Here's one for Slavoj Zizek...

The link to the whole article is at the end of the quote...

*************

AA wrote:

From a New York Times op-ed piece by the ubiquitous Slavoj Zizek:

One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the
disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run
the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the
heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their
dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the former
Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the new
capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency,
inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.

A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists
allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power:
they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists
themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism,
but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating
capitalism in its own terrain.

This is why today's China is so unsettling: capitalism has always
seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion
of capitalism in the People's Republic, many analysts still assume
that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.

But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to
be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What
if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of
economic development, but its impediment?

If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in
the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign
of the "immature" expectations of the people who didn't possess a
realistic image of capitalism.

When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large
majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom
to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk
as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity,
liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the
prevailing cynical hypocrisy.

More here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html

*************

Zizek is a poseur farouche. Scaring the knickers off the philistines with his pseudo-Marxist aura.

He knows nothing about historical forces and nothing about economic forces. But he can suck up the popular gabble of the salons like a sponge and squirt it back out again like a true charlady. Or better, he can gobble up the gabble, half-digest it, and shit it out again with his own special texture and odour added.

He's all diction and no dick, so to say. A tame castrato in the bourgeois/academic press. He makes even Tariq Ali look good ;-)

What does "ubiquitous" mean, AA? Slimy? Slithery? Is it the same as "iniquitous"? Or "you-be-quiet-ous"?

As for the big question: "Can authoritarian capitalism work better than free-market capitalism?", of course it can't. Too many distortions of healthy processes - or what pass for healthy processes under capitalism. Nazism was authoritarian capitalism. Capitalism without the "free and equal" exchange of capital (in this case, money) for labour power becomes slavery in a more concrete sense than "wage-slavery", and slave labour is notoriously unproductive and unmanageable, even when it's got more slave-drivers whipping it than you can shake a scourge at. Imperialist capitalism is like a wobbling jelly of congealed blood. And if we don't lance it soon it'll burst all over us. The blood is infected...

Cheers

Chops

The Hammer and the Cross - a book review

Here's a really terrible review of a new history of the Vikings. As I say in my comment, I only hope it doesn't reflect the book itself. It would take a whole article to deal with the misconceptions underlying the piece. I ran out of space in the end, so I couldn't add that the reviewer buys into the myth of the Vikings and Old Germans being shrouded in the mists of time and ancient forests, instead of making it clear that they were quick to throw off outworn rags for bright new cloaks, and that they kept what was essential to their culture regardless of outward forms. And that this essential core - the social and military cohesion of a tightly-knit free people - was volcanic enough to metamorphose the petrified crust of the decaying Roman Empire into new and stronger rock. In other words, their *modernizing* impact was crucial to the history of Europe "as we know it". Forget the peeling paint, and look at those foundations!

***********************

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6894257.ece

The Times review by Dan Jones

The Victorians were fond of the Vikings. In 1869, the year that the Cutty Sark was launched, R.M. Ballantyne published a popular novel called Erling the Bold: a Tale of the Norse Sea Kings, which drew heavily on the Icelandic sagas of the Scandinavian peoples who lived in northern Europe during much of the early Middle Ages. In its preface he wrote: “Very much of the religious, civil, and political liberty which we enjoy at the present time — the liberty of the press, freedom of speech, the influence of public opinion over public affairs and many of our cherished institutions . . . in short, the spirit of the age and the germs of the British Constitution — may be traced to the Norsemen of old; those sturdy Vikings . . . who marauded, conquered and settled in this country at various times between the 5th and the 11th centuries.”

This was romantic cobblers, designed to please patriotic schoolboys. But there was plenty of it around. The Vikings were regularly portrayed as a lusty, seafaring nation whose hearty interest in colonising other countries was tempered with an earthy sense of fair play. Or, in 19th-century terms, the sort of ancestor worth having.

Times change. These days, the Vikings have been relegated to the second tier of civilisations worth raving about. (One BBC bigwig recently told me that the only TV history worth commissioning is on “dinosaurs, Egyptians, Romans and Nazis”.) Their deeds seem either cartoonish or obscure; if most people have any knowledge of them at all, it is the peculiar smell remembered from childhood visits to the Jorvik Viking Centre in York.

So let’s refresh. The people we call the Vikings originated as polytheistic heathens from Scandinavia between the 8th and 12th centuries. Their name evokes a seabound wandering, with warmaking, settlement and piracy all implied. They wandered westward to Greenland and the fringes of America, and eastward to the Baltic and Russia. They raided and settled in Ireland and in southern Italy. They threatened the post-Carolingian Frankish kingdom along its coast, over land, and even with raids up the Seine. They encountered the Muslim people in the Spanish peninsula and North Africa.

Their earliest contact with Britain came in 793, when they landed amid violent storms at the great monastery on Lindisfarne. The monks there may have had as little as an hour’s notice of their arrival. When they touched land there was no reckoning with them.

A 12th-century chronicle described the raid: “The pagans from the northern regions came . . . like stinging hornets . . . and slaughtered not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen, but even priests and deacons, and companies of monks and nuns. [They] laid ] everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all of the treasure of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters . . . some they drowned in the sea.”

It is a violent picture, and it is with violence that the Vikings are frequently associated. War, trial by ordeal, slave-taking and animal and human sacrifice were integral to their culture. Yet beneath this was a complex heathen spiritualism, which gave way by the end of the Viking age to a generally adopted Christianity.

This change from heathendom to Christendom is the chief concern of Robert Ferguson’s new history of the Vikings. Thor’s hammer and Christ’s cross bear obvious structural similarities and, during the 400 years covered by Ferguson’s intricate and thoughtful work, the two gradually dissolve into one another.

Ferguson’s main achievement in this book is not to throw the seafaring baby out with the salty bathwater. In revising the credulous mumbo-jumbo celebrated by the Victorians, the temptation must have been to disregard most of what is written in the sagas and chronicles on the grounds that they were written either centuries after the events they describe, or else from the perspective of those who had quaked before the prow of a longboat as the cow-pie helmets hove into view.

This temptation is admirably resisted. Rather than being sceptically dismissed, the narrative sources are cross-examined against extensive archaeological, genetic and physical sources. Runes, ships and relics are key witnesses in decoding the quasi-mythical stories about heroes whom Ferguson accepts from the outset we can never truly know. In maintaining some semblance of narrative thread, Ferguson says he has had to make certain “concessions to the idiom of legend”, but the judgment he exercises in doing so seems to me pitch-perfect.

And so we have heroes and villains restored tentatively to life. There is a noble attempt to delineate men such as Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless and Harald Bluetooth from the myths that have subsequently become them. The journey from hammer to cross, undertaken under the auspices of these men, their ancestors and contemporaries, is a fascinating one. And if occasionally the story feels fragmented and the cast of characters weak, it is because we are following a historian picking his way through a mist destined never fully to lift.

But why should we still care about the Vikings? Unlike the Victorians, we now have little instinctively in common with our Scandinavian cousins, save perhaps a fondness for binge-drinking, Ikea furniture and — if Michael Gove gets his way — state-devolved secondary education.

Perhaps it is because Ferguson’s book shows us our present de-Christianisation in reverse. As Europe slinks back into heathendom after a millennium of relative godliness, now is a good time to consider how our hairy-breeched ancestors got us where we are; and what it is we are now leaving behind.

The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings by Robert Ferguson

Alan Lane, £30; 480pp

***********************

What to say? I only hope the book in question bears no responsibility whatever for the review. There's no evidence given for the dismissive swipe at Ballantyne's remarks on liberties of expression and popular involvement in public affairs. The geography's wonky - "they wandered eastward to the Baltic". Well, well. Ask the Swedish Vikings how far they had to wander to reach the Baltic. They penetrated far more deeply inland than just Russia, the embryo of which they founded. They reached Constantinople along the rivers - no salt water there. So "even with raids up the Seine" made me burst out laughing. The review ignores their core activity of trading. And treats "settlement" as a mere detail. But the Vikings didn't just "threaten" the Franks, they conquered an important chunk of their realm - Normandy. Their settlements, as we know, had a huge impact on the future development of Europe. In a broader perspective, unmentioned here, the Scandinavian expeditions were part of the pan-German migrations. As in England and Normandy the German peoples brought with them their social and military institutions. These made them almost unstoppable, but the less essential one weren't sacrosanct. They adapted to the conquered societies. The old religion was dumped for the wealth of Christianity. Pure expediency. The old local mechanisms for managing business were ditched for Roman bureaucracy and money... but the democratic ethos (among the free-born of course) of leaders being first among equals remained and gave us the progressive aspects of feudalism. The Vikings made a big contribution to this process. As for religion, the Vikings, as long as they remained Vikings, were intransigent holdouts. Irreducible until the pivotal years for Europe of around 1050. Then the new Europe at last convinced them. The Hammer didn't dissolve into the Cross, it was traded in.

Why Johnny can't hypothesize, and the US can't do education

An excerpt reported in Scientific American from a panel discussion on US education moderated by someone from the Wall Street Journal. Doomed from the start.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=why-johnny-cant-hypothesize-a-discu-2009-10-26&sc=DD_20091027

My comment follows.

*****************

[...]

"The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and sciences," added Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Whereas other countries recruit teachers from the top tier of graduates, he said, "America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third."

Convincing star college scientists to enter the field of K-12 education can be a hard sell, especially when comparing salaries of public school teachers with those elsewhere in the science industry. Universities entice great minds with pay that is more competitive within the field—physicists generally earning more than humanities instructors to reflect jobs outside of the ivory tower. Public schools, however, pay teachers based on seniority and education rather than field.

Aside from upping the competitiveness of science and math teacher salaries, most of the panelists agreed that competition among schools needed to be increased. "Competition is extremely weak with respect to most education contexts," said Christopher Edley, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and former member of the Obama education transition team. He and others noted that schools should be brought into more direct competition with each other (in part by expanding student choices through the creation of charter schools). Advances in science or math education are often not embraced as quickly as those in private industry because schools and instructors have little external incentive to improve their product (other than meeting basic proficiency requirements).

Competition, however, shouldn't entirely overtake the role of regulation, concluded Edley. "This is a huge, huge industry," he said. "Ultimately, you're going to have to use competition to identify the innovations that work, but then… require of low-performing schools that they adopt best practices." The education policy debate, noted Murray, is not unlike that currently taking place over health care: Do you create an environment with forced competition or place more emphasis on regulation?

*************

The US is a slime of worms when it comes to education. A miniscule elite (artificially fed from other countries) and an overwhelmingly undereducated, falsely educated and just plain uneducated general public. The solutions suggested here will be less than useless.

As long as the goal is a few top brains, the rest of us get nothing.  Instead, the States should aim to develop the best possible knowledge and skills at the middle of the Gaussian curve mentioned by Fyngyrs. This would not only give a much broader foundation for the best performers to rise from, but also give underachievers a much more attainable target. It's also a damn sight more democratic. And it requires a completely different focus from the US. One that makes sure that ALL schools regardless of location or intake turn out an equally high standard of "product" - our kids, the next generation. It's been done (in Sweden, for instance) and it can and should be done everywhere. But there's no chance at all of  this happening in the US under the tyranny of profit-driven capitalism. It' s not dog-eat-dog competition that's the answer, but supportive emulation.

Brains, astrocytes and octopuses

From Scientific American, about brain cells called glia, that could well be more important to thought than neurons.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-root-of-thought-what&sc=DD_20091027

My comment follows.

*********

The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do?
Nearly 90 percent of the brain is composed of glial cells, not neurons. Andrew Koob argues that these overlooked cells just might be the source of the imagination

[...]

LEHRER: Could you describe some of the early experiments that first led scientists to reconsider the role of glial cells?

KOOB: Glial experiments didn't get going until the 1960s. All scientists knew about glia was that if you put neurons in petri dish, you had to have glia, or neurons would die. Then, Stephen W. Kuffler at Harvard, for reasons unknown, decided to test Pedro's accepted theory of insulation. This was around same time that cell counts in the brain revealed glial cells to be nearly 90% of the brain (this is where the neuron based idea that we only use 10% of our brain comes from). Kuffler is notable because he ironically established the Harvard 'neuro' biology department while he was performing these groundbreaking glial experiments. Anyway, Kuffler took astrocytes from the leech and mud puppy and added potassium, something that is known to flow out of neurons after they are stimulated. He thought this would confirm Pedro's theory that glial cells were insulators. What he found instead was that the electrical potential of glial cells responded to potassium. Kuffler and colleagues found that astrocytes exhibited an electrical potential, much like neurons. They also discovered in the frog and the leech that astrocytes were influenced by neuronal ion exchange, a process long held to be the chemical counterpart to thought. Since then many researchers have completed experiments on the communicatory ability of glial cells with neurons, including in the late 80s and early 90s when it was discovered glial cells respond to and release 'neuro' transmitters.

LEHRER: Why are calcium waves important?

KOOB: In short, calcium waves are how astrocytes communicate to themselves. Astrocytes have hundreds of 'endfeet' spreading out from their body. They look like mini octopi, and they link these endfeet with blood vessels, other astrocytes and neuronal synapses. Calcium is released from internal stores in astrocytes as they are stimulated, then calcium travels through their endfeet to other astrocytes. The term 'calcium waves' describes the calcium release and exchange between astrocytes and between astrocytes and neurons. Scientists at Yale, most notably Ann H. Cornell-Bell and Steven Finkbeiner, have shown that calcium waves can spread from the point of stimulation of one astrocyte to all other astrocytes in an area hundreds of times the size of the original astrocyte. Furthermore, calcium waves can also cause neurons to fire. And calcium waves in the cortex are leading scientists to infer that this style of communication may be conducive to the processing of certain thoughts. If that isn't convincing, it was recently shown that a molecule that stimulates the same receptors as THC can ignite astrocyte calcium release.

LEHRER: You suggest that glia and their calcium waves might play a role in creativity. Could you explain?

KOOB: This idea stems from dreams, sensory deprivation and day dreaming. Without input from our senses through neurons, how is it that we have such vivid thoughts? How is it that when we are deep in thought we seemingly shut off everything in the environment around us? In this theory, neurons are tied to our muscular action and external senses. We know astrocytes monitor neurons for this information. Similarly, they can induce neurons to fire. Therefore, astrocytes modulate neuron behavior. This could mean that calcium waves in astrocytes are our thinking mind. Neuronal activity without astrocyte processing is a simple reflex; anything more complicated might require astrocyte processing. The fact that humans have the most abundant and largest astrocytes of any animal and we are capable of creativity and imagination also lends credence to this speculation.

*************************

choppam at 03:48 PM on 10/29/09
First - "octopi" is a terrible false-learned plural of "octopus". Like the equally terrible false-learned plural "virii" (or a dozen variants) for "virus". The "i" plural is a Latin plural for certain words ending in "us" (not all by a long chalk). "Servus" - slave, plural "servi". "Virus" is a neuter noun in Latin, meaning poison/slime/stink. It doesn't have a plural, and if it did, it wouldn't be "i". Same sort of thing with "octopus". It's from the Greek for "eight-foot" (cf Oedipus - swell-foot). The Oxford English Dictionary (the big one) explains this, and gives the plural as either "octopodes" - the archaic really learned variety, or "octopuses", the normal English-style plural (like "viruses"). "Antipodes" has the same Greek inspired plural - it's an interesting word - look it up!
Second - I love the way this article shows us how we are fighting our way towards an understanding of important things that have been with us for a very long time - like, say, the universe. The object of study remains there for us to examine, regardless of our ideas about it. But the better we get to know it, the better we can relate ourselves to it, and even if we can't control it in any important way, we can use our knowledge to avoid injury and pain, and to increase pleasure and well-being.
Neither the universe nor the brain gives a toss if our attitude is one of worship or contempt. But they can both serve us better if we release them from the mind-forged manacles (mistaken hypotheses or superstitions) we've clapped on them.

Hope for humanity!

Just look at this energy!
You won't believe what can be done with skipping ropes and young legs!
So there's hope even in the US at an army and navy basketball game. China, North Korea... and Ohio.
The girls are 4th and 8th graders from an Ohio school district, and call themselves Firecrackers....
Sit back and take a deep breath...

http://www.bookwormroom.com/2009/10/21/something-to-shake-up-even-the-most-blase/

C

Learning: "in at the deep end"?

An extract from an article in Scientific American "Getting It Wrong":

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong

Some readers may look askance at the use of word pairs, even though it is a favorite tactic of psychologists. In another article , in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied,Lindsey Richland, Nate Kornell and Liche Kao asked the same question, but they used more educationally relevant text material (an essay on vision). Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.

This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall . Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own.

Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.

************************
My response:

Lots of useful comments!
Joney makes an interesting point:
"Unfortunately, the experimenters and the author of the article have confused getting right answers with learning. Remembering a piece of information does not mean that it is worth knowing in the first place or that you will ever use it again." I'm not sure they do, though. Not in the content-focused article test, even if the content of the article might not be very stimulating. Remember there are control groups in all the experiments, so the futility factor would be the same for both groups.
Getting things wrong/Failing to solve a problem can be useful a) if you want to get them right/solve it, b) if you know it can be done, and c) if you've got a sporting chance.
Most people know more than they know ;-) The thing is to show them they do, and show them that they can mobilize this knowledge over the board to tackle any problem that comes their way.
If you can get the pre-emptive questions to stimulate learner curiosity, you're home and dry. If you use them to bust their teeth out, you're not.
Frinstance, I once used a Latin poem by Catullus (with lots of love and kissing and ignoring wagging fingers) in a class of 14-year-olds at a school in Sweden in a Swedish lesson. Literature. Most of the class were non-Swedes, including several Latinos. With the help of the Latinos (Spanish being so closely related to Latin) we worked out key words, like life and love and kiss. Then we chorus-read it, to get the swing of things. Etc. It worked like a charm. They knew more than they knew. A Latin poem for 14-year-olds in an immigrant-rich school (second poorest district in Sweden, too, as it happens)!
I'd have generalized the piece a bit more though.
People hate being taught, but they love learning.

Onions and Whisky - McDonalds in Iceland

From the mailing list, again, about McDonalds closing down in Iceland:

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 13:07, IH quoted a BBC news item:

Besides the economy, McDonald's blamed the
"unique operational complexity" of doing business
in an isolated nation with a population of just 300,000.

Bollocks.

The franchises are run by a firm called Lyst,
with owner Jon Gardar Ogmundsson saying the decision was "not taken lightly".

"Lyst" means "appetite" cognate with "lust". "Lust not taken lightly" - go Velvet Underground.

"It just makes no sense. For a kilo of onion,
imported from Germany, I'm paying the equivalent
of a bottle of good whisky," he added.

Ah, the nostalgia - reminds me of when I was there in 1985. Most goods marked with "units" - say "5" - whose money equivalent changed by the hour with the inflation. This morning, times 2 equals 10 koruna, this afternoon, times 2.5 equals 12.50.

A can of crushed tomatoes cost around 4 dollars.

Iceland's banks collapsed at the height of the

global credit crisis - wrecking the country's
economy and forcing it to rely on an $10bn (£6.1bn) international aid package.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/8327185.stm

Usual media lies about capitalist society, its economy, and our choices. No "forcing" about it at all. Iceland could have thrown those responsible into a geyser, or into the maw of a volcano, or just chained them up outside McDonalds for the duration. Instead the government patted them on the cheek, called them naughty boys, and put the people of Iceland into hock for the foreseeable future so the Reichenscheisse (rich shits) would feel no pain.

Same story in Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine. Oh, and in the US, the UK, Germany, France... ad nauseum.

C

--
Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es.

Death by a thousand cuts - The Titanic Syndrome

From a mailing list:

The Titanic Syndrome, the film by Nicolas
Hulot and Jean-Albert Lièvre, which will be out
on [French] screens October 7, will upset people.
This environmental documentary shows almost no
nature: Breaking with the postcard aesthetic
customary in the genre, the film confronts the
hard reality of poverty and injustice. It
attempts, uneasily, to say that the vertiginous
deterioration of the biosphere is the result of a
social order become insane, one which makes the
weak, the poor and the exploited bear its consequences.

The film repeats that the key to escaping
this sort of destructive logic is in the
reduction of rich countries' material
consumption. Let us bet that this discourse,
harsher than that of "little gestures for the
planet," will garner a mixed reception. And
should Nicolas Hulot begin to upset people?

The strength of his persona is to remain
popular by going right to the tip of what French
society - or more precisely, the media system
that provides access to French society - agrees to hear at any given moment.

Thus, for a decade, he has little by little
hardened his speech: At first, sounding the alarm
over the scope of the environmental disaster, he
then sought to involve citizens, then brought the
question into political terrain. He now succeeds
in demonstrating that ecology is first of all a
social issue, and criticizes - but in terms that
remain very general - "capitalism."

In the commentary that clothes the images,
he says: "I am lost." Lost? I telephone him to
understand. He answers: "I'm lost because I don't
understand that so much energy should be
necessary to put what is obvious before our
elites. People who have a sometimes dazzling
intelligence have blind spots, that is, they
don't manage to understand that their economic model will not succeed."

That's Nicolas Hulot's problem, and,
consequently, our problem: He believes that
political action today is inspired by the pursuit
of the common good. But he forgets the strength
of interests: individual and class interests.
What Hulot calls the elites are today an
oligarchy. The oligarchy does not want to hear
about the obvious facts of environmental crisis
and social disintegration because the principle
objective of the oligarchy is to maintain its own
interests and privileges. It does not concern
itself with the common good insofar as it does
not challenge the oligarchy's own position.

When one is a nice person, it's difficult to
absorb the fact that others are not all so nice.
Nicolas Hulot is about to do that, and,
especially, about to draw the appropriate
conclusions. That is: to speak in vague terms
about "capitalism" no longer, but to plunge a
knife into the flesh of class selfishness. He can
do it. But he knows that then, all of a sudden, a
number of media and of more low profile powers
will suddenly find that he has many flaws.

http://www.truthout.org/1006099

Films are for a mass market. And it's amazing how sometimes people grab a subtext and take it much farther than the surface action and message would appear to warrant. In this sense it's often better to see films as pointers, as signposts to an alternative direction than to take them literally. It's events and solutions outside the cinema that make a real difference, and just making a small hole in the media armour protecting the rotten core of the current system can show people that it's possible, and that it's also possible to make similar holes in the real-life armour protecting the rich and powerful. Not only small holes either but much bigger ones.

So the more the merrier. Michael Moore's documentaries, satirical films like Wag the Dog or even Mars Attacks, Ken Loach's work, and now The Titanic Syndrome, they all add up to more than the sum of each individual stabbing.

The death of a thousand cuts for the lying presentation of *our* world by *their* media. The lies have been exposed for decades in well-researched and cogently argued books by writers and analysts like Chomsky (eg "9-11" "Manufacturing Consent", "Profit Over People") and Pilger (eg Freedom Next Time), and eye-witness accounts like Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. But these are not mass market works, and make an impact on an avant garde of independent and critical readers. Films can make a mass impact.

C

Disenfranchised EU subjects

A common situation getting commoner (from a mailing list):

>So my question is: are you active in or do you pay attention to your
>local municipal political scene?

These are the only elections I am allowed to take
part in, apart from European elections, but I own
I haven't much paid attention to who was who and
proposed what on a community level, especially as
what politics propose during election campaigns
is basically only geared towards getting your vote.
I voted according to my old family traditions and
beliefs, but that is no longer valid.
I feel more in tune with alternative currents
now, ecologists, anti-consumerists etc. and will
have to look into this more closely. Next elections are far away.

I

I'm a disenfranchised citizen of a leading nondemocratic EU country, too. But everyone in the European Urine is disenfranchised - how many have had a chance to affect the adoption of the Lismal Treaty with a vote? How many will have a chance to affect the choice of an EU President? Blair as our highest representative?

C

Gagging over gagging

The links here *are* chilling (Groucho's word)...


"Sue the fuck out of 'em" is the favourite motto of the Corporate Killers if they can't kill their critics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/26/spreading-toxic-injunctions

For the general method see:

http://www.johnperkins.org/

(He's the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman)

For a hilarious take on the killers of cultural life, check out:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/resource.cgi?ResourceID=31

Current example of this disgusting attitude is the Warner Brothers attack on Ms Marmitelover's planned Harry Potter evening at her occasional restaurant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/25/harry-potter-lawyers-ban-restaurant

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/oct/26/harry-potter-halloween-warner-lawyers

C

Mary Beard's Don's Life Blog Book just out

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2009/10/its-a-dons-life-the-book/comments/page/2/#comments

Just love the cover with its homage to Monty Python! And for once it's not just a pretty face - though I hope it'll prove an attractive one and lure punters in. They won't be able to put it down... but let's hope the price is as spot-on as the cover.

Can't wait to get my fingers in there - hope there's lot of nice pictures!

POSTED BY: XJY | 22 OCT 2009 10:08:31

XJY -- Lots? No. Well-chosen? Yes.

POSTED BY: MARY BEARD | 22 OCT 2009 10:16:41

Bad conditions for workers even in imperialist countries

Mail thread on the continuing subordination of women even in "developed" industrial societies.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=7as9n55y8u51&shva=1#inbox/1248ad610636d2e9

Choppa Morph wrote:

> But to say workers seldom have 74 hour weeks for starvation wages
> is sheer nonsense. Unless you're thinking of relatively privileged
> and well-organized workers in industrialized countries.

If we are talking about the proletariat, aren't we by definition
talking of industry?

Nope - the proletariat (according to Marx) is made up of who own nothing to sell but their labour-power - no other "productive" assets, like computers. This definition makes a big difference. The industrial proletariat is, obviously, sells its labour-power in industry. Nowadays in imperialist countries ("our" advanced industrial nations) the public sector and services are mostly industrialized - the workers there are wage-earners involved in producing the commodity labour-power, ie us human beings.

But yes, industrial workers in developing countries have relatively
bad conditions. But as I mentioned before, I was referring to France
& the US - where workers do not have starvation wages. Very different from conditions in 1848 London or Paris - which were worse than conditions in China today.

Not by much. And industrial workers in developed countries are still risking life and limb and internal organs due to the pace of work required and the lousy conditions and machinery not adapted to human bodies. Not in the "posh" industries featured in "aren't we great" Readers Digest or airline glossies, but in normal industries manufacturing paint or plastics or the like. Not to mention the service industries.

Read Barbara Ehrenreich's illuminating book "Nickel and Dimed" on this.


> A lot of "rich" countries also have workers forced to work two jobs
> to survive.

Bullshit. "Survive" is not a meaningless term.

Again - read Ehrenreich - she's talking about basics. Food and shelter. Why the hell have soup kitchens sprung up again, or homeless people become a problem once more?


They "need" two jobs to have big homes, cars, electronic toys, etc
etc - environment-destroying "things" they are "forced" to buy to
serve big capital. If they didn't enslave themselves to consumer
society, "they" could work 20 hours a week and do much better than
"survive". The average Westerner spends more on each car they own
each year than the world-wide average total annual income. And yet
cars are planet-destroying luxuries. Most French families spend more on cell-phones than the annual incomes in poor countries. No one needs a cell phone. Survive?

This is for the "lucky" ones. Two income households able to put themselves in debt ("credit worthy"). I wasn't talking about them. In our society(ies) you now need two incomes to sustain a "normal" standard of living. This normal standard of living DIFFERS FROM COUNTRY TO COUNTRY - that's very important to bear in mind. Never mind if this standard includes the kind of crap you mention - a daily paper, for those who can still afford it, can be sewage like the Daily Mail or filtered sewage like the Guardian. We're more often talking about "social survival" (keeping above the contempt level) than actual physical survival. If you look at the worst cases of "social" death in "developed" (excuse me while I vomit) countries, the list is still endless. The street-sleepers of Paris (under bridges, on underground ventilation grids) are a good (!) example. All kinds of diseases on and inside their bodies, including gangrene and organ failure. Frinstance.


I'm not questioning that the distribution of resources is skewed. But
don't tell me that we have to swallow the television commercials to
know how to "survive".

The TV commercials are a worry, but only cos they reinforce the generally shitty situation of those with nothing to sell but their often unwanted labour-power. Like the rural poor in the US with no access to health care (cf the "health fairs" mentioned in a previous thread), who drink way over the Danger level of sweet fizzy drinks, or smoke, etc. Only the extremely poor, anywhere in the world, are unable to get hold of such destructive poisons - tobacco and alcohol or narcotics.

This relates to the breast-feeding part of the thread cos of the efforts by very big capitalist groups to replace healthy reproductive behaviour (like breast-feeding) with artificial and often harmful commercially profitable behaviour (bottle-feeding using milk substitutes).

C

New approach

I write a lot by way of comments in other blogs, mail lists, chats, news media etc. Like a mosaic, a bigger clearer picture can emerge from lots of small, apparently separate pieces. And even if it doesn't for every reader, at least a lot of the pieces are colourful and have some depth (or let's say the glass is sometimes thicker ;-) ), making for a kaleidoscope rather than a mosaic. When I was a kid I loved the kaleidoscopes we made at home on the kitchen table.

So I'm mainly going to post my comments out of their immediate context. You can decide if the larger context/perspective gives a clear enough ground and frame for my scattered fragments, these "disiecta membra".

I'll indicate the original location of each entry so you can follow the whole discussion leading to my response, if you want to.

Revolutionary situations in Near East

Soumaya Ghannoushi writes:
There are echoes of pre-revolutionary Iran in the wider Middle East |

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/13/ir..

Comments (96)
Soumaya GhannoushiThe Guardian, Friday 13 February
Ripe for revolution
A blinkered west has created conditions in the Middle East that mirror those of late 1970s Iran Thirty years ago the world awoke to a great volcanic eruption in Iran that transformed the country's face and sent tremors across the globe. A mass movement of popular protest had succeeded in doing what few had thought possible. The Shah's heavily fortified regime was no more - a mere chapter in the country's long past.

For all the religious euphoria that has marked the revolution, its root causes are in reality more sociopolitical than theological. After all, theology cannot create revolution if its conditions are not seething in society's gut and within its political forces. The vast wells of popular anger that erupted at the end of the 1970s were fed by grievances that had been building for years. At the forefront of these was the corruption and despotism of the Shah and his regime; the widening circle of sociocultural marginalisation, fuelled by pseudo-modernisation; and the regime's acquiescence to foreign interventions, particularly from the US.

There is much about this pre-revolutionary Iranian scene that would appear familiar to the observer of the wider Middle East today. While the region's modern history has been mired in a string of crises associated with a fragile post-colonial state, its ills have been further aggravated by the erosion of legitimacy that has accompanied the last few decades. Its first source - national liberation - faded with the departure of the independence generation, and the rise to power of a new breed of colourless technocrats and generals.

And as the promises of development and progress vanished into the smoke of the shanty towns, the Arab state lost its last refuge from its citizens. Stripped of all cover, it degenerated into a terrifying oppression machine. The more depleted its legitimacy, the greater it relied on the police, internal intelligence apparatuses, and on the support of foreign patrons - much like the Shah. Most Arab regimes would not survive without the perpetual use of violence against their citizens and opponents - aided and abetted by their "friends" and allies.

Egypt may represent the clearest manifestation of this state of affairs. For the last decade, its 80-year-old president has been preoccupied with ensuring the accession of his son, Gamal, to the throne of the republic. In the meantime, his country, the most populous in the Arab world, sinks deeper into degeneracy, with receding regional influence, rampant corruption, and millions teetering on the verge of starvation.

What we have before us is a deadly recipe for explosion. By the 1990s, with the collapse of communism and Bush Sr's attack on Iraq, most Arab regimes had reached their sell-by date. Thanks to their "business as usual" Euro-American allies, their expired lives were extended. But one cannot see how they can escape mortality much longer, amid a sea of crises and surging popular anger.

Of course, this is not to say that the Iranian scenario will be replicated in Egypt - or other Arab countries - or that another Khomeini will soon emerge. History does not repeat itself. What is doubtless though is that many components of the Iranian dynamite are today raging beneath the surface of imposed "stability", especially as new sociopolitical forces are entering the stage on the ruins of the discredited official elite.

Four months before the Shah was forced to flee, the CIA issued a report describing his regime as stable. The shah, it predicted, "is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years". Things haven't changed much since. The same state of wilful oblivion is still in play. Blinded by short-term interests, western governments insist on seeing things in the region as they want, not as they are. In truth, they are the real makers of revolution in the Middle East.

• Soumaya Ghannoushi's book on the directions of political Islam will be published later this year

*********************

Choppam responds:

Soumaya Ghannoushi: There are echoes of pre-revolutionary Iran in the wider Middle East

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/13/ir...

Good starter for discussion, and basically correct.

I would like to see more detail on the prerevolutionary vs revolutionary situations today though.

In relation to 1979 conditions are far more fragile throughout the Middle-East. In the pressure-cookers of Egypt and Pakistan in particular.

What happened in Iran was the combined revolt of the urban left and workers, whose main political leadership was Tudeh (Euro-Communists, neo-Stalinists) who didn't go for power, and the rural poor, led by the mullahs, who did go for power. The rural poor fell to the mullahs cos the Tudeh ignored them (cf the progressive urban regime in Afghanistan under USSR protection, which also ignored the rural poor). The Tudeh, given revolutionary, class-independent leadership (not fawning on the bourgeoisie with rotten Popular Front ideas, handed the revolution to the Mullahs by default, and paid the price.
A similar process is likely in Pakistan today. The US is pursuing a divide and rule policy to split the country into mutually hostile regions, and is violating Pakistani airspace every day - in fact such violation was one of O'Bamas first orders. Pakistan is not just seething (as is the case in Egypt) but is about to boil over. Since the voluble left is even blinder and thicker than it was in Iran, power will once more pass to fundamentalist extremists by default. End of story in Afghanistan for the imperialists, and a huge boost to Iran to stand up to the US once more. A boost for independence forces in Iraq too. And a model for the enraged masses in Egypt and the oppressed in Saudi-Arabia. God knows what the effects would be on India or Israel or Turkey - just to take a few states in the immediate vicinity of such a development.

The current lick-spittle pro-imperialist regimes in Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi would be missed as little as the Shah in Iran in 1980 or the Tsar in Russia back in 1918. Drowned without trace in the cesspool of history.

And the US (along with its lickspittle co-imperialists) would suddenly find it had lost an arm and a leg in one of its most important and resource-rich bridge-heads/enclaves in the world. Roughly comparable to the loss of the Subcontinent by British imperialism after WW2.

These are huge geo-political changes waiting to happen, and the result will not depend on US military might but on the internal struggles between progressive urban working-class forces (all the others having sold out to imperialism) and reactionary rural "religious" forces, and which of them is hungriest for power. The internal struggles that will break out, that is, when the immediate joint objective of removing the alien oppressors has been achieved.

Just sit back and watch - it'll all be on TV, and now you know what's gonna happen and how to interpret the nonsense that our pundits will be spouting when it does happen.

Throw everything at it!

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/2/9/151024/2055

Small is ugly if it means we keep burning coal
Big is beautiful if it breaks our dead-dinosaur addiction
Posted by Gar Lipow (Guest Contributor) at 7:59 AM on 10 Feb 2009

Gar writes: "We have start deploying everything we know how to do at a reasonable cost, which includes stuff that is more expensive (not including social costs) than fossil fuel".

Choppa responds:

This is perfectly true, but definitely needs spelling out for the nuclear, gas and coal lobbies and their deluded followers. And the clearer it is spelt out, the clearer it also becomes for the rest of us, and the angrier we will get at the suicidal short-sightedness of our own dinosaurs.

Buildings - retrofitted, insulated, covered with thin-film PV and solar water heaters, running heat-exchangers for air and rock, using rooftop greening to provide moisture retention, heat moderation and recreation on-site, and lower built-up area heat extremes. Constructed with energy-use optimizing windows and glass, and using optimal angling for shade in summer and sun in winter - and light conduits to reduce power for lighting.

Water - heat-exchange source; groundwater from different levels for grey water (non-drinking, lawn-watering) use, and clean water; running water providing electricity from river-turbines, as well as more recreational and economic (fish-breeding) water given reduced cooling needs. Seawater providing tidal and wave energy.

Earth - geothermal with its huge resources (volcanic areas); heat exchange (plenty of experience worldwide with small-scale HE, less with just as feasible district or urban scale HE); (speculation: why not try and tap earthquake movements and tension pre-catastrophe?); underground construction for say industrial purposes; crops and greenery for multiple uses.

Wind - windfarms and small-scale highly efficient urban turbines, etc - this is well-enough known.

Sun (water, earth, wind, fire!!) - pull together all we know about - PV, CSP, water-heating; small-scale, large-scale etc, and throw it all in the mix at every geopolitical level.

THEN THINK BIG!!

Gar hits the nail on the head when he mentions HVDC. This High Voltage Direct Current will transform our electricity transport and usage the way Tesla's LVAC project did. Imagine that! Not only could sunrich areas produce energy for many industrial and residential at once - the whole of Southern California, at least, frinstance, plus the cities of Nevada and Arizona - but on a world scale we could harness the solar resources of the Sahara to supply the whole of Europe. This last project is already being studied, and there's a trial HVDC line already being operated in Sweden.

So, if we THROW EVERYTHING AT IT NOW, we'll be well on our way. And every development over the next couple of decades (and as with AC electricity, these will follow thick and fast) will add to the goodness and savings. And if we're lucky, renewable energy will take off with the enthusiasm and diversity and unimagined human empowerment generated by computerizationa and the internet.

Sorry about the length - hard to add to what Gar said without referring to the breadth and depth of areas already working or projected or shown to be feasible.

by ChoppaM at 12:05 PM on 10 Feb 2009

Lovins knows best I still like an HVDC super grid following electric rail corridors though. And large wind farms, large wind/wave/ocean current floaring platforms offshore, and large concentrating solar on factories. Will these large renewable systems be necessary when solar cogeneration reaches 70% efficiency, batteries reach 10 minute charge and 1/4 the energy density of liquid fuel, and superconducting electromagnetic energy storage goes into mass production? Nope. Keep the HVDC super grid and the factory CSP, and recycle the wind and wave machines when that happens. Meanwhile all sorts of people in single family homes, living on farms, and communities large and small who don't mind timing their power use and putting up with ocasional emergency backup power systems can go renewable immediately if not sooner. http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 7:27 PM on 11 Feb 2009 [ Reply to This ]

Throw everything at it! (This is ChoppaM again) As amazingdrx points out, the rail corridors provide a good solution for HVDC. What this means is a really mind-boggling surge in the potential for dealing with varying needs at varying times (collecting the output of thousands of any-scale generations) not just in the US, but in Canada and Mexico too, both of which countries can add pretty substantial fuel to the flames (so to speak :-) And this is early middle term which can be planned and trialed now, as it is being (on a near-term basis) in Europe. Which means that once more the US runs the risk of lagging behind in perhaps the most important single development in relation to the usefulness, dimensions and feasibility of renewable energy. Think of the role of transport/transmission infrastructure for industry and turnover times in past leaps - rail and steam engines for knitting countries together and making large-scale industry possible in the best locations - roads for cars and trucks - and AC transmission for electricity. While not renewable energy in itself, and not available right at this moment, it presents such an attractive solution to all the problems raised by sceptics in relation to renewables that I think it is perhaps the single most important factor in the equation for every actor in the wind, solar, geothermal, construction, wave and tidal, heat exchange industries. Which means it should be the focus of concentrated research, development and deployment immediately.

by Choppa at 12:48 AM on 12 Feb 2009 [ Reply to This ]

That's it Chop

I'm thinking of the political and financial blockage erected by the status quo industrial lobbyists and those "politicians they keep in their pockets" (to paraphrase "The Godfather") thusly: It has already lost, but we don't realize it yet. As lovins says the big investment money has abandoned coal and nuclear power already, will oil be next?

Oil is showing signs of that effect, investors are afraid to put up 100s of billoins for new oil exploration, offshore drilling, and refining unless/until prices rise and show some sort of long term trend. Those billions won't produce profits otherwise.

Wind shows profits immediately.

Here's where we are really at: over 50% of us want to go green. Under 10% of our energy use is renewable and conservation and efficiency combined barely have the combined figure reaching 10% of our energy use.

Over 50% of us are willing to sacrifice some convenience and adjust our lifestyles to do it. We would be willing to give up always on 100% centralized grid power and gas guzzlers, and go for smart grid power timing and ocasional emergency backup power and plugin hybrids that make us actually pay attention and plugin our cars.

So we have 50% of us demanding change and willing to sacrifice for it, and less than 10% market pentration of green energy conversion. There is huge growth potential, only capital for mass production is missing. Government stimulation could set a fire under this commercial wave.

As it rolls out why bother with the other 50%? Let them laugh and deride and resist, who cares? We will eventually be selling them their daily dose of kwhs.

It will take years to get to 50% so let's just enjoy it, invest early in solar cogeneration on our roofs, and ground source heating/cooling, and plugin hybrids and sit back and collect our gains.

We have the numbers to demand that we be allowed to sell our power over the grid and improve grid design to accept this green energy re-evolution. mosr of our detractors, the drill baby drillers, will join in around 2020, with the final 10% cursing us until the day they go to their rewards.

The bottomline is that we have won the political battle in terms of public opinion, but the public does not realize the technology is already here, waiting for capital for mass production. We have to wake them up by example, by highlighting successful renewable smart grid and conservation efforts.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Guardian - down with corporative tax avoidance

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/09/elliott-corporate-tax-avoidance

UK plc must do its bit for broken Britain
It's time to toughen up on corporate tax avoidance, at home and offshore
09 Feb 09, 12:18pm

Really stupid article, as are all these articles attacking symptoms of capitalist rot and not causes.
What we need is a workers state, run by the workers for the workers, with comprehensive land reform (!), ridding the country of the huge and parasitical land tax, with comprehensive industrial reform ridding the country of a huge and parasitical production tax, and comprehensive financial reform ridding the country of a huge and parasitical interest tax. If all the product from land, industry and banking went to the people and its democratic institutions instead of an infinitesimal group of greedy and irresponsible profiteers, we'd discover just how rich a country we're living in. But right now none of it's ours, it's all theirs.

Of course these reforms need to be international, even though they'd survive even in individual countries for a while, as the USSR did for 80 years.

And anyone notice how totally useless all the established economic theories and experts are when it comes to the crunch? All that's left to take capitalism through to the next big war is a period of Keynesian concessions to the workers to allow capital to lick its wounds, regroup and then try once again to decapitate the hydra- headed working class.

What a stinking, utopian project!

Benazir Bhutto assassinated

Time to get back to the blog again, hopefully it'll be a bit less compact this time.

As far as personalities are concerned I've often used Benazir Bhutto as an example for women i gender-oppressive societies. Marry someone with money who doesn't mind what you do as long as the public ceremonials are observed, and do as you wish out of the public eye.

But the personal aspect isn't very relevant in relation to the assassination.

It's not primarily about personalities, but about policies. There are enormous pressures being exerted on Pakistan by imperialism, and by the populist opposition to imperialism currently being channelled by islamism.

Bhutto's policy was to lead the regime best able to manage imperialism's interests in the country while siphoning off some of the riches for her own and for her more powerful supporters, with crumbs from the table for her mass base among the petty bourgeoisie.

The populist opposition is fuelled by democratic demands for national and cultural self-respect, but the distorted ideological representation this finds in islamism will lead up a blind alley. The weaknesses of individual terror tactics are symptomatic in this respect - it destroys your most enthusiastic supporters, and generates heavily repressive countermeasures by the state.

At least islamist populism stands in opposition to the West and its stranglers... so far so good... but since it also stands in opposition to the need of the mass of Pakistanis for food shelter health education productive work and a say in their own lives, it will be as contradictory as the regime in Iran. And far from attracting the solidarity of the mass of working people in the West, it tends to alienate them and provide fuel for the misleading demagoguery of Western politicians.

Only a revolutionary (ie anti-capitalist) socialist mass movement can stop the rot and end the bloodshed and despair. Obviously in a socialist union with the rest of the sub-continent - India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to start with.

For the moment we can note that Eppur si muove - nevertheless, it moves, as Galileo noted of the earth around the sun. History, and beneath its bloody surface, the class struggle, is moving, and after the tensions piled up by the collapse of Stalinism in the USSR, the explosiveness of its movements should surprise no one.

The End of History - my arse!

So *why* do men hate women?

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A slur and an outrage

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2070272,...

A slur and an outrage

The reporter who blew open Watergate is part of a misogynist conspiracy against Hillary Clinton

Zoe Williams Wednesday May 2, 2007 The Guardian

All you ever read about Hillary Clinton is how the American electorate hates her, and yet the only reason you're reading about her in the first place is that she is, in effect, 50% of the candidacy for leadership of the Democratic party. Somebody, surely, must like her. It can't just be the internet. Is the net even allowed to vote?

Carl Bernstein is dishing the dirt in his forthcoming unauthorised biography, entitled A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bernstein is now known as "the one played by Dustin Hoffman" in the Watergate film. He is a seminal investigative journalist, and claims to have the unexpurgated truth, culled from 200 sources - one of which, wince-inducingly, is Clinton's closest confidante, Diane Blair. Or rather not the woman herself; she (and now you can wince) died of lung cancer seven years ago. Bernstein has filleted her papers and personal effects, which are being sorted for the University of Arkansas library. He stops short of calling Clinton a liar, apparently, but suggests that she played fast and loose with the truth. Well come on then, how would the truth look if she'd played slower and tighter?

The gobbet that's meant to stir us up and keep us going until publication next month is this: contrary to what she's said, she did know about Bill and his affair with Gennifer Flowers. Or at least, she probably knew. This is according to an uncredited writer who has followed her career closely. "She always knew about her. Anyone who has approached the subject of Hillary Clinton with a clear eye will run across many examples of stories that are not true."

It's a tricky one, isn't it? Maybe she did know, but there might be a question mark over how she knew - was it actual information, or a hunch? When exactly should she have announced that she knew, in order to keep her veracity slate clean in the eyes of the voting public? When she'd got hold of some DNA evidence, or just when he came home with a naughty look on his face? Never mind that this is his transgression, not hers. Never mind that he paid his debt for his lively undercrackers some time ago, as I think even the most stalwart conservative would agree. How can this possibly be a relevant test of her, as a person or as a politician?

This is so far beyond the old "does it matter what they do in the bedroom?" debate. It's outrageous even to suggest that her husband's sex life is salient to her career in the first place, let alone that she should be held accountable for it. The whole book, ranging across "everything" from Clinton's "complex relationship with her disciplinarian father" to "her courtship with Bill Clinton and the amazing dynamic of their marriage, during the most trying of circumstances", is a slur on Hillary Clinton, refracting her through the prism of the men around her to a nexus of feminine roles: daughter, wife, blah.

The greatest outrage is that the next accusation will be that she isn't a "heavyweight". Misogynist opinion sees no contradiction in reducing any given woman to a series of soap opera and/or biological roles - and then, using this as "evidence", levelling at her the charge that she isn't serious-minded!

The same has happened to Ségolène Royal, the socialist contender for the French presidency, who has found even members of her own party incapable of comprehending how someone can both be a mother and understand foreign policy. Oh, that we had time to caper through the various German responses to Angela Merkel's childlessness.

In the UK, our tabloids are still capable of this sort of thing, but in Westminster, in soi-disant quality journalism and publishing, it would be laughed off the page. At the risk of unseemly nationalism, it's worth remembering how far we've come.

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk

********************************

Choppa's response:

So, *why* do so many men fear women?

For the same reason many US-icans fear socialists and communists.

US citizens are so afraid of their peers - of each other -- and you can see this in any piece of US mass culture, which is full of organized bullying and brutality (Them) against weak and trembling individuals with a desirable goody to be stolen (Me) -- that they can hardly conceive of the Evil that must be inherent in Double Thems (Emperor Ming, Lex Luthor, the Joker, Saddam Hussein, Huns, Nips, Bogey de Jour).

Men likewise are so afraid of each other, so terrified, so browbeaten, so cowardly, so corrupt, so squishily yellowy-brown, that the Alien Other, the Double Them confronting ManHood, Woman, must be of an Evil so inconceivable that their balls clench and they shrivel up in the face of it (la Fica Dentata).

And the culture of fear is nurtured by a society of alienation and terror. Change society from Dog eats Dog to woMan helps woMan, live and let live instead of kill or be killed, and you drain the cesspit of fear we all splash around in.

Voilà.