culture that leads to ostracization of geeks in their teens is inextricably linked to patriarchy, and that by adopting misogynistic attitudes they’re just buying into the value system that was used against them in the first place:

By becoming misogynists, geek men actually reinforce the sexist standards that lead to them getting beat up or made fun of as kids. Patriarchy is still to blame. And the inability to recognize this, not only by the individual geeks who become misogynists, but by critics of geek culture, makes sexism in these communities difficult to diagnose and counteract.

—Amanda Hess. “Courtney Stoker on Feminist Geek”. The Sexist, 29 June 2010.

This isn’t a revelation for me, in fact it’s rather a depressingly obvious manifestation of one of the most despair-inducing human failings: the inability of the oppressed to generalize beyond the injustice of their own particular oppression to a larger rejection of prejudice and inequality. That, and its corollary, the tendency of oppressed groups to seek other groups (internal or external) that they themselves can look down on, in a misguided attempt to shore up the psychic damage they’ve suffered by placing themselves in a position to inflict it on others.

As obvious as it might be, I haven’t seen it formulated as such from the feminist side too often in this context, and am glad that Stoker points it out here. I’m not sure I agree with her analysis of how “Growing Up (Male) Geek” is not equivalent to institutional disenfranchisement, partly because I’m not sure whether she means that the young geeks or their older selves lack institutional power. If she means the latter, I mostly concur, with a pair of caveats: it’s important to recognize the amount of damage that can be done to people when they’re children by bullying and disenfranchisement, and to reject the values that led to said bullying and disenfranchisement; it’s also important for individuals, regardless of their past histories, to take responsibility for their own thoughts and hence their own prejudices, and to do the work to overcome these prejudices.

I have no doubt that I’ll cover this ground again, as I have too many reactions for just one post.

Tags: culture, fandom, feminism, politics, power, psychology, science-fiction, sexism

Controlling Discourse in the Internet Era

Tadhg — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:37:25 +0000

This article on manipulation of Digg stories doesn’t surprise me, but it’s definitely sad, and demonstrates the fragility of online forums (and, perhaps, democratic systems in general). I’m also interested by the dedication of those involved, and their determination to suppress opposing viewpoints—while, naturally, maintaining a sense of persecution.

Tags: culture, politics, power, psychology

Tal Ben-Shahar on Practical Happiness

Tadhg — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:30:24 +0000

Even though Oakland apparently isn’t too bad so far after the Mehserle verdict, thinking about police–protester interactions is depressing, and watching this take on recent events in Toronto didn’t help. So what better than five ways to become happier?

You should follow the link and watch the video, but if you really don’t have time to spare to become happier, a quick summary:

Accept emotional pain. It’s indicates that we’re still alive and not psychopathic.
Focused time with loved ones. We need it, and we need it without distraction.
Regular exercise. We’re not supposed to be sedentary. Even three times a week for thirty–forty minutes helps tremendously.
Be grateful. He suggests noting five things you’re grateful for every night.
Simplify. Stop trying to jam more and more into less time.

I have experience with some of these, and they work. This includes exercise; the difference it can make is extremely significant. (It doesn’t have to be CrossFit—but do some kind of strenuous exercise three times a week for forty minutes!). I haven’t gotten too far with simplification. The “gratitude journal”, despite its New Age veneer, has some strong evidence behind it. I might try that out.

Tags: happiness, law, politics, power, psychology

Some Recent Web Reading on Economics

Tadhg — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 05:39:35 +0000

A David Harvey lecture on the recent crises, animated:

An NPR broadcast on how falling real wages have been compensated for by expanding easy credit.

A reminder that money is not real.

Some thoughts on why higher education correlates to higher political self-delusion in Britain. (Also, on why economists and other intellectuals are so likely to construct theories defending even utterly ludicrous levels of inequality.)

Tags: economics, money, politics, power

The Tenets of Injustice

Tadhg — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:39:59 +0000

This excerpt gives an excellent summary of our current state of affairs:

The five tenets of injustice are that: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable. Because of widespread and growing opposition to the five key unjust beliefs, including the belief that so many should now be ‘losers’, most of those advocating injustice are careful with their words. And those who believe in these tenets are the majority in power across almost all rich countries. Although many of those who are powerful may want to make the conditions of life a little less painful for others, they do not believe that there is a cure for modern social ills, or even that a few inequalities can be much alleviated. Rather, they believe that just a few children are sufficiently able to be fully educated and only a few of those are then able to govern; the rest must be led. They believe that the poor will always be with us no matter how rich we are. They have also come to believe that most others are naturally, perhaps genetically, inferior to them. And many of this small group believe that their friends’ and their own greed is helping the rest of humanity as much as humanity can be helped; they are convinced that to argue against such a counsel of despair is foolhardy. It is their beliefs that uphold injustice.

—1–2 Injustice. Danny Dorling. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2010. ISBN: 9781847424266.

(Via Leninology.) I’m impressed enough to order the book.

Tags: books, politics, power

The Platform of the Maine Republican Party

Tadhg — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:00:42 +0000

I came across this via slacktivist, and it makes for interesting reading. Much of it is laughable, including some dubious capitalization and article use. Perhaps surprisingly, I agree with significant portions of it—although this might be due to my and their meaning different things when using the same words…

For example, the final line (and the one that slacktivist discusses) is “Repeal and prohibit any participation in efforts to create a one world government.” I’m all for it. But when I look at the world, the most likely candidate for “OWG” is the nation with military bases in at least 63 countries, which I somehow doubt is what the Maine Republicans are talking about.

There’s also this:

Freedom and personal liberty are conditions of existence which are hard fought for and once won, must be maintained. Each generation must be taught anew the importance of eternal vigilance against those who would disregard the limits imposed on government, and usurp powers not granted to them by the people.

Today this state and the nation are in crisis precisely because we as a people have failed to maintain that vigilance. We have failed to pass down from one generation to another the critical knowledge and lessons that history provides.

—Maine Republican Party. “Platform of the Maine Republican Party”. Maine Republican Party website, 8 May 2010.

Tough to argue with that, although one could certainly argue with the underlying premise that the US was ever a paradise of freedom and liberty. But perhaps my favorite coupling with the above lines is clause III.b:

Reassert the principle that “Freedom of Religion” does not mean “freedom from religion”.

—Maine Republican Party. “Platform of the Maine Republican Party”. Maine Republican Party website, 8 May 2010.

Right… so eternal vigilance must be maintained to keep us free, but absolutely not free from religion? Even on its own, without the introductory piece purporting staunch belief in freedom, that line makes no sense. Religion can be many things, and the line between “free to practice any religion but not no religion” and “free to practice any or no religion” is extraordinarily fine. Too fine, certainly, to be enshrined in law without making “freedom from religion” itself a joke, as you would end up with government arbiters of what constitutes religion. This would be fine with the Maine Republicans as long as those arbiters were “good Christians” in their eyes, but clearly this misses the entire point of freedom of religion. That seems painfully evident (such that I’m tempted to delete this paragraph because it seems so obvious), but a frightening number of right-wingers (and others) in this country refuse to see this point.

There’s plenty of other dumb, bizarre, and objectionable stuff in there. I find myself often hesitant to mock the American right wing, mainly because I consider the “progressives” in this country to have plenty of their own ridiculous delusions, and also because I think that there are legitimate grievances about the power of the state and the erosion of personal autonomy caught up in the “tea party” stuff, but this piece of incoherence from the Maine Republicans screamed out for comment. And mockery.

Tags: humor, politics, power, psychology, religion

Best in Life/The Greatest Joy?

Tadhg — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:38:20 +0000

These are arguably the most famous lines from Conan the Barbarian:

Khitan General: What is best in life?

Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!

Random browsing recently led me to learn that this was inspired by the words of Genghis Khan.

According to Wikiquote’s Genghis Khan entry, Khan said:

The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.

This mindset clearly helped Khan in his conquests, and a culture that supported such a view would be quite suited to military aggression. That said, of course it’s also a vengeful and bloodthirsty outlook. One of the things that strikes me is that its ferocity and focus elicit a certain admiration from me, despite my considering it abhorrent and wrong.

Part of this is definitely from its focus—simple answers to questions like “what is the greatest joy” tend to be compelling. My own view on life doesn’t provide such a focused (or pithy) answer, instead acknowledging (or buckling under) the complexities of existence.

The bloodthirst, however, is an inherent part of its draw. Absolutist moralities tend to allow extreme actions under certain (sometimes quite common) conditions, and this is probably a feature, not a bug—morality is generally a complicated and often confusing constraint. The ability to grant ourselves exemptions from it based on some apparently-coherent larger structure is quite a draw. I also suspect that humans are drawn to intense experiences and that philosophies such as Khan’s benefit from making those more likely (with plenty of drawbacks, clearly).

It is nevertheless telling that even Khan felt the need to add justificatory rationalizations for his actions:

I am the flail of god. Had you not created great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.

(A line which is sadly likely to work on more people than one might think.)

Tags: culture, film, history, politics, power, psychology

Money, Motivation, and Social Organization

Tadhg — Wed, 19 May 2010 05:37:20 +0000

This animated excerpt from a lecture by Dan Pink on the nature of motivation is absolutely worth watching:

In some ways it doesn’t surprise me much to find that people are motivated less by money once beyond a certain income threshold, and more by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It’s great to have empirical verification that this holds true for a lot of people, and not just certain privileged groups, but it’s not particularly counterintuitive or shocking.

The post has a certain inspirational value, viewed individualistically, and it’s valuable for that reason. Anything that encourages us to pursue autonomy, mastery, and purpose seems like a good thing, and this clip had that effect on me.

That being said, I wonder if Pink is really exploring the implications. I haven’t read the book, but it seems like he’s concentrating more on smaller-scale aspects, such as how this can be used by companies. If it helps companies, great, and if that further helps their employees to be happier, fantastic. That being said, basic capitalism is about extracting more value from labor than you’re paying for it, so you could cynically read this as a way for companies and/or managers to improve profits. (Not a new idea, and I certainly think that many of the campus-style tech companies already engage in this approach.)

More interesting to me is the possibility that we’re seeing a shift away from the company as a locus of social control. The denial of autonomy through “scientific management”, and the fact that lower-level employees have been subject to fairly outrageous authoritarian scrutiny for as long as there have been companies, is not coincidental. In many respects workplaces, by their nature gatherings of large groups of people, are potentially destabilizing environments, and the controllers of those environments have always tended towards rigidity and stricture.

Dress codes, petty timekeeping, interference in worker’s lives outside the workplace, enforcement of “moral codes” (particularly regarding sexuality)—these have all been common, and indeed remain so except for a highly privileged very few. The studies that Pink cites, however, and some workplace trends, make it possible that companies might find it increasingly tempting to give up a certain amount of control over their employees in return for higher profits.

This is by no means a given, regardless of what economists might claim—just as workers don’t always focus purely on money, companies and their executives and managers will not always do what’s best for the company or for themselves in economic terms.

However, if it did happen on a large scale, it could have interesting side effects, even if it did absolutely nothing to alter the economic balance in society. People would, I think, have higher expectations regarding how they should be treated, and in the long term I suspect this would lead to more autonomy generally, not just at work—clearly a good thing. The extent to which various existing powers and power structures would let this happen is open to question, but there is a chance that the profit motive would essentially force them to.

There are certainly other questions raised by these studies, such as: what do they say about the organization of our societies? This question is less important in terms of immediate practicalities, but more important in terms of, well, how things should be. If more or less everyone wants to pursue autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and furthermore more or less everyone is more productive except at the most mundane tasks if allowed to pursue said goals, then why don’t we make sure that everyone can?

This is a rhetorical question, in a sense; the answer is because existing power structures won’t allow it. There are other “answers” that obscure the real one, such as “somebody has to do the shit work”, which doesn’t hold up as it’s clear that society would be better off if such work were shared to a greater extent; or “people couldn’t handle the freedom”, which is best addressed by noting that whoever makes that claim is always referring to other people; and so on. It’s definitely a question worth posing, because this illuminates certain unpleasant facts about the functions of power in our society. Those studies are useful because they more or less kill off economic arguments for the existing arrangements.

As a side note, one has to seriously question the structure of schools given the findings of the cited studies, also. Traditional schooling isn’t too good at helping students pursue autonomy; purpose is also questionable; mastery, well, maybe, but not necessarily the mastery the student actually wants.

As more of these studies in behavior and behavioral economics come out, they seem to seriously undermine the theoretical underpinnings of the status quo. Another example was the “power corrupts” study that made it very clear that those given power will very likely abuse it while also feeling they had every right to do so. I’ve always tended to regard theories supporting the status quo as mere updates of “the divine right of kings”, and that bias seems borne out by the evidence[1]. Nevertheless, the evidence is increasingly compelling that we should be organizing our society very differently. Whether or not that makes anything more likely to change for the better is left for the reader to judge.

[1]	Although I should of course be wary of reading any evidence as supporting my own preconceived notions, since I’m predisposed to view all evidence I come across as confirming my beliefs, and so is everyone else.

Tags: culture, economics, politics, power, psychology, video, work

What’s Really Happening in Greece

Tadhg — Sat, 15 May 2010 06:55:31 +0000

The primary narrative I see represented is that the Greeks spend “too much” on their social programs (and to pay their civil servants) and that they’ve been profligate generally and need to cut back, where this means slashing social spending. There may be a little truth to this tale, but there’s a lot more going on, which Michael Hudson exposes.

The larger story is complicated by various opaque financial instruments; it’s also easier to blame bad actors than to see the larger system as broken (a problem that afflicts human reason early on—see “Political Turmoil in Legotown”). There’s also the fact that the money is on the side of people telling the bankers’ side of the narrative.

But, what’s really going on is massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Let’s call the “Greek bailout” what it is: a TARP for German and other European bankers and global currency speculators. The money is being provided by other governments (mainly the German Treasury, cutting back its domestic spending) into a kind of escrow account for the Greek government to pay foreign bondholders who bought up these securities at plunging prices over the past few weeks.

—Michael Hudson. “The People v. The Bankers”. CounterPunch, 11 May 2010.

The profoundly antidemocratic concentration of financial policymaking power in Europe is driving this approach:

Political, social, fiscal and economic power is being transferred to the EU bureaucracy and its financial controllers in the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF, whose austerity plans and related anti-labor programs direct governments to sell off the public domain, land and subsoil wealth, public enterprises, and to commit future tax revenues to pay creditor nations.

—Michael Hudson. “The People v. The Bankers”. CounterPunch, 11 May 2010.

Given the amazing power that the central banks have, why aren’t they subject to democratic control? The usual answer here is about “stability”, the implication being that the messy and dirty democratic process might be overtaken by popular sentiment, and that with a fear of such an occurrence the financial sector will lack the confidence to invest. So the banking controls are made “independent”—that is to say, unaccountable. What occurs then is that instead of the (at least nominally) democratic governments reining in the bankers, the bankers instead rein in the governments, forcing bailouts, regressive fiscal policies, and so on. Which is exactly what we’re seeing during the current crisis.

In the longer term, consider the fact that per-worker productivity has risen vastly in the last 30 years, that corporate profits (even subtracting for various kinds of fraud) have risen similarly, but that real wages in the US haven’t since 1979. This is clear evidence of upward wealth transfer. Consider also that the average person’s debt (consumer and mortgage) has also exploded—with the financial sector reaping the benefits. These are not accidental occurrences, but the result of systematic moves to “financialize” the economy, which rewards the financial sector and punishes other sectors—including industry generally, not just labor.

The long-term lowering of taxes in the US and other Western economies has “freed” more money throughout economic classes, although to radically differing extents. And the response to this on the part of the wealthier sectors has been to buy more hard assets, especially real estate. This makes it necessary for people lower down the chain to attempt to do the same, thus increasing demand, further inflating the bubble, and crucially driving up debt as mortgage sizes increase—thus transferring to the banks much of the money that workers gained from tax cuts.

The tax cuts, however, mean that the government doesn’t get back from the banks what it previously got back from higher taxes for everyone, and so it raises money by other means. Which is what Greece has done:

[I]t has issued bonds to finance the deficit resulting from these tax cuts. The buyers of these bonds (mainly German banks) are demanding that Greek labor (and now German taxpayers as well) should bear the burden of tax shortfalls. German and other European banks and bondholders are to be repaid at the social cost of drastic cutbacks in pensions and social spending — and if possible, by more privatization sell-offs at distress prices.

—Michael Hudson. “The People v. The Bankers”. CounterPunch, 11 May 2010.

The Greek populace understands at least some of this, and doesn’t like it—hence the riots.

I’m not sure how things will turn out there, although my sympathies clearly lie with the Greek populace and not with the bankers. However, this scenario makes me even more concerned for Ireland and its economy, particularly because the Irish are spectacularly unlikely to resist similar “austerity measures”, and can thus look forward to what seems likely to be a dismal economic future.

Tags: economics, politics, power

Building the Bubble

Tadhg — Wed, 05 May 2010 06:30:32 +0000

Was there a conspiracy to build doomed-to-fail speculative bubbles on dubious mortgages? Very likely, but not necessarily in the classic meetings-in-smoky-rooms fashion. Mike Whitney’s article “The Subprime Conspiracy” summarizes what was going on, and who knew about it. It also provides a good description of how the common idea of “conspiracy” can be quite naive, and that matching incentives are all that’s really required.

Tags: economics, politics, power

The History of Debt

Tadhg — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:34:43 +0000

“Debt: The first five thousand years” is a fascinating long-term overview of how debt has evolved and been managed through its history. The perspective granted by the long view is quite different from how I’d been looking at recent debt-related events, in particular regarding the “virtual versus real” money debate.

The author, David Graeber, points out that “virtual money”, money not linked to some “hard standard”, actually emerged first, which is counterintuitive, particularly to those who regard the virtual kind as a recent creation of dubiously-motivated states. He also points out that “hard” money is intrinsically linked to warfare (because it’s possible to steal it; a possibly more accurate statement would be that it’s possible to acquire “hard” money while remaining unconnected to, or destroying, the system where that money originated—something that’s not possible in the same way with virtual money).

From this point, he produces the concept of an economic cycle that I’ve never come across before:

… [O]ne can see the last 5 000 years of human history as the history of a kind of alternation. Credit systems seem to arise, and to become dominant, in periods of relative social peace, across networks of trust, whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions, whilst precious metals replace them in periods characterised by widespread plunder.

—David Graeber. “Debt: the first five thousand years”. Eurozine, 20 Aug 2009.

I highly recommend reading the whole article.

(Note: I came across the article via Hacker News and The Long Now.)

Tags: economics, history, politics, power

Anthrax Persecution

Tadhg — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:39:02 +0000

You may remember the antrax mailings of late 2001. From 2002 to 2006, the FBI seems to have spent much of its time focusing on Steven Hatfill, who was later dropped as a suspect. However, while investigating Hatfill, they also apparently waged a campaign of harassment against him, as detailed in “The Wrong Man”.

Hatfill was able to sue the Justice Department (and others) for ruining his reputation, gaining a $5.82 million settlement. So from that perspective it appears that “the system worked”, with Hatfill able to gain compensation for the damage done to him. However, he had to undergo years of was is clearly persectution first. Furthermore, there are two things outlined in the article that I find particularly disturbing. The first is government interference in his work life:

Hatfill was fired from SAIC. The official explanation given was that he had failed to maintain a necessary security clearance; the real reason, he believes, was that the government wanted him fired. He immediately landed the associate directorship of a fledgling Louisiana State University program designed to train firefighters and other emergency personnel to respond to terrorist acts and natural disasters, a job that would have matched the $150,000 annual salary he’d been getting at SAIC. But after Justice Department officials learned of Hatfill’s employment, they told LSU to “immediately cease and desist” from using Hatfill on any federally funded program. He was let go before his first day. Other prospective employment fell through. No one would return his calls. One job vanished after Hatfill emerged from a meeting with prospective employers to find FBI agents videotaping them.

—David Freed. “The Wrong Man”. The Atlantic, May 2010.

Now, one could look at this and claim it makes sense, that if the Justice Department are sure he was responsible for the attacks, they couldn’t in good conscience have him drawing a salary originating in federal funds. And once you start down that path, why let him get paid by anyone?

Of course, the problem is pretty clear: what if they’re wrong? This is the whole reason why a “justice system” exists, to try to ensure that people are only punished if they’ve actually committed crimes. Furthermore, the justice system is supposed to be the entire manager of that process—that is, if it punishes someone, that should be their total punishment, and additional other punishment (such as being prevented from working) should be unnecessary.

One would ideally hope that the Justice Department as a whole, and the individuals working within it, would have some clue about this. Instead, they applied pressure to prevent Hatfill from working, which seems awfully like extra-judicial punishment to me.

It should be clear how dangerous that is. Allowing government officials to apply such pressure without having to prove anything is a recipe for abuse.

The most disturbing incident in my view, however, is this one:

[...] FBI agents in a Dodge Durango, trying to keep up with them, blew through a red light in a school zone with children present. Hatfill says he got out of his car to snap a photo of the offending agents and give them a piece of his mind. The Durango sped away—running over his right foot. Hatfill declined an ambulance ride to the hospital; unemployed, he had no medical insurance. When Washington police arrived, they issued him a ticket for “walking to create a hazard.” The infraction carried a $5 fine. Hatfill would contest the ticket in court and lose. The agent who ran over his foot was never charged.

—David Freed. “The Wrong Man”. The Atlantic, May 2010.

I find this even more disturbing because the injustice is so apparent, because there is no excuse for this whatsoever, because the lack of accountability borders on the insane, and because of the apparent immediate (and instinctive) collusion by the various authorities involved.

Even if Hatfill had been responsible for the anthrax attacks, it would still have been both wrong and illegal for FBI agents to run over his foot. Since no proof of his being the anthrax mailer seems to exist, that makes him an innocent citizen, and innocent citizens shouldn’t suffer random assaults by government agents.

Now, when the Washington police showed up, their actions are profoundly wrong. This is compounded by the fact that Hatfill would lose the case in court. While it’s vaguely possible that he bore some responsibility for getting his foot run over, the driver’s culpability is almost guaranteed to be greater… and the driver was never charged. It seems unlikely that this would have been the case if they hadn’t been an FBI agent.

Hatfill’s comment on this? “This is a police state. The government can pretty much do whatever it wants.” Not 100% true—else he wouldn’t have been able to sue for a settlement—but far, far closer to the truth than most people would care to admit.

Tags: law, politics, power

Market Efficiency in Action

Tadhg — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:18:43 +0000

It should be clear that having better access to information than others will make it pretty easy to make money in market trading. And:

While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

—Charles Duhigg. “Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds”. The New York Times, 23 July 2009.

That seems like quite the loophole.

Predictably, the major players are exploiting it:

The deep-pocket bank/brokerages actually pay the NYSE and the NASDAQ to “colocate” their behemoth computers ON THE FLOOR OF THE EXCHANGES so they can shave off critical milliseconds after they’ve gotten a first-peak [sic] at incoming trades.

—Mike Whitney. “High-Frequency Trading as High-Tech Robbery”. CounterPunch, 16 April 2010.

The players on Wall Street are not going to stop doing this kind of thing anytime soon. Their entire existence is predicated on finding stuff like this and profiting from it. Call it arbitrage, cheating, deceit, exploitation, whatever, but it’s what makes them hugely rich, and if one avenue is closed off they’ll find another. Regulation would certainly help, but what’s really needed is more direct (and democratic) connections between people and their money—much of the dodgy financial history of the last thirty years is of Wall Street figuring out how to induce the shepherds of other people’s money (pension fund managers, corporate officers, public officials) to make bad bets, and then cleaning up thereafter. This is pervasive enough to have significantly warped the economy of New York’s cultural events, and it’s not getting any better.

The moral hazard in inducements to gamble with other people’s money should be clear. The technology certainly exists today to make concentrations of “public” wealth (as pension funds and, indeed, corporations ostensibly are) much more responsive to that public, but this would require wiping away a large chunk of the entrenched financial interests (and they have the money to fight that, clearly).

It almost goes without saying that cheating, particularly of the kind outlined by The New York Times and Mike Whitney above, should be forbidden both right now and in any future better market arena, but fixing things like that just isn’t enough. The whole thing needs to be changed utterly (note that it would be possible to change it utterly while retaining capitalism and democracy, incidentally—an anarchist revolution isn’t necessarily required here, although hypothetically a true anarchist revolution would solve these and a lot of other problems).

Tags: economics, politics, power, tech

The Office Model of the Office

Tadhg — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:29:34 +0000

I haven’t watched much of either the British or American versions of the show, but am nevertheless going to recommend three posts by Venkatesh Rao which use the American version to illuminate interesting aspects of office life:

Long, but definitely worth it.

Tags: culture, power, psychology, television

Another Try at Legalizing it

Tadhg — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 07:40:23 +0000

In November, a ballot measure that would legalize[1] growth and possession of up to an ounce of marijuana will be put before California voters. I’d love to see this pass for a bunch of reasons—none of which affect me personally.

Consistency is one of them: it’s pretty clear that marijuana use is just not more dangerous than tobacco or alcohol use, and hence it’s clearly unjust for it to be singled out.

I’m not a fan of meddling in individual behavior (obviously), and this seems like a pretty clear example of doing just that. I can’t see the public health[2] justification for this kind of meddling, which would have to be extremely stark.

There’s also the issue that a really significant portion of the population breaks the current prohibition law anyway. The first issue here is that if a really significant portion of the population is breaking a law despite extremely significant enforcement efforts, then that law is rather clearly problematic. That’s not to say it should automatically be given up on, but it should be examined carefully—and the law against marijuana doesn’t pass such an examination. The second issue is that if lawbreaking of this kind is widespread, then it leads to selective enforcement, which is inherently corrupting.

I would really love to see this pass because it would at least then shift the burden to the other side in the debate, the side favoring prohibition, and the burden of proof should always be on the side seeking to use state power to control individual behavior. However, given that California passed a measure banning gay marriage last year, I’m not that optimistic. Yes, the issues are very different, but I suspect that a lot of the voters will break the same way they did on that measure. Maybe things will be different this time because the Mormons won’t get involved, as this time they won’t feel a compulsion to meddle in the marriage practices of another state.

[1]	In California, under California state law; it would still be illegal federally, and those in possession would be breaking federal law.

[2]

The notion that a government that just explicitly rejected the concept of providing public health coverage for the nation would have any kind of moral standing in turning around and saying that it had to use state power to prohibit marijuana for the good of the health of the nation is just ludicrous.

Tags: law, politics, power

Poisoned by the Feds

Tadhg — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:36:40 +0000

No, not by accident. Not as part of a war effort. Not as part of a biological weapons test. Rather, on purpose, as part of Prohibition enforcement efforts:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

—Deborah Blum. “The Chemist’s War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.”. Slate, 19 February 2010.

Horrific. At least, as the article points out, when they tried poisoning marijuana crops in the 1970s, there was enough outcry to stop it.

The reasoning of the government agents in both the Prohibitions and marijuana cases is quite telling: they were fine with poisoning people in this manner because if people ingested the poison, they had brought it upon themselves by breaking the law. The arrogance of this is breathtaking, and boils down to the concept that once you step outside the bounds, they can do whatever they want. Sadly (and frighteningly) enough, this is still the attitude today, and most people don’t notice it because most people avoid the consequences of breaking the law—and, make no mistake, most people do break the law, frequently, because there are now so many (often vague and sweeping) laws on the books that it’s rather difficult not to.

The combination of power, lack of accountability, distance from one’s actions, and the conception of handling things as social engineering rather than as dealing with individuals is an unhealthy mix, and a mix that’s disturbingly common in government.

Tags: law, politics, power

Karl Heinz Kurras was a Stasi Agent

Tadhg — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:36:18 +0000

This is probably old news to people who follow German politics closely, but I just found out about it (via MetaFilter).

Karl Heinz Kurras was the West German police officer who killed student demonstrator Benno Ohnesborg in June 1967 during a protest against the Shah of Iran’s visit to Germany. This was one of the major radicalizing events of the period for the German left, and hugely influential.

Last year, evidence emerged that Kurras was a double agent working for the East German security services. I find that rather surprising, but I don’t think it actually changes much about the reaction to the shooting, or about responsibility for it; the West German authorities acted abominably during the period, and this doesn’t change that. (Incidentally, nothing in that last sentence should be read to imply that the East German government were not also acting even more abominably in the same period.)

Tags: history, politics, power

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