March 2011

A few photos shot with my phone from the “demonstration outside the Wisconsin GOP fundraiser”:http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/as-wisconsin-sens-head-for-dc-labor-brings-the-war-to-them.php?ref=fpblg this evening.

(via First Draft — thanks mds). Just to note, he’s been appearing here for a long time. Update: see also Nichols and BusinessWeek.

I forgot to say that the temperature barely rose above freezing on Saturday. More coverage, by popular demand, soon.

(MJS)

Yesterday was the largest demonstration yet. They’re reporting 85,000 at its peak, which, with the constant stream of people coming and going, would mean 125,000 over the day. (Personally, I suspect that this, like all previous estimates, is an over-estimate, but not a huge one) I went from 10 to 11.45, then again from 3 till 5 (my constraint is having the 4 year old to cart around—literally I carry him all the time—and having to get 14 year old home so that she could get her running kit on and join the other girl cross country runners who ran down there en masse). At 3 the square was densely packed on the west and north sides and then a block down state street and several other streets. And at any given moment hundreds of people leaving while hundreds more arrived.

I have seen Trafalgar Square filled (I’ve even helped fill it) but somehow this was better. Why?
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I apologise to everyone for taking up so much space here. I’ve kept going in part because I know there are still people who are looking here for news and discussion and impressions. And because, although at some level it seems parochial, this has been the most remarkable political movement I’ve witnessed close-to (and that included the 1984-5 Miners Strike and the peace movement in the early 80’s which was my first experience of a mass movement), and by far the biggest thing of its kind that I’ve known about in the US since moving here a quarter of a century ago. Unless something surprising happens, I’ll slow down from hereon, with maybe a couple of posts in the future giving more impressions and analysis, and maybe suggestions about where the movement could go.

But for the moment, there is one urgent thing. Several plans seem to have been made for events at the Capitol tomorrow. This is a sign of the lack of coordination among the diverse leaderships of a more or less spontaneous uprising. The time that most people are quoting is 11 a.m. I urge readers who can make it to get there, and those who cannot to encourage others to do so. The Bill is passed, and there is no point trying to kill it now. The key is a massive show of strength — not to show the Republicans what they will be up against in the coming year or so, but to show our quieter supporters throughout the state that we are strong and this is just the beginning of a much less spectacular and sexy movement that can reach far beyond the capitol into the cities, towns, and villages of Wisconsin, in which they can play a part with assurance that their efforts have a real prospect of success.

I’m a member of the 2011 Nominating Committee which appoints several Board director and committee positions at ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers). Funnily enough, when I was still on staff at ICANN, one of my last tasks was to support the 2009 committee, so though I’m a new member I’ve actually been through a cycle already. Our job is to attract and then sort through applications for positions doing unpaid work on fairly gritty issues in the technical coordination of the Internet’s naming & numbering systems.

So far, there are about 35 applications for 8 open positions. Half of them have applied to be Board Directors. None – not a single one – is from a woman. I have been told this is at least partly because previous nomcoms have disproportionately appointed men, discouraging women from applying. A propos of the thread below on the tiny number of women appointed to the new Irish cabinet, and their ghettoization in family-oriented ministries, I can only say this year’s nomcom is taking this criticism to heart. All other things being equal, we can only appoint women if they apply. There’s also a process to nominate a third person – you nominate, we contact them and ask if they want to go forward.

We’re participating in ICANN’s San Francisco meeting next week to rally troops and encourage people to apply for these positions, as well as to shine a bit of light on how the nomcom works. It’s been criticised – fairly, I believe – for being more secretive than is necessary, and this year’s committee is keen to open things up more. Nomcom is one of those highly imperfect processes that’s like democracy insofar as it’s the worst possible method to appoint directors and councillors, except for all the other methods. (The Internet election of ICANN Board directors you still hear some people banging on about almost a decade later was captured by the employees of a certain Japanese conglomerate – not quite the global demos we had hoped for.)

The nomcom’s rallying cry; “Apply Now to Join the ICANN Board, the Councils of GNSO and ccNSO, and the ALAC”, won’t mean much to people not steeped in the depths of Internet governance. But if any CT readers are interested by the basic pitch and would like to know more, please ping me and I’ll happily explain. [click to continue…]

I’ve enjoyed the Kuhn’s Ashtray series (to which my attention was drawn by our Kieran). It has a lot of good points and I’m basically sympathetic to Morris’ skepticism about Kuhn; but, all the same, this may be the moment to nip a pernicious new literary sub-genre in the bud. Wittgenstein’s Poker. Kuhn’s Ashtray. The trope: philosopher reduced to inarticulacy by devastating objection exhibits instability of character by resorting to ineffective physical violence. What’s next? Kant’s Mustard Pestle? Hume’s Sock Full of Pennies? It’s funny until someone gets hurt. [click to continue…]

Here.

(from WisconsinEye, which is distinctly less user friendly than youtube).
Listen to the background noise.

I am so behind the times I’d not even looked at the new Irish cabinet line-up yet, but Eimear ni Mhealoid asks for thoughts in a comment on the post welcoming Niamh to CT.

Here is the new line-up, and some commentary is here. CT commenter Eimear quotes Olivia O’Leary pungently describing as “a Dáil bar cabinet – the boys have divided up the major portfolios and left the girls with the housekeeping and nanny jobs“.

Oh dear. How depressing. Is Frances Fitzgerald truly the only woman front bencher Fine Gael can field? And in the pink ghetto of Minister for Children… How utterly pathetic. (That said, I’m glad the appallingly reactionary Lucinda Creighton has not been given any encouragement.) There’s clearly been a lot more thought given to political rewards – fair enough, though sad to see real new talent ignored for supporting Richard Bruton – and to geographic spread (at least within FG) than gender balance. Why it’s thought more important to have people from every province than from half the population is beyond me.

What a pity to see cranky old limpet Michael Noonan in Finance – the Dept. of Health bossed him around like nobody’s business last time round. Though frankly I’m still sad it’s not Richard Bruton, who brought a moral and intellectual conviction to shadow Finance before his unsuccessful leadership heave against Enda Kenny. For all his loyalty and bluster, Noonan’s economic and financial vision for Ireland’s path forward is, shall we say, tactical rather than strategic. Finance will run rings around him. Kenny would have done far better for Ireland to put his own considerations aside and appoint a Finance minister who can articulate and prosecute the arguments and policy for the way forward, both at home and abroad.

Labour looks overall to have more depth of talent than FG, though it’s odd that they’re all pretty old and from within spitting distance of Dublin. Appointing a (Labour) woman as Attorney General looks tokenist and removes from FG a potential career stepping stone for future ministers for Justice.

I’m glad to see Simon Coveney rewarded with a decent ministry – agriculture, food & fisheries – that he can get his teeth into. A fair exchange for the enormous pressure put on him a few years ago to ditch his promising European Parliament career to keep his seat in FG hands.

Women are always told to wait for ‘next time’, but in Ireland the next time has a funny way of never happening. There are always more pressing concerns. This cabinet has only one more woman than FG/Labour’s previous coalitions in the 1980s. The only consolation is that so many people outside Ireland think Enda Kenny is a woman.

The Senate passed the bill in a minute today. The process was very unusual, and seems to have violated Wisconsin’s open meeting laws, but we;ll see. Democratic staffers received a notice at 4.18 pm that there would be a conference committee meeting at 6pm (24 hours notice is required by law). The conference committee split the bill — so that the collective bargaining part of the bill is split from the budget part and, because the collective bargaining part is not, contrary to what Walker and the Republicans were saying till 4.19, a fiscal bill, it does not require a quorum in the Senate. Normal procedure would have the Senate and Assembly pass a bill, and only then go into conference committee. But this time, having split the bill in conference, the Senate took up the bill and passed it in the space of a minute with just one, Dale Schultz, voting against.

Also violating the open meetings law, the Republicans have called an Assembly Session for 11 am tomorrow. Of course, it is entirely possible that they will begin roll call at 10.05 am, they have, after all, been doing things like that.

News got out around 5pm this evening and by 6pm people were gathering outside the Capitol. The police had declared the Capitol closed and were trying to clear it, but no-one was leaving. The numbers increased progressively and impressively over the evening and about 30 minutes ago, finally, all doors to the Capitol were opened, and the Capitol is now full of people.

I haven’t verified the rumour that the 14 are returning, but it has been going around, and makes sense. The key thing, for the moment, is this: maximize the size of the demonstration at the Capitol at 11 tomorrow (Thursday) morning. If you can get there, please do, if you know anyone within a reasonable distance, call them and ask them to come. I don’t see any prospect of a good end to this in the short term. The aim now is to ensure that the people who have passed this feel the full strength of the movement against them, and that those who are determined to defeat them in the longer run will also see that they have vast resources on their side.

‘Fiction is a route to political truth’, says Gideon Rachman in the FT recently, noting in particular Hisham Matar’s moving novel In the Country of Men, set in Libya in the early years of Gaddafi’s rule, and The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, through which we may get some feeling for life in modern Cairo. Reflecting on the great Russian novels, Rachman says that literary fiction in Russia seems to have given way to crime fiction in recent times. Which makes me wonder what novels I might recommend to someone interested in gaining insight into contemporary Ireland.

In Ireland as in Russia, for whatever reason, the genre of crime thriller is flourishing. Journalists and dramatists such as Gene Kerrigan and Declan Hughes set their novels in the Dublin criminal underworld. John Banville adopts an alter ego, Benjamin Black, for his detective fiction evoking an unfamiliarly noirish 1950s Ireland. The Twelve, by Stuart Neville, is about unfinished business in the aftermath of the Northern Troubles. Alan Glynn’s fast-paced thriller Winterland dramatizes the world of politically well-connected Dublin builders and businessmen at the height of the construction frenzy of the mid-2000s.

But the Irish literary imagination doesn’t seem to engage very readily with grand socio-political issues or state-of-the-nation fiction. It is perhaps too soon to have a literary meditation on the calamitous economic crash. But even so, there has been relatively little serious fictional treatment of the rapid shifts in Irish society during the 1990s and 2000s. Why might this be?

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Niamh Hardiman, who has been blogging for us and off, has very kindly agreed to come on board as a permanent member of CT. She is a senior lecturer at University College Dublin (where both Maria and I did our degrees), working on a variety of issues in European and Irish political economy. We’re really happy to have her join us.

The announcement that military show trials are to recommence at Guantanamo Bay, combined with the brutal and vindictive treatment of Bradley Manning, make it clear that, as regards willing to suppress basic human and civil rights in the name of security, there is no fundamental difference between the Obama and Bush Administrations. The first obvious question is, why? The second is, how to respond?

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The great “what will we do when the machines take over” debate continues, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the arguments of licensed speculative economists science fiction writers, who have been engaged in this debate for some decades at least. The Bertram/Cohen “thesis”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/03/07/oh-noes-were-being-replaced-by-machines/ receives considerable support from Iain Banks’ repeated modeling exercises with slight parameter variations, which find that the advent of true artificial intelligence will free human beings to spend their time playing complicated games, throwing parties, engaged in various forms of cultural activity (more or less refined), and having lots and lots of highly varied sex. With respect to the last, it must be acknowledged that extensively tweaked physiologies and easy gender switching are important confounding factors.

But it isn’t the only such intellectual exercise out there. Walter Jon William’s Green Leopard Hypothesis (update: downloadable in various formats here – thanks to James Haughton in comments) suggests, along the lines of the Cowen/DeLong/Krugman argument, that a technological fix for material deprivation will lead to widespread inequality and indeed tyranny, unless there be root and branch reform to political economy. But perhaps the most ingenious formulation is the oldest – Frederik Pohl’s Midas Plague Equilibrium under which robots produce consumer goods so cheaply that they flood society, and lead the government to introduce consumption quotas, under which the proles are obliged to consume extravagant amounts so as to use the goods up (the technocrats fear that any effort to tinker to the system will risk reverting to the old order of generalized scarcity). This is a world of conspicuous non-consumption in which the more elevated one’s social position the less possessions one is obliged to have. Crisis is averted when the hero realizes that robots can be adjusted so that they want to consume too, hence easing the burden. One could base an entire political economy seminar around Pohl’s satirical stories of the 1950’s and 1960’s – he was (and indeed arguably still is, since he is still alive and active ) the J.K. Galbraith of the pulps. If, that is, J.K. Galbraith had been a Trotskyist. I’m sure that there are other sfnal takes on this topic that I’m unaware of – nominations?