Sure, I oppose the death penalty in the case of Troy Davis. Who doesn’t.
But I also oppose the death penalty in the case of Lawrence Brewer, who was killed in Texas the same night.
I oppose the death penalty in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki.
I oppose the death penalty in the case of Osama bin Laden.
Killing people is the problem. It’s not the answer.
Look, I think I have figured out a straightforward rule of thumb for apportioning blame. Let’s review this summer’s sausagefesty hackathon and decide what should be done to whom. I call this game:
What Kind Of A Selfish Prick Are You?
1. Brad Manning
What he allegedly did
Leaked classified material, including US diplomatic cables and Collateral Murder video. Contributed to public questioning of unjust war and unethical US foreign policy, at incalculable personal cost.
What kind of selfish prick is he?
The opposite of one.
What should be done to him
Congressional Medal of Honor.
2. Aaron Swartz
What he allegedly did
Broke into an MIT wiring closet to download all of JSTOR in order to do large-scale dataset analysis as he had already done for Wikipedia and PACER data, to demonstrate institutional bias.
What kind of selfish prick is he?
Sense of entitlement up the wazoo, but he’s young.
What should be done to him
Slap on the wrist for trespassing. Lawrence Lessig to have a long boring talk to him about his methods.
3. Julian Assange
What he allegedly did
Sex without condoms with women who did not consent to it.
What kind of selfish prick is he?
A rapey douchebag.
What should be done to him
No one to ever have sex with him or pay any attention to anything he says, ever again. Wikileaks to continue without him.
4. Rupert Murdoch
What he allegedly did
Authorized hacking into phones of at least 7000 people, including child murder victims, terrorism victims; extracting and publishing details of politician’s child’s illness; paying off chiefs at Scotland Yard to prevent investigation into crimes; for decades publishing incredibly crappy newspapers and presiding over a media empire that besmirches human dignity for profit. Deciding elections by fiat.
What kind of selfish prick is he?
Murdoch would use his mind to burn every human being to death, if he could.
What should be done to him
All money confiscated and given to the poor. Murdoch and sycophants to be chained in the public square and pelted with feces for the term of their natural lives. Their family names to be abolished at their deaths.
Motherhood is nuanced too. My children are people that I share my life and my home and my stories with. I have shaped my life around them for now, because they are vulnerable to the weather and hunger and bodies of water and wild animals and need a place where they are protected and can grow and be provided for. My body and my lover’s body made them and they brought enough love with them to keep them alive (through our parental fascination), and then more love grew. We have made a life for ourselves, hewn it out of raw materials, carved it from the landscape. There are rich rewards for this kind of life, and there are penalties too, and you show me the kind of life where that isn’t true.
Claire, as we prepare to get off the plane: What does feminist mean?
Me: Oh my god, Claire. Feminism is the belief that women are human.
C: …but women are human.
Me: *expressive shrug*
C, firmly: People who don’t think so are crazy.
Me, risking stinkeye from fellow passengers: We don’t use that word, honey. It’s not fair to people with mental illnesses to liken them to non-feminists.
This is kind of a weird one for me because I try to drip-feed the donations all year rather than scrambling to find cash at Chrimble. But! If you do get a wodge of checks from rich aunties, here’s where I’d send ’em were I you:
Oh, God, Haiti: earthquake AND cholera? Please try to stay out of trouble in 2011. Paul Farmer’s organization was the first medical team on the ground. Your money will SO not be wasted here.
Yes, I know, I don’t like what he said about gay men either. But he’s dead, and his organization can restore sight to the blind for $25.
What I adore about Kiva is that the entrepreneurs PAY ME BACK. My original donation to Kiva has increased about fivefold. Suck on that, puny S&P-linked index fund! SUCK.
In hard times, luxury goods are the first to go; even when the goods in question have a brain and a pulse. 2010 was a terrible year for horses. Joe Shelton runs the most admired, humblest, most efficient and effective rescue in Northern California.
When the geek rapture transcends us all and I am finally re-instantiated as software that is able to grok group theory, EFF will take the place of all the above organizations. Until then think of your donations as a sort of digital 401(k).
Also, find your local hospice. One day you or someone you love will need it. (This year my local hospice turned out to be in Florida.)
Also consider getting on the Bone Marrow Donor registry. My darling friend Jen’s badass donor dude is doing the do on the 28th, so keep her (and him!) in your heart.
Also, if you’re a person who can give blood you should give blood, especially if you’re a special snowflake O Negative like meee!
Jeremy: “Obama will have betrayed us all if he doesn’t declare a National Day of Mourning for Delicious.“
God-daddy G: “i don’t know why she needs a godfather when she already gets advice like “there has to be a way to overthrow the plutocracy without being a horrible rapey douchebag”. You HAVE TO LEAVE ME SOME WISDOM SPACE!”
While I quite liked all three books, I think it’s symptomatic of the pathology of the modern West that the protagonists of Franzen’s Freedom, Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Lipsyte’s The Ask are all sad white men who orbit the uberrich like anxious and stupid moths. And they are all subjected to ritual humiliation, lovingly detailed. And did I mention that they are all transparent authorial stand-ins?
Ah, Bush’s America. Zombie Bush’s America, in fact, in which Cheney has a Cylon heart and the rest of us have a Democratic administration and everything’s getting worse, especially if you were shortsighted enough to be born in Iraq or Afghanistan. (What were you thinking?) People, by which I suppose I mean novelists, are very open about their envy these days. They document the dewy features and lithe musculature of the wealthy. They specify the exact brand of luxury crap they wish they could afford. (William Gibson’s especially ridiculous in this regard, but I’m letting him off because I have finally realized that he’s a comedian. Also he offers a vision of what an alternative life might be like, which none of the others do.) In Zombie Bush’s America there is endless shame in not being rich (for very large values of rich, note well; mere upper-middle-class-ness is the most shameful condition of all, HOW CAN I SHOW MY FACE) and no shame in admitting how abjectly ashamed you are. Quite the reverse. It’s as if Jane Austen approved of Lady Catherine de Burgh.
Of course the most revolting thing about this whole queasy ritual is that if the writer abases himself disgustingly enough, the amused uberrich will anoint him (yes, always a him) and he’ll get to be superrich himself. I’m going to be a prescriptive little bitch here and say that writers should not aspire to the condition of plutocrats; not because I hold writers to higher standards (ha!), but because NO ONE SHOULD.
I had to go to the Department of Homeland Security to get a stamp in my passport. It was one of those bitter cold rainy days. The security guard wouldn’t let me in until the family ahead of me was through the metal detector; then when he did let me in, he and his colleague laughed about the family and ostentatiously sprayed air freshener where they had been.
I said nothing. I shrank into myself and didn’t make eye contact.
I remember when the DHS logo was introduced, so it still looks fictional to me:
It scares me all the same.
A week later we had a work meeting about our health care options. There’s a Bush-era plan that lets young, rich and healthy people opt out of the general pool of employees, thus lowering their own health care costs at everyone else’s expense.
I was listening to the agent explain the plan, but I was also listening to the Republican talking points he had complacently absorbed, very much against his own self-interest; and I was simultaneously translating those Republican talking points into my own Marxist deconstruction of them.
I’ve been doing this a lot lately. It’s exhausting and disturbing. I lost my temper and walked out.
My difficulty with authority is that the older I get and the more experience I have with it, the harder it is to ignore the essential violence of the plutocratic state.
All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.
Eek!
Last night I dreamed Tony Abbott sat next to me on a train, maybe a Tangara. We were heading West. I don’t know why that was important. I do blame this hilariously homoerotic oped for disturbing my beauty sleep:
I could not fail to notice the walk – which with an obviously athletic body could only be described as unmistakably masculine. Indeed Tony must be the most masculine and athletic of Australia’s politicians, and not boringly so. I have often thought that had he been on the left he would be the media’s pin up boy.
My stars! Is it warm in here? Get a room, boys! The piece, disappointingly, does not continue with “…my heart palpated as he caught my eye. His eyes, twin flames under that stormy brow, burned as he huskily whispered my name…”
My dream also ended unsexily. I told Abbott off for his platforms and policies, although I did it a bit self-consciously, since most of what I object to in his position (he’s bad on gay marriage, immigration and the environment) is exactly the same as what I object to in that of his opponent. He’s a Catholic monarchist! She’s a centrist cipher! They fight (property) crime.
I have only theories about the right. Despite my decade-long flirtation with Christianity I always thought of myself as socialist, just a Fabian socialist. It was a shock to discover that my church was actually hard-right, anti-abortion, anti-feminist and come to that, anti-women and children, at least in practice.
More recently my theories have revolved around the Big Five personality traits – the idea that our personalities can be mapped along five independent vectors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. This research made immediate sense to me when I first encountered it. It’s trivial to note, for example, that I score sky-high on Openness and Neuroticism, and that I am introverted as hell. In fact Julia’s the only Extravert in our little family – the only one who draws energy from company, as opposed to from solitude – and framing it in this way has helped me to accept her manic glee.
My theory is that conservative people do not score very high on Openness. Is that tautological? And it’s not even that, as a progressive, I think things are going to turn out well; it’s just that I know from bitter experience that whatever else happens, time will pass. Sometimes that’s a good thing – +1 to team White Blood Cells! go the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement! science yay science! – and sometimes it’s an awful thing – bring back the bookstores; boo to old age. But either way, there’s no point fussing about it.
I also, relatedly, subscribe to the notion that conservative religion is pretty much all about sublimating the fear of death. I know it was for me. And it would explain a lot about how conservative religious people behave; their nasty secret sins, and their otherwise weird and alien assumption that as long as their imaginary superhero in the sky “forgives” them, then despite all evidence to the contrary, no actual harm was done. They store up for themselves so many riches in heaven that they leave the earth a smoking crater. This life doesn’t matter! It’s just a starter life! Do-over! I’m not a fan. Can you tell?
Separately, I finally got a glimmer of understanding the libertarian point of view when I realized how historically late an invention the income tax is, and how little tax people used to pay:
Another income tax was implemented in Britain by William Pitt the Younger in his budget of December 1798 to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic wars. Pitt’s new graduated income tax began at a levy of 2d in the pound (0.8333%) on incomes over £60 and increased up to a maximum of 2s in the pound (10%) on incomes of over £200 (£170,542 in 2007).
Put like that, it’s obviously a shocking imposition, and I myself would far prefer not to be hurling a goodly fraction of my income at the US military establishment. But I don’t mind a bit paying for public schools; I would pay more; and I would prefer to pay for Medicare for All and a respectable public transportation infrastructure than to pay for my private health insurance or my car. My parents, you see, taught me that it is good and right to share. Because they’re pinkos.
So those are my theories: that conservatives want things to stay the same, and they don’t want to be made to share. When I think of it that way, you know, I can honestly sympathize. I don’t want to grow old and die, and I don’t like being made to do things either. But I am going to grow old and die, and I do have an awful lot of privilege while other people have far less, and it behooves me not to bogart the cash and the happiness and the, you know, access to clean water and antibiotics and so on. My ethical stance boils down to an ultra-streamlined Postel’s law: be kind and tolerant. Or even more simply, don’t be a dick (Cheney.)
Then there’s that whole weird thing about taking the Bible seriously. Or more precisely, taking extremely tiny morsels of the Bible, daisychained together with logical contortions and dubious interpretations, as an infallible guide to modern life that totally lets you off the hook for being a homophobic douchebag. I dunno. I find far more beauty and wonder and testament to the human spirit and the awesomeness of life in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. But you knew that already.
All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.
(At least you guys have preferential voting and won’t accidently Nader yourselves into a Bush administration, touch wood. But that is another ranty, for another time.)
Who said it: Krugman or Kunstler?
“Was that the sound of the economy rolling over?”
“The lights are going out all over America — literally.”
“Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: that the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century.”
“…a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself…”
“America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters.”
“Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward. ”
“In times like these politics gets very crazy. The public forgets how misled and confused it is and develops vicious certainties that do not necessarily jibe with reality.”
“The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
“So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.”
When you can no longer tell the paranoid blogger from the Nobel prize-winning economist at the newspaper of record, something somewhere has gone very wrong.
I’m thinking. I’m thinking about women. I’m thinking about my body, about beauty, about politics, about my daughters, about the war. I am thinking about the books I want to write. I am thinking about the weekend. I am thinking about my childhood, and my Daddy, and the future. I am listening to a lot of music.
I was not eavesdropping. They were braying. They are both in their fifties.
She: How about this rain? Cold enough for ya?
He: Obama weather.
They snigger.
He: I scored. I took a short position worth 1.5 million, and the whole market went down four points this morning. They’re mad at me at work but I don’t care! I just sent my boss the commission slip. The client said ‘Do you know what you made on that trade?’ and I said ‘Bra…’
(He is a white man.)
He: ‘Bra,’ I said, ‘I always know my commission. That is the first thing I know.’
She (admiringly): You just don’t give a fuck, do you.
He: I don’t give a fuck. They could fire me, I wouldn’t care.
She: Really?
He: Really. I would walk. I got plans. All I want is for someone to give me fifty million dollars.
My God. I turn my back on this hemisphere for, like, five minutes, and they flatten a country, flood California, abandon desperately-needed health care reform and sell democracy to the highest bidder. What the fuck, Americas?
If you go to flummery.org and scroll down to Handlebars, which is right now the second on the list, you’ll see the awesome inspiration for yesterday’s gloom. It’s a portrait of the Tenth Doctor as the lonely trickster God, getting increasingly out of control. It got me thinking about how the Doctor is in some ways the personification of Britain, or even of the Anglosphere: brilliant, in love with humanity, in love with cleverness, lacking a sense of proportion, ruthless, Death, destroyer of worlds.
It’s a remarkably prescient piece of work, foreshadowing not only the 2009 story arc of Doctor Who itself but also that of the Obama administration. But as the first-hand accounts start trickling out of the smoking embers of Copenhagen, it’s clear that the days of the Anglophone trickster are over. It was China, India, Brazil, South Africa and the USA that sat down in the decisive meeting, and it was China that prevailed. It’s the Monkey King’s century now. It’s his planet to destroy.
In some ways it’s more painful to live under the Obama administration than under Bush. You seriously never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? It’s impossible, however, to avoid the conclusion, if you sit down and look at this botch of a health care bill – women and children thrown under the bus again – and the near-total-disaster of Copenhagen – saved only by the man himself arriving in his Tardis at the last possible moment and salvaging something, anything from the wreckage.
I had hoped for so much more. I don’t know what. Comprehensive, single-payer health insurance and a binding treaty on climate change, for a start. I know Obama is at heart a moderate, a reformer, one who believes in institutions and working through them. I don’t know whether I am that moderate any more. I held on through the tumultuous summer and fall but when he committed tens of thousands more troops to the war in Afghanistan – I almost wrote fresh troops but they won’t be fresh, they’ll be the same tiny minority of working-class people on their sixth or seventh tour – the president broke my heart.
I am not saying I have better options. I guess that’s my point. I let myself dream of better days, and now those days are here and they involve a difficult and disappointing set of compromises with the real world and its constraints, and I no longer even have the fire of my outrage to keep me warm. Paul Krugman, who is rather like Jeremy in his infuriating habit of being right about everything all the time, tells me to suck it up. “If you’ve fallen out of love with a politician, well, so what? You should just keep working for the things you believe in.”
No one is coming to the rescue. Time to grow up.
To whom it may concern,
As a graduate of Sydney University, I am appalled, but not surprised, to read that a group of past and present students, including many from St Pauls College, created a pro-rape, anti-consent Facebook group.
It’s no secret that the colleges have long fostered an environment of privilege where binge drinking and violence against women can flourish out of control.
What’s horrifying is that in the second decade of the 21st century, the university still apparently lacks the institutional leadership and political courage to address this toxic culture.
I call on the colleges and the university to expel the students involved.
Failure to take strong disciplinary actions against students who advocate for rape sends a clear signal to women that the university does not consider them fully human.
Rachel Chalmers
BA Hons and University Medal, 1992
ETA:
Thank you for your comments Rachel, I will pass your email on to the Master.
Regards
Tracey Fredson
Personal Assistant to the Master
Accommodation and Function Manager
Wesley College
Events have conspired to endow hyper-topicality upon Light Industrial, my scandalous kiss-and-tell expose of the two weeks I spent working in Australian television in 1993.
This is nice and all, but on the whole I would prefer for Australian television to stop being so hideously embarrassing…
preoccupations