politics

politics / style — No Comments
9
Jan 12

Ace Kiss Epsilon

This is who the corporations are telling you is cool,
This is who the corporations are telling you to listen to:
Here’s our end-of-year best-of-lists;
Here’s our coolest journalists
Taking a trip to the coolest city in the world
With people who aren’t like you or me.
Or maybe they’re just like you and me -
How would you know?

This is who the corporations are telling you is cool.
This feature article is trying to tell you something:
This spontaneous photo opportunity just happened!
You could have been there, and you weren’t.

Are the corporations telling you I’m cool yet?
Are the corporations telling you to listen to me?
You should listen to me if they tell you,
You might learn something:
You might learn how to be cool.

Poor poor corporations whispering in your ear,
Like that kid at school that nobody liked,
Because deep down the corporations want to be cool.
That’s why they’re telling you who is cool
Because, if you finally believe them,
Then you’ll think they’re cool too.

So it’s karaoke blind dates in Tokyo with -
So it’s urban gardening in Buenos Aires with -
So it’s hacker protests in Tallin with -
So it’s organic microbreweries in Portland with -
So it’s hip-hop quotables in Nairobi with -
So it’s -

Whispering in your ear: am I cool yet?
Am I cool yet? Am I cool yet?
I’m linking your article,
I’m keeping my distance,
Trying to keep my cool.

Am I cool yet?

Postscript: the weirdest thing about this article is how fucking boring that trip sounds.

politics — No Comments
30
Nov 10

The zen master of propaganda of the deed

Whose conspiracy is this, anyway?

  1. Propaganda of the deed is one of the few innovations of anarchism that entered the mainstream of political activity. In some ways this was unfortunate, because the association with violence contributed to the poor reputation that anarchism now enjoys. While violent propaganda of the deed was generally cast aside by the anarchist movement in the C20, it was enthusiastically embraced by terrorist organisations. The 9/11 bombing of America is unlikely to be beaten in the propaganda of the deed hit parade.
  2. Julian Assange self-identifies as a conspiracy theorist, not in the trivial sense of black helicopters and crop circles, but on the grounds that authoritarian regimes are by definition conspiratorial. This belief is then reverse-engineered to arrive at its corollary: any regime engaging in conspirary is, by definition, authoritarian to some degree. If you don’t like authoritarian regimes, the most obvious remedy is to attack the conspiracy, and Assange laid out his strategy in two papers published in the far-off days of 2006.
  3. Assange offers one innovative way of thinking about conspiracies (and therefore government) as “cognitive devices… a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment)”. This is not a constructive metaphor, since Assange believes that the only thing that a conspiracy computes is “the next action of the conspiracy”, and leads to his prescription of thinking ahead in order to deceive / blind / throttle / separate conspiratorial power groupings.
  4. Regardless of who founded Wikileaks and for what purposes they founded it, Assange has made the organisation the embodiment of the philosophy loosely described in his papers. Wikileaks’ target in general is undifferentiated Authority; but the bigger the authority, the more of a target it presents, and the more valid the attack. Assange seldom makes specific claims in public about what the planned effects of Wikileaks’ work might be, suggesting that he realises their limitations when it comes to effecting real change in the institutions it seeks to undermine.
  5. Given those limitations, Assange works with the material he has, and as a result propaganda of the deed is alive and well.  Most commentatorati, distracted by the surface impact of the leaks, fail to realise that Wikileaks is the nonviolent C21 equivalent of C19 anarchist bomb-throwing; and if they do realise it, fail to understand what the significance of this is. Assange is not seeking to undermine the American government himself; he wants you, me and everybody to undermine the American government, and he is merely showing us how it’s done:

“We must understand the key generative structure of bad governance. We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity. Most importantly, we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling and effective action.”

politics — No Comments
19
Sep 10

Teaching you to be like me

Three things occurred to me while reading about this experiment in pedagogy:

  1. Alarm bells ring when I read that “[Katie] Salen is 43, reddish-haired, hyperorganized and a quirky dresser”. Being a quirky dresser at the age of 43 means that you’ve made a particular effort a la Colin Hunt.  IS THIS THE SORT OF PERSON WE WANT DESIGNING OUR KIDS’ EDUCATION? Etc etc, see the Daily Mail for further details. She comes across in the article as innovative, knowledgeable and determined.
  2. The central question of the article is this: “What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?” The short answer to that question is: it would be an unmitigated disaster for the children in exactly the same way that it has been for rest of us, but don’t let that stop you.
  3. The real problem that our education system has is not identified by either the writer of the article (Sara Corbett – good article, btw) or the designers of the new approach described in that article (Quest to Learn – which actually sounds like a very interesting experiment to perform on children, if performing experiments on children is your kind of thing).

The wider function of the type of education system in industrialised countries is designed for one thing: to prepare children for the structure of life in the industrial world. From the parents’ perspective, however, education serves another unacknowledged function.

Most parents are happy with the existing model of industrial education, since that’s the shape of the life they expect for their children; parents that believe themselves more free-thinking might opt for a Montessori school; parents of a particular political-religious tendency will prefer to home-school their children. These examples point to a single conclusion: parents expect an education system to shape their children to be like them.

This is equally true of the Quest to Learn approach which came out of the work of – surprise! – a bunch of new media types (working with a bunch of education types, obviously – but that was probably mainly for plausible deniability). Their website is explicit that they are looking for a certain type of student:

  • “Creative
  • College and Career-Focused
  • Curious
  • Hands-on-Learners
  • Technology, Design, Art, and Media Enthusiasts
  • Game Lovers
  • Great Collaborators
  • Interested in the way things work”

That checklist tells us that this bunch of high-achievers are looking for other potential high-achievers that they can groom. I have no opinion one way or another about this – everybody has to go through some form of education, and this may well be the best form of education for that particular personality type. Nobody should be fooled into thinking that this is reaching out to the kids’ on their own terms, however, because it’s simply repeating the old pattern of education using new tools. The parents’ profiles will probably tell you more about this project than the childrens’.

A truly revolutionary form of education would no longer take the adult perspective on what children should learn, but be wholly defined and constructed by the children themselves. Fortunately that form of education is something that nobody wants to see.

[Note: My real problem with Quest to Learn is this: "a small but increasingly influential group of education specialists... believe that going to school can and should be more like playing a game, which is to say it could be made more participatory, more immersive and also, well, fun. Nearly every aspect of life at Quest to Learn is thus designed to be gamelike, even when it doesn’t involve using a computer."

Now I loathed games of all kinds from an early age, so that sounds like it would be shit, but my personal opinion isn't a good guide to whether something is going to work or not. However one very important thing to remember is that REAL LIFE IS NOT A GAME, and turning their education into games is likely to turn their children into monsters.]

politics / writing — 3 Comments
24
Feb 10

There’s not enough topical poetry about the politics of Niger

Another colonel
Thinks it’s his turn to spring clean
The big boss – hi coup!

politics — 1 Comment
25
Jan 10

Facts both Astonishing and Disturbing

  1. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is 0.4% of total UK government spending. In an age of globalisation, how is it possible to invest so little in your primary vehicle for dealing with other governmental and intergovernmental actors?
  2. 85% of basic services in Southern Sudan are provided by NGOs (source: anonymous donor). Not only is it difficult to know where to point the finger on this one, it’s difficult to know whose finger would be doing the pointing. Certainly not mine.
  3. Remittances to Haiti were 19% of GDP in 2002 but rose to 50% of GDP in 2008. Take a barely-there legal economy, factor in the financial crisis, and things don’t look great for the reconstruction. I’m sure the US will take things in hand though.
  4. Congo (Kinshasa) would be screwed if people were allowed to live where they wanted, so it’s a good thing freedom of movement isn’t a human right. Haiti was pretty ropey even before the earthquake, but it’s looking pretty good for Iraq.
politics — 1 Comment
5
Dec 09

An education in terror

David Blair’s coverage of education in Pakistan – more accurately, the lack of education in Pakistan – threw up some interesting stats in the war on terror.

This year the central government will spend 66 per cent of its budget on defence and debt servicing, and only 2.5 per cent on education. Throw in the immense burden of corruption and there is precious little money for schools. The central education budget is only £478 million, or about £6 for each school-age child in the country. Defence, by contrast, receives £2.6 billion according to the official figure – and probably more in reality.

As Blair points out, over the border in Afghanistan primary school attendance for boys (although not for girls) is higher at 66% to Pakistan’s 23%. The situation for girls in Afghanistan is of course dire compared to boys purely because of ideology rather than finance, which is one reason why I don’t share Una Vera’s relative optimism about the position of women.

An entire generation of girls has not missed the opportunities afforded by basic education, and the current crop of female activists in Afghanistan is from the previous generation. Blair’s article is fair-handed about the role that madrassas play in offering rudimentary education to the poor, but he doesn’t look too far to the future. I can’t blame him – it’s not a pretty sight.

Lack of educational opportunities in Pakistan is the single biggest problem the country faces, a timebomb waiting to happen no matter who happens to be in power once the dust of the war on terror settles. It drives an even bigger wedge between the Pakistani elite and the people who they govern, and it closes the door to future growth for Pakistanis in every area of life.

The article does mention that DFID and other actors are investing in the educational system, but that the funding tends to go through the government, which creates problems due to corruption. So here’s an alternative suggestion: why not channel funding through the madrassas, an already existing network of educational facilities?

This gives Pakistan two opportunities. First, it won’t cost as much as starting from scratch, although obviously in areas where there are no facilities, scratch is all we got. Second, it creates more pathways for dialogue between the government and the people, undermining the monopoly that religious groups currently have.

For success, the key thing would be to work with madrassas to expand the curriculum beyond religious study, into relatively non-controversial areas such as science and languages. There’s no reason why, if it’s handled properly, at a future date madrassas could become integrated into the national education system. Not ideal, but better than what exists now.

I have no illusions that this would be ridiculously difficult to pull off, and that neither the government of Pakistan or the madrassas is likely to engage with it quickly, given their ideological antipathy. The tragedy of Pakistan is that nobody else seems to have alternative suggestions – it’s just business as usual, as if state-based education was the only meal on the menu.

politics — No Comments
30
Nov 09

In Isolation

This, I love.
In Pandemic 2, the plucky island nation of Madagascar (plucky, and also riven by political conflict) closes its borders as soon as a pandemic is declared, isolating the island completely from outside contamination and ensuring its survival. In the real world the outcome of this strategy is North Korea, and good luck with that.

At my regional airport, passport inspection comes complete with facemasks, handwash and a sheet exhorting you to report your symptoms to the nearest medical centre.1 The pandemic has re-awakened all sorts of interesting cultural krakens, and BLDGBLG has embarked on a large scale project examining notions of quarantine and isolation from a spatial / architectural perspective. There’s a particularly interesting interview with history professor Krista Maglen, whose research focuses on the prevention of infectious disease, where she discusses how physical space determines cultural space when it comes to controlling the spread of disease.

Quarantine differs very much depending on where a country is in relation to a disease source or perceived disease source… Quarantine became a very big deal [in Australia]. First of all, there’s a perceived proximity to Asia, which in the West has traditionally been seen as this great source of disease – the “Yellow Peril.” Quarantine is also a way to draw a line around White Australia, racially, just as much as it is to draw a line around the notion of a virgin territory that doesn’t have the diseases of the rest of the world.

Britain has a different relationship to quarantine because its borders are much more fluid. It can’t have borders as rigid as somewhere like Australia, for lots of different reasons: because of its empire; because it relies on maintaining open borders to let trade flow; and because Britain is itself quite undefined, in a way. It’s a composite of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The borders of Britain are much more fluid, so quarantine takes a different form there and has a very different history.

Quarantine is closely tied to immigration in the United States: Ellis Island was a quarantine processing site, as well as an immigration processing site. Until the 1920s, immigrants arriving into the United States came into facilities that were also quarantine stations, and also places where you could isolate people for disease control reasons. Part of the processing of who can and can’t get into the United States is always about quarantine—what bodies are seen to be diseased and undesirable.

This sheds much light for me on the way in which immigration discourse in the USA is shaped – on both sides, but particularly on the right – in terms of disease control. Uncontrolled immigration is an infection in the body politic – the right demands that the intruder cells be expelled, a classic CD4+ T cell response, while (broadly) leftist plans for controlled assimilation are the political equivalent of quarantine measures.

The US attempts to deal with immigration issues as if it was an island nation (in addition to shouldering its own legacy of racial tensions), as if it was a body with clearly identifiable borders rather than a free-floating concept with only a thin match to its actual spatial coordinates, which is of course a recipe for an epic fail. How should we deal with the brute fact that the history of civilisation is a history of population movements?

← Older Entries