An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Wobbly in the Shell:

The army of production must be organized, not only for the everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

Witch House

JWZ on Witch House as an after-tremor of goth:

the current batch of "Witch House" bands, which is a micro-genre that was invented about six minutes ago that seems to be comprised of an odd mix of late-80s goth, shoegaze and trip-hop, as if Love is Colder Than Death were covering Jesus and Mary Chain while the singer from Rosetta Stone tried to rap...it's just about the only thing that remotely qualifies as "goth" that has come out in the last ten years.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Reith rolls in his grave

Adam Curtis:

TV now tells you what to feel.

It doesn't tell you what to think anymore. From EastEnders to reality format shows, you're on the emotional journey of people - and through the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the agreed form of feeling. "Hugs and Kisses", I call it.

I nicked that off Mark Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which said that if you analyse television now it's a system of guidance - it tells you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having the Good Feelings. And the person who is having the Bad Feelings is redeemed through a "hugs and kisses" moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance.

Product Red

Jesus. This really isn't a parody:
Product Red, styled as (PRODUCT)RED, is a brand licensed to partner companies such as Nike, American Express (UK), Apple Inc., Starbucks, Converse, Bugaboo, Penguin Classics (UK & International), Gap, Emporio Armani, Hallmark (US) and Dell. It was founded in 2006 by U2 frontman and activist Bono and Bobby Shriver of ONE/DATA to engage the private sector in raising awareness and funds to help eliminate AIDS in Africa

Eucatastrophe

Eucatastrophe: Tolkein's term for the unexpected happy turn at the end of story. I would have imagined, firstly that there would be an existing term for that, and secondly that Tolkein would have known it. Apparently not.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Wikileaks and gated communities

Wikileaks: finally, Sombody Gets It:

 

The strategy of Wikileaks, as explained in an essay by Julian Assange, is to make the world transparent, so that closed organizations are disabled, and open ones aren't hurt. But he's wrong. Actually, a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns:  low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other.

While many individuals in Wikileaks would probably protest that they don't personally advocate radical ideas about transparency for everybody but hackers, architecture can force all our hands. This is exactly what happens in current online culture. Either everything is utterly out in the open, like a music file copied a thousand times or a light weight hagiography on Facebook, or it is perfectly protected, like the commercially valuable dossiers on each of us held by Facebook or the files saved for blackmail by Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks method punishes a nation -- or any human undertaking -- that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn't have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. Wikileaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.

 

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Aphex Twin

[tl;dr: I don't get Aphex Twin]

This weekend I have been mostly listening guiltily to electronic music. Guiltily, because after 4 years around Berlin I surely ought to either love or hate it. Instead my reaction is puzzlement. Occasional moments of ecstatic comprehension as I find encounter something that moves me. Boredom listening to most of the rest, especially the stompy repetition that seems too dull even to dance along with. And a dull ear which can't distinguish the two, can't figure out which genres or properties make for music I like.

Currently listening to Aphex Twin's drukqs. It communicates largely in a register I don't understand, mostly avoiding danceable segments or buildup/breakdown.

Still, there's The track Mt. St Michel is one of the easier to tune into -- high-paced tpaping on the beat, and then a bunch of calmer stuff going on in the background.

But it seems nobody else likes/understands this album either, even amidst Aphex Twin fans. Popmatters:

The tunes oscillate between exciting hyperactive beat-happening compositions and tedious exercises in piano practice or can-banging. There seems to be no real content to the album, and the tracks follow no theme or pattern.


[also, I wish I had enough of a technical musical vocabulary to figure out what I'm listening to, and why. Feel horribly handicapped whenever I try to discuss music. Really want a few very old-fashined lessons in musicology]

Celebrity robots, and racist hero/slave polarization

Celebrity robots:

One clever trope that Urasawa introduces, which I think is genuinely an original one – not just with respect to the Tezuka original but with respect to the whole genre of robot fiction – is that in this world there are celebrity robots, like Mont Blanc. The humans revere them. And yet the humans continue to treat the mass of ordinary robots as disposable non-persons, despite the fact that it’s not so clear what would separate your old-model cleaning lady robot from noble Mont Blanc. Is it just that the cleaning lady doesn’t write poetry? I think this is good allegory of typical ethnic conflict patterns. The dominant group somewhat assuages its guilt/uncertainty, by raising just a few members of the minority above even the level of the majority, imbuing them with extra authenticity and heroism, and somehow in this way actually cementing the old majority/minority relations in place, rather than challenging them.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Child poverty to worsen under coalition, says IFS - Yahoo! News UK

Among all children and working-age individuals, we forecast a rise in relative poverty of about 800,000 and a rise in absolute poverty of about 900,000 between 2010-11 and 2013-14," said Robert Joyce, author of the IFS report.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Over-educated Chinese?

There a glut of Chinese university graduates without meaningful employment in their fields, and these educations were funded by parents who sacrificed their own lives to send those kids to college. Unless that graduate is from a high-ranking school and has family connections, it’s seldom worth the cost these days.

In desperation, Chinese families are now sending their kids to school in the USA, the UK or Europe, in hopes their kids will master Western attitudes and form alliances beyond China. But even those children return home to face the same stigma: the little no-name school they attended in the West is ridiculed as a Wild Grass College. All this was seen in Japan two decades ago.

Remittances as aid

Here's another argument for No Borders. Not sure if it's a socialist or a neolib one. Work-migration is the most effective form of international aid:

Is there a Secret Weapon for Fighting Poverty? | UN Dispatch

 

Granted, this then brings us straight into the global outsourcing debate. If somebody cleaning floors in Sydney is bringing money to Indonesia, wouldn't an exploitative factory in Jakarta be even more effective?And it's worth remembering that life for gastarbeiter can be pretty shit -- see the recent outrage in the Philippines about torture of Filipino nurses in Saudi Arabia.
But...facts, facts, facts.

 

 

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Remittances as aid

Here's another argument for No Borders. Not sure if it's a socialist or a neolib one. Work-migration is the most effective form of international aid:

Is there a Secret Weapon for Fighting Poverty? | UN Dispatch

 

Granted, this then brings us straight into the global outsourcing debate. If somebody cleaning floors in Sydney is bringing money to Indonesia, wouldn't an exploitative factory in Jakarta be even more effective?And it's worth remembering that life for gastarbeiter can be pretty shit -- see the recent outrage in the Philippines about torture of Filipino nurses in Saudi Arabia.
But...facts, facts, facts.

Anti-degrees

Tim Worstall has a point on education:

It’s not all that long ago (certainly within my adult lifetime) that no degree was required to qualify as either an accountant or solicitor (all a degree did give you, other than that mind widening etc, was a free pass through some of the professional courses/exams), you could go off to work as a trainee and take your professional exams while working (articles in the law, might be the same word in accounting).

I'm slightly biased, in that my 'profession' (programming) is one where not having a degree can still be a point of pride.

Not sure about the CT article itself, though. I'm all for utopianism, but I don't see this variant ever making it anywhere.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

This post may be on the David Icke forums (!), but it's a surprisingly good take on meditation:

The main thing you’ve got to ask yourself is “What happens when I concentrate and how do I set about the conditions to concentrate on concentration.”

When shooting a gun, you concentrate naturally for 5 seconds or so but you need to learn the process which you can do this for much longer. Still…People good at aiming a gun might have better concentration skills than those who meditate simply because they need to concentrate to hit their target. A person meditating doesn’t have that kind of target so they never build up a high degree of meditation in any of their meditations even if they do it 3 hours a day.

Reviving anarchism

 Henry Farrell on two semi-academic books on the history of anarchism:

the “Wrong Address” theory of nationalism, under which History was supposed to confer group consciousness and solidarity upon Class, yet somehow ended up delivering it to Nationality instead

...

This loose network Anderson describes was genuinely global. Its participants were comfortable speaking several different languages. Indeed (and this is Anderson’s key argument), both 19th-century anarchists and nationalists always spoke to a world audience. They were caught within a world system that had been created by corrupt European powers that were now losing influence and control. Both anarchists and nationalists sought to break this system up. When they acted, they were acutely aware that they were being observed by audiences both foreign and domestic. They acted precisely so that the whole world would take note....

The Art of Not Being Governed fits together nicely with its predecessor, Seeing Like a State, as a landmark work of early 21st-century social science. The two books have complementary arguments; The Art of Not Being Governed might equally well have been titled The People States Can’t See. It is, first and foremost, a history of escape from the state, chronicling the stories of the various peoples who have fled to highlands, swamps and archipelagos where the state cannot easily reach them. Scott’s particular object of study is “Zomia”, the mountain marches of Southeast Asia that stretch from southern China down to Laos and northern Thailand, taking in parts of Burma and eastern India. Scott calls Zomia a “shatter zone” that has actively resisted incorporation into the various states around it and served as a refuge for peoples fleeing those states.

There are a few reasons why I've not seen much German television. One is that I've avoided TV since childhood. Another is that, until the past 6 months, I've not lived anywhere with a shared television. A third is that in-person recommendations of what to watch in Germany have never been able to keep up with the deluge of English-languag recommendations constantly coming in through livejournal, facebook and the like.

So, when I do encounter German TV, there's space for me to be pleasantly surprised. So it was with the satire programme Xtra3. Came across it because Chris was channel-hopping, then quickly realised it's top-notch satire with a political edge I can sympathise with. This snippet (via karohemd) is particularly great, following up on the ludicrous terror alerts and so on:

Monday, December 13, 2010

EU limits social housing in the Netherlands

How did I miss this? Oh, right, because our eyes collectively glaze over at the mention of anything from Brussels, regardless of how much it affects our world.

Thirty three per cent of housing stock in the Netherlands is owned by bodies that receive state funding. In 2005, the commission – the executive body of the EU – argued having more than 30 per cent of homes belonging to the social housing sector seemed ‘disproportionate’.

It expressed doubt about the compatibility of the Dutch social housing support systems with the European competition rules, and suggested that it could be a possible ‘manifest error’.

 

French pessimism about the crisis yet to come

70% of French believe the worst of the crisis is yet to come:

Lorsque l'institut Ipsos leur demande s'ils pensent "que le gros de la crise est derrière nous", ils sont ainsi 70 % à répondre au contraire que "le gros de la crise reste encore à venir".

This despite recent business figures which are positive, if not quite so good as in Germany. What's going on?

  • Everybody believes governments are making up the figures, even when they aren't
  • It's going well for business, but not for people -- the crisis has become a concentration/acceleration of the existing patterns of inequality.
  • 'man in the street' experiences of recession -- unemployment in particular -- lag behind the state of business, which in turn lags behind financial markets. This is why the crisis began as a financial crisis: at first it seemed phony-war-like, something happening only in meaningless figures
  • People are using optimism/pessimism to make a political point. e.g. the left are exaggerating the crisis, as a means to criticize Sarkozy

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Ken MacLeod:

I was on a panel with Charlie Stross, and he did a very impressive Charlie-style riff on how SF is actually the agitprop department of an early 20th-century totalitarian movement that never made the big time with the flags and uniforms and revolvers and never got a mound of skulls to call its own. Technocracy, the movement in question, has dwindled to a handful of old men in Oregon, busy putting the Northwest Technocrat on the Web after decades of cyclostyling, but SF soldiers on. It's as if collectivization and the Five-Year Plan had never happened but there was this genre, socialist realism - SR - that kept going on and on and on about tractors.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Ödön von Horváth

Someone wrote to me about Ödön von Horváth, a Weimar-era playwright and novelist who wrote these wonderful absurdist pieces about how nuts fascism was -- the point being that its inherent craziness hid how evil it was. His work is laugh-out-loud funny while being shiver-down-your-spine chilling. But he was a Hungarian living in Berlin and eventually had to flee the Nazis. An epically difficult thing in itself, and he must have felt a unfathomably-deep sense of relief when he finally got to Paris... where he was promptly struck by lightening and killed while taking a victory stroll down the Champs Elysee. How can we not champion this guy? He must not be forgotten.

Bookslut | Heinrich Böll and the Literature of Aftermath: A Correspondence

What is Anonymous

What does anything have to do with the other? People are dead. Other people are rich. Some people’s day was ruined. Other people were embarrassed. Some people laughed. What is the end result? Human history. The world, every damn day. Welcome to the never-ending old sick twisted mostly unfunny joke that is life. The human mob, again and again and again. Until there are none of us left.

So what is Anonymous? Whatever you want. In my definition, the closest that a boring and trite platitude can get to summing up human existence while still missing it completely. Sorry. Add your own politics/doom/disappointment/enthusiasm/distrust/anger/fear/love. It’s jokes, all the way down.


In other words, it's the mob. we got a little less used to the mob in the era of Fordism, when people were more regulated and had to get up at 9am. Now, the internet is in many ways bringing us back towards the pre-industrial. And 4-chan is the new mob.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

SF and victorian realism

The Goggles Do Nothing — Crooked Timber

The ancestry of modern SF lies as much in the 19th century “condition of England” novel as it does in more obvious ancestors like Frankenstein. That is to say – one of the skeins one can trace back through modern SF is a vein of sociological rather than scientific speculation, in which events happening to individual characters serve as a means to capture arguments about what is happening to society as a whole. In the nineteenth century, there was clearly a tension between the novel-as-fleshing-out-of-individual-experience and the novel-as-depiction-of-our-social-state (Middlemarch is one of the few novels I’ve read from this period that really manages these tensions successfully). Science fiction took one of these routes (an awful lot of early SF - e.g. H.G. Wells is primarily sociological speculation). Returning to the long nineteenth century is nothing more and nothing less than SF coming back to its roots.

Wikileaks, Mr Miyagi, cells and mass movements

This is the key question for the long-term impact of wikileaks:

Assange's hypothesis may or may not be true, but his belief that WikiLeaks will lead to greater government transparency is blinkered in the extreme. Governments do not respond to security breaches by surrendering themselves to the fates. American foreign-policy bureaucracies have and will continue to respond to WikiLeaks by clamping down on the dissemination of information.

The effect of wikileaks is to clamp down on all partially-secret information. If you want to act, you now must make a choice: either you act entirely in the open, or you keep it all locked down*. Keep things partialy secret, but not entirely, and you're going to experience the worst of both worlds.

This isn't a new phenomenon. It's how political groups must act under threat from a repressive government. Choose transparency, act like Aung San Suu Kyi. Depend for your survival on public support domestic and international, on the efficiency of open communication, on having a morally-defensible public face. Or act as cells. Be small, be secretive. Renounce the possibility of building a mass movement. Be a small group of committed citizens, maybe not even knowing the names of one another.

But don't choose a path in the middle. To adapt Mr. Miyagi:

Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, [makes squish gesture] get squish just like grape. Here, karate secrecy, same thing. Either you karate secrecy do "yes", or karate secrecy do "no". You karate secrecy do "guess so", [makes squish gesture] just like grape. Understand?

The same applies to governments, lobbyists, firms worried about leaking secrets to one another. The latest leaks were visible to 3 million Americans. It's a reasonable bet that Russia and China had already gained access to them. Similarly I wouldn't be at all surprised if big corporations already knew about some of what the State Department were secretly saying about them. You can easily imagine somebody in Bradley Manning's position going on to work for Halliburton, bringing with him any documents discussing the corporation.

The bulk of the leaks consists of political analysis, gossip, pen-portraits of powerful figures. It's the kind of commentary that circulates pretty freely among journalists, lobbyists, activists, civil servants and other politics nerds. People in power already had it, albeit not in written form. What's new is letting the public into it, warts and all.

* The effect isn't total, but it's heading in that direction. In the specific case of the Bradley Maning leaks, some half-competent database management would have cut them off at the pass.

 

Anonymous take down mastercard.com

This is a pretty impressive success for Anonymous, taking down a very prominent site.

 

 

In an attack it is calling "Operation: Payback", a group of online activists calling themselves Anonymous appear to have orchestrated a DDOS ("distributed denial of service") attack on the site, bringing its service to a halt for many users. Attempts to load www.mastercard.com are currently unsuccessful.

 

Interestingly, this is sandwiched half-way between being a mass action, and being merely the work of a small, elite group of hackers. I'm not sure what system they're using, but the 'distributed' element of the DDoS almost certainly comes from thousands of /b/tards running some code on their own machines. For that matter, it could well be that a bunch of them are sitting on mastercard.com and hitting refresh. 

Mastercard statement: "MasterCard is experiencing heavy traffic on its external corporate website – MasterCard.com. We are working to restore normal speed of service"

CT on fees

Now that fee-paying is part of the culture, government has taken the opportunity to expand the principle. Whereas we might once have hoped that, as society became wealthier, ever wider access to the goods of higher education (and many other cultural goods) would be possible, now it seems that “we can’t afford it”. What was once an essential component of the good society—remember Harold Wilson’s enthusiasm for the Open University?—becomes an expensive luxury whose only acceptable public justification is economic benefit. So much for John Stuart Mill.

Post mainly to see if ScribeFire is going to help me at all. Probably not

[

Tuesday, December 7, 2010


It is hard to exaggerate Mr Erdös's passion. For 19 hours a day, seven days a week, stimulated by coffee, and later by amphetamines, he worked on mathematics. He might start a game of chess, but would probably doze off until the conversation returned to maths. To find another life this century as intensely devoted to abstraction, one must reach back to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who stripped his life bare for philosophy. But whereas Wittgenstein discarded his family fortune as a form of self-torture, Mr Erdös gave away most of the money he earned because he simply did not need it. "Private property is a nuisance," he would say. And where Wittgenstein was driven by near suicidal compulsions, Mr Erdös simply constructed his life to extract from his magnificent obsession the maximum amount of happiness.


Source; there's much else on the site.

Also here are personal reminiscences. Fun to think how, in 60 years time or so, we'll be seeing the deaths of the last mathematicians who worked with him directly. The last people who really knew (i.e. who worked with) the man himself.

Counter-view here

Sex and space

Just unearthed an old email I wrote about the relationship between sex and sexuality. Figure I may as well put it up here, since I'm not likely to do anything more with it otherwise.

The basic idea is that many elements of sexuality aren't usually considered in terms of space -- but they could be. A cluster of intimate practices are based around the restriction of space (and the associated physical sensations of pressure, darkness, the touch of whatever boundary is limiting the space). I'm thinking of hugs, bondage, the wearing of corsets and latex, perhaps with vacuum-beds as an extreme case. These tend to also be 'about' the complete control and presence in that restrained space and sensations of security (think of people who feel safe when a partner is sitting or lying on them). Often they're described in the language of restricted freedom; thinking about them instead in terms of space maybe leads you to more psychoanalytic interpretations of the practices; i.e. connecting them to being in the womb. [I have no background in the area, but it certainly seems a possibility]

But you'd need, somehow, to connect that to the sensations of DISembodiment and DISplacement during sex -- orgasm, in particular, seems often described in terms of being away from the surrounding environment, in a space which has shrunk to just the two(?) partners. If you cease to be separate bodies, can you still be separate bodies in space? To put it another way, 'staring at the ceiling' is a common idiomatic description of being bored during sex. If you're aware of where you are, the sex isn't good enough.

[based on reactions to a talk at Salon Populaire 6 months ago]
Why /are/ there 'y's in the English name of Kyrgyzstan? Almost everywhere else the country is 'Kirgistan', 'Kirgisia', or something similarly y-free. Going through wikipedia, the only other non-cyrillic languages* to use y are Aceh, Cebuano (Philippines), Min, Turkmen, Vietnamese, and others whose names I don't recognize.
oddly decent article by John Naughton in the Guardian:

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.
The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay. [source]
Bitchy Jones, of course:
My point is this. Femdom is broken. It’s not even there. In a way you can’t blame mandoms for thinking there are no actual dominant women. Real femdom based on the desires of dominant women and submissive men coming together to find places of intersection is gone or never was. All there is a male-desire based economy so pervasive that even people doing stuff for themselves think the women needs to be dressed like and advert for herself as if she needs the business. And it isn’t really surprising that this popular idea of femdom fake out doesn’t have the visceral power of the popular idea of mandom. Because it isn’t real.
Sad news for French multiculturalism, as the only (!) politician who dared wear an islamic headscarf* has left the Nouvea Parti Anti-Capitaliste. Brent Whelan:

Moussaïd gave the party its most widespread--though least welcome--burst of publicity last February when she appeared on the list of local candidates in the regional election wearing the Islamic headscarf she favors. Squeezed between the strident criticisms of feminists and secularists, she held her ground--and insisted on her qualifications as a long-time social and party activist--with grace and poise that belied her 21 years. (See my previous post, "Veiled Threat," 2/15/10) After a storm of polemics, mostly hostile, both inside the party and in highly visible venues such as the Idées pages of Le Monde, Ilham and her local supporters had hoped the delicate issues of tolerance and diversity she raised could be fully aired in a party congress. But as that public debate receded in time--originally scheduled for November, then December, now February--she apparently lost confidence in the party's openness to her situation, and now her chapter is closed.


* We're not even talking about a hijab here, by the looks of it -- just a hair covering. i.e. something that wouldn't be the faintest bit controversial in any halfway-sane political climate.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Jet and Coal

Surprising to read in BldgBlog about jet engines being used to put out fires in coal mines.

The engineering field of putting out coal fires has intermittently intrigued me since I heard that they (supposedly) account for as much CO2 emission as all road vehicles in the US. Putting out these fires is an incredible engineering challenge, and one that even the most narrow-minded environmentalist couldn't object to.

So I can't help daydreaming about the kind of organization that could put out the fires. A band of idealistic engineers -- top graduates from Caltech and IIT, grizzled mechanics who've spent decades underground, geologists whose morals wouldn't let them stay in the oil industry. They're funded by a philanthropic tech billionnaire, or perhaps just from carbon offsetting. Together they cross the world, dragging exotic equipment and wrangling McGyver-like contraptions to deal with each mine. One day they land Thunderbird One in Centralia, point the engines down one of the shafts, and finally put out the fires that have been burning for decades.

Privacy, Secrecy, Pseudonyms: between Kurt and Pandora

Productivity and secrecy don't go well together.

I've been slow to accept this, because my private emblem of productivity is the neurotic workaholic. I find it most comfortable to imagine people driven by self-hatred, flinging themselves into creative obsessions to justify lives they would otherwise consider unacceptable, or as a diversion from the emotional wildfires and the social obligations which would otherwise pursue them.

This, of course, says more about me than about the outside world. Sad-but-productive has always been a figure of hope for me, alongside all those people who claim to ride out emotional troubles by burying themselves in work. It's appealing precisely because it's never worked for me -- because my ability to get anything done evaporates when I'm down. I'd love to clap my hands and believe that if I just learn to mope in the right way, I could be simultaneously sad and productive.

Because the alternative model of productivity -- the stronger one, the one built around self-expression rather than self-loathing -- is even harder to picture myself in connection with. But this is the more internally coherent kind. It comes from treating everything you encounter with open acceptance, welcoming all of life as material for creation. From not (as I do) ramming 90% of life into the closet, and trying to show people the remaining 10%.

Using your entire life in this way necessarily means abandoning the old pseudo-Romantic lie that each lifetime tells only one story. It requires saying "I am large. I contain multitudes"

Pseudonyms form one escape. Remember Weimar's cluster of insanely prolific intellectual streetfighters, people such as Kurt Tucholsky. Most of them were forced to write under multiple aliases. Partly this was for political reasons, partly to deal with the sheer volume of their output. Also, though, it was (was it?) to allow free rein to the different parts of their personalities, without running everything through one brand. Multiple personality as lifestyle choice, 70 years before Grant Morrison.

Friendship, therapy, confession

The therapist, the priest, the penpal, the stranger on a train. We always need some confessor who isn't among our friends. Why? Because in order to respect our friends, we must believe that they will disapprove of some things -- particularly, that they share something of our own set of morals. So when you've done something shameful, there's no hope in telling your friends. Either they'll lose respect for you, or (worse?) they'll accept your failure, and so you'll lose respect for them.

Just as Groucho wouldn't join a club that would have him as a member, so -- beyond a certain threshold of self-hatred -- you can't befriend somebody who would have you as a friend.

Here's the role for the expendable not-quite friend, whatever medical, spiritual or social guise s/he may take. Here also is another reason why religions and mores usually have some system of penance and forgiveness -- not just for patching up broken relationships, but because the /possibility/ of repair allows for openness.

Nina Power on chocolate and perky passivity

Nina Power on chocolate:

Chocolate represents that acceptable everyday extravagance that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just moves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly coca solids. It sticks in the mouth a bit. In a total abnegation of her own subjective capacity as well as the entire history of huamn achievement, Fay Weldon, for example, claims that:

"What makes women happy? Ask them and they'll reply, in roughly this order: sex, food, friends, family, shopping, chocolate"

I think there's a very real sense in which women are supposed to say 'chocolate' whenever somebody asks them what they want. It irresistibly symbolizes any or all of the following: ontological girlishness, a naughty viginity that gets its kicks only from a widely-available mucky cloying substitute, a kind of pecuniary decadence [One-Dimensional Woman, pp 36-7]

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

It's an interesting compare-and-contrast question: why have parts of the CIS been resolutely pro-American, while the Middle East has largely not? Presumably in part it's the effect of living under unpleasant Soviet rule, to which the USA was always the most visible opposition. But that effect can't last indefinitely; will there ever be a mass turn towards anti-Americanism in eastern Europe, the baltic states or the caucasus?
In Central and Eastern Europe, the countries of the former Warsaw Pact followed more or less that script. But in 2004-06, when Condoleezza Rice tried to extend the model to Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, she got a rude shock. Citizens in those countries, given anything resembling a free vote, tended to support strongly anti-American candidates.
-- Helena Cobban

email over ssh/socks with evolution (to dodge wifi cafe firewall)

I've just been working in a cafe whose wifi blocks outgoing email. So I had to figure out how to send mail through an ssh tunnel. That is, hussle it through the firewall by sending it encrypted to a server elsewhere, and send the email outgoing from there.

For future reference, and in case it's useful to anybody else, here's how. This is assuming you are running ubuntu on your own machine, and have ssh access to a server somewhere else that's capable of sending mail.

We use ssh to set up a SOCKS proxy, over an ssh tunnel. This establishes a port on the local machine (here, port 1234). any traffic sent through that port will emerge from the server at the other end:

ssh -D 1234 username@server.net


Now, install tsocks. This lets you run another program, with all outgoing connections sent via SOCKS

sudo apt-get install tsocks


configure tsocks to use the tunnel you've set up

sudo vim /etc/tsocks.conf


look for the default server settings, at the bottom. Edit so that:

server = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 1234

Now start your mail program under tsocks

tsocks evolution 



In order to make external mail sending work under this setup, I had to turn off TLS in evolution. I'm not sure if this is a problem inherent to the socks/ssh setup, or just with my particular situation.




more info: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=791323