The Polical Compass

This has been the buzz around the office for the last couple of days: we've been having fun with the political compass. We were at a seminar about critical thinking in students and one of the suggestions was a tool to help them perceive the bias they approached a subject with.

Its central premise I take to be self-evident: that the axis of left and right is unsatisfactory for plotting political convictions and that another of authoritarian vs. libertarian is needed. This, obviously, doesn't work for Americans who like to confuse 'liberal' with 'left' when they are not the same thing. This is part of the reason why former lefties (say Wolfowitz et al though for all their trumpeting of SDS leadership I've never seen them mentioned in anything on the SDS) end up with a very right wing government.

I have long argued that Irish political parties are only comprehensible if you have a three dimensioal axis including both these measures and nationalism and unionism. The lack of a major fascist party here is partially attributable to strong nationalism being associated with the left a bit more than the right. DeValera would have been a willing fascist but his fellow travellers would not.

By the way, I score somewhere between Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

From people at work's score I suspect that most people's politics, when not considering which of their limited parties to vote for, are far less authoritarian than the options offered them. And probably quite a bit left too. Howard Zinn noted that about polling the US people rather than the options they are offered

Budget

Spending too much time this morning thinking about modelling prisoner's dilemma on children's robots to really take the time to write what I had intended to write.

Another budget and another confused set of tools will emerge. Bertie had his supposed 'road to damascus' when he discovered the ordinary people had begun to blame him for the neoliberal ruin that was emerging and the huge disparity in income that is developing and so claimed he was 'the last socialist in Ireland'. This budget will be another set of giveaways; institutional giveaways to the very rich and corporate greed that will see the bifurcation in Irish society entrenched; and handouts to the poor to buy votes - increases in social welfare for groups (like the elderly) that his electoral machine is afraid of losing. The cynicism of this clientelle politics is really sickening. It's also deeply infuriating as their hypocrisy is damaging for the country. In reality the key economic policy of this government is croneyism rather than the neoliberalism of Charlie McCreevy (though of course he was guilty of cronyism as his tax breaks for billionaire horse pimps shows). They rub shoulders and create a corrupt business environment for their billionaires they worship in the Galway Races hospitality tents and up a few shillings (bread and circuses again) for the excluded's dole rather than seeking an economy where the rising tide raises all boats. Many of the boats have holes in them and handing out life jackets isn't the best use of public money.

Not that the best use of public money is something this government has shown the slightest understanding of.

What the civil war denied us the joy of...

News that the lovely people at the progressive democrats have fallen out with each other (and why wouldn't you? You have a viper in your midst.) has been greeted with glee tempered with dread round our way. Mary Harney has many faults - chief of which is being leader of a party which defends privilage and as morally correct and capital as something, the operation of which is beyond human interference - but I don't think she is a crypto fascist. McDowell is. That's not to say he personally believes in scientifically outmoded racial inferiority doctrines (for those not paying attention for the last fifty years or so the notion of a race among human populatios is derided by geneticists) but racist is as racist does and his constitutional referendum that he slipped by used the race card and people's fear of race. It redefines citizenship in a way which is not appropriate for a republic but one which is for a nation: in this situation McDowell chose not to follow the progressive model of the US but is instead heading the direction of Serbia. This is particularly ironic given the Minister for Justice is a disciple of all things American including their failed criminal justice system and their barbaric, expensive, and useless prisons. It seems to be no coincidence that a media panic about gang wars opens up on his watch. During all this the minister has an ever lengthening Criminal Justice Bill which will solve all problems. He just doesn't have any legislation passed ever. His bloated incompetence is further demonstrated by his aloof sang froid as the courts had no option but to reveal the unconstitutionality of our statutory rape laws. Their illegality is not his fault - it was pointed out to us in college about 18 years ago - but what is his fault is his failure to react when cases were in progress as had never happened before. So, we have a Minister for Justice that single handedly created a racist nation, failed to protect children from child abuse, who by his own admission is minister for justice during soaring gang crime that he believes needs much legislation to crack down on but who has introduced no such legislation (just reamended and deamended drafts) - in other words as abject a failure as a minister as has ever held a post in this country. Why should anyone worry? His stop-start career, built on media whoredom should be over. Unfortunately Harney had the nerve, the balls, the chutzpah, to take the post of Minister for Health - perhaps the most underfunctioning department in the government. She was always going to fail there. Her stock is crashed.

So why the stalled leadership bid? Harney is a link to the old school: to a time before it would have been acceptable for a man with the moral stink of McDowell to run for public office. His kind would be seen as the kind of beast that rose in central and Eastern European countries: no decency about him. The PDs under him could mutate, slightly, from the party of capital and privilage into an actual racist extreme right wing party thus able to, possibly, garner a popular vote (it currently has no sizeable electoral base and weilds power in great disproportion to its support) and move up a gear. What would possibly unite the very rich and the very poor other than having a classic old school extremist right wing party like we never had in Ireland? Naive class self interest is rampant in this country. Comments like "I'm a builder/nurse/pensioner Haughey looked after us", laughably naive (he gave back a bit of what he stole, like a porcine Robin Hood), are common stock. The poor are under the cosh. Their jobs have not got better wages and conditions over the last decade. They see them being taken by better educated immigrants who will move up and move on or just work like, well whatever hard working people work like these days, and take the money and spend it in another country where it's worth something. That is how they could give their allegiance to the party of the divine right of capital which has stolen their futures from them.

It is quite funny that the PDs were founded to break us out of civil war politics and they may just succeed. It's difficult to explain Ireland's political parties to someone from abroad. I usually say that left and right is only one axis. There is also the y axis of socially liberal and conservative. Then there is the z axis of republican versus unionist. The independence/ republican/ nationalist axis was at its most extreme socially liberal and left wing rather than fascist like in the rest of Europe so we never had an all out fascist party due to our civil war politics. McDowell's PDs, if he gets to run them, may change that. Finally a break from civil war politics will allow the creation of a fascist party that so many in this state will benefit from. In the old days he would have needed religious support for this. The beauty of the state we now live in where our rights are defined by our nature as consumers rather than as citizens and our aspirations by consumption rather than production is that this is no longer necessary.

He serviced some state

So he's dead then. And why should we speak ill of the dead? Because we can. Because his censorship of dissent by threat and writ is over. His control over a craven media is finished and the backlash is audible today. Because I can honestly think of nothing positive to say of him. I'm a dog in the streets from North Dublin in a town the size of the whole of Longford with a wee country road and no buses. His corruption polluted the whole of the country. I'm not saying the country was great before him, but it was much, much worse with him. There is no legacy. When people try to convince me of his 'presidential' qualities they usually mention the tax exempt status for artists that allows the multimillionaire Bono to lecture at me about helping the poor. It strikes me as symptomatic of his seigneurial contempt for the plain people of Ireland. We should be indebted to the great and the good and be glad to fund their lifestyle.

More Property Porn

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It's official - google trends has us down as a bunch of property obsessed wanker knobheads.

And I'm still the pedant hater that cringes every time I hear the word property used when someone means 'a house' or 'realty'. To be fair though, property is marginally less popular than sex, but only in Dublin and London is it even close. Sickos. Interestingly, free stuff is much more popular than property (way to go India!), but in many places free stuff is much more popular than sex, others it's the other way around. Property is just as popular as mp3s in Milton Keynes.

And if google says it, it must be true. It's uniquely democratic Right?

Prop'tay Porn

Indulge me. I've a report running on a database and a few minutes to spend. I'm not picking on the English here, well I am but any brain dead trend in England or the US will be taken up with enthusiasm here. Sadly that can't be said of interesting or exciting new developments. Our TV schedule is dominated, it seems to me, with 'property porn' shows. Some airhead presenter will go abroad with some people with money and ask them to compare "prop'tays". It kind of reminds me of when I was a kid and Blue Peter would be on and they'd be talking about their sticky-back-plastic and cutting out "pattons". For the life of me I couldn't figure out what a "patton" was. Was it some kind of template? I didn't realise that English people can't pronounce an r after a schwa sound unless the schwa is at the end of a word and not followed by an r in reality. So 'Africa' is pronounced 'Afriker' and 'water' as 'watah'.

Anyway, the jarring pronunciation just highlights the word which is my problem. They'll be standing there in front of a house and saying things like 'so what do you think of this proptay?'. When did the word house cease to mean a house? At whatever dimwit school they went to were they taught the alphabet with 'p is for proptay' and a picture of a house on the wall? Anglo-American-Irish obsession with the price of residences has made a whole generation of people who cannot distinguish between a pile of bricks and a set of rights that you can enforce against other people. Our greed is sickening. Not only that, but unlike say stocks and shares, we have three societies devoted to nonproductive assets. I should point out that this applies less to the US than England and particularly applies here. We are pouring the wealth of the country into something which will swallow it up and never give it back. We have largely leveraged our capital to disenfranchise anyone under 30 already in this country and we are moving abroad like the rapacious carpetbaggers we are. The massive increase in disposable capital in this country has produced no rise in innovation, no amelioration of poverty that is supposed to be expected when the tide rises, and development that is so skewed to the construction industry and the rising value of a nonproductive commodity that the future seems almost as scary as it did in the 1980s. When we had no money and we were all miserable and we all emigrated. I wonder has the 'leave this country' gene been wiped out by a decade and a half of full employment? Will twenty somethings start thinking to themselves that they have no chance of a decent quality of life, of fair and reliable tenancy (as buying is a mad dream for most of them) in this country and up sticks like we all did?

Or will the 'soft landing' the credit institutions and government are desparately propagandising about turn out to be a rough and catastrophic one? With every extension of leniency on credit the banks, in the interest of quarterly returns and the ultimate morality of shareholder value, risk the whole confidence trick of this economy.

I'm worried. I like it here. I feel too old to move out again. It's home and I want to stay here but if the arse falls out of the economy I migh be forced out. Mind you, if it does those with capital after the deluge will be able to make out like bandits (or those who multiple bought in the 1990s).

Happy thanksgiving from the no-control room!

I meant to write an entry last Friday. Only thing was it was supposed to be about the premiere of Wal-Mart: the high cost of low price that I was hosting last Thursday night. I had planned to have somebody from Impact (the retail workers union) and Tesco (which is the closest to Wal-Mart here) and to be completely ignored by Lidl and Aldi, and maybe somebody from Superquinn to try and have a different tack on supermarkets. I thought it would be a great antidote to that simpleton Eddie _!_ Hobbes and his series of programmes that managed to convince most people here that the problems with prices in Ireland were all to do with tax and that if we all had an Aldi nearby our money problems would be over. Like grocery prices are really the deal rather than non-productive assets (say land for example). Like Irish farmers are actually getting a reasonable price for quality product. Like supermarkets are ever an economically sensible place to buy fresh food, fresh meat, fresh fish, or anything healthy. Seriously, they do all these programmes about the varying cost of items. Hobbes went on about how a LidlAldi in every town would be the saviour of housewives. Did he ever pop into a local greengrocer and have a deco at the prices? And the quality is of course incomparable. Food might actually taste of something if you buy it in the greengrocer, or if you want to pay supermarket prices, in your local organic market. And that's without thinking about food miles and other issues that you may want to consider that go beyond cost and quality. But Eddie _!_ Hobbes successfully campaigned to get the groceries order revoked thus ensuring Tesco's complete domination over this country (and the filling of our roads with monstermotherfuckingtrucks that they can't actually deal with and the levying of huge tolls and another round of taxation to pay for the road upgrades to make Tesco richer). I felt this film would be very relevant in Ireland with the impending IBEC led collapse of social partnership and Irish Ferry's hilariously blatent contempt for its workers, the government, and of course all of us. You're never getting on one of their ferries again, right?

Anyway, I began to get suspicious as the promo materials didn't arrive. Last Thursday dawned, dull and dreary (actually it was bright and sunny at dawn as it has been for the last while till the fogs rolled in) and still no sign of the film. A disasterous day looked like happening. I was thinking of showing Robert Greenwald's previous film 'Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's was on journalism' but then I remembered that it was only the second best film about a satellite news channel that I and my Beloved saw at the documentary film festival that year. So we showed 'Control room' about Al Jazeera instead. This turned out also to be topical given the current revelations about the US's willingness to bomb their headquarters (they of course bombed their bureaux in Afghanistan - nearly killing the puppet Karzai - and in Baghdad - killing a journalist but ensuring that their all important spin on the invasion of Baghdad was the only one out there). There were all sorts of organisational nightmares but it went well enough, I was just bitterly disappointed that we let people down, including those that came via the film's website to the only showing in Ireland. They've been in touch and when the film actually arrives we'll be able to have a full showing and do lots of publicity. Hope to see you there.

Monarcy in the UK

So racist rants by muslim clerics demand a suspension of the normal rules of democracy? Why not pass a law banning incitement to racial hatred like most of the civilised world? Because much of the tory party, BNP, and allied loyalist parties speaches would be similarly viewed by an impartial court perhaps?

It's good to see that at last democracy is reasserting itself in Britain. No Tony, everything has not changed. You are not your master. You cannot make a clean break with human rights. Your hold on your party and the media is too fragile to allow you down the road to totalitarianism. I hope. Shoot to kill policies were unthinkingly approved by the media - or at least they were so frightened by the fruits of dissent in the US after terrorist attacks that they were cowed into silence - but at last after weeks of police lies, disinformation, leaks, and dirty tricks the press is beginning to reassert the normal rights of democracy.

Here's a thought: people in the UK can never have a proper foundation to a democratic state, a proper sense of citizenship, a proper foundation to the defence of human rights, a sensible balancing of the rights and needs of its citizens until they are citizens rather than subjects. Abolish the monarchy in the UK. Get a constitution which legislation will have to be tested against. I know the judges have tended to do this against the unwritten constitution for the last 15 years but this labour government is doing its best to assert the primacy of the executive branch of government at the expence of the other two. Take the conduct of government out of the shadows and let people know what is going on. How else do you expect people to vote and take part?

Later, how exactly the opposite process is taking place in Ireland and the US. We are becoming subjects to our executive branch of government. I went to a football match a while ago and had the indignity of having to listen to the 'Taoiseach's march'. What? When did he become a ceremonial figurehead? And of course in the US they have 'in god we trust' written everywhere, and flags, and pictures of their beloved leader. Quite like a third world dictatorship really. Funny how the most republican of parties in the most republican of countries is forgetting what a republic is and how it differs from an oligarchy. You don't inherit the leadership in a republic. We owe the leader no more respect or reverence than any other public servant dependent on our pleasure. You cannot commit a sacriligious or blasphemous offence in a republic - whether that be to the flag, the institutions or offices of the state, or to some established religion. Republics are the result of the intelligent design of the people: all other foundations for the state are the result of exploitation.