I had, frankly, been afraid of trying to read Ken MacLeod, because I wasn’t sure I had the prerequisite domain knowledge. I studied Russian and majored in Political Science at UC Berkeley,[^fn0] and wasn’t sure that this had given me enough expertise on the history of Communism to jump into his work. Now that I’ve overcome this fear, I should check whether there’s a market for a MOOC, “Remedial Ken MacLeod Prerequisites,” in which I discuss leftism in the twentieth century, MacLeod’s crony and [former Big Pharma dispenser][1] Charles Stross, and the landscape of rural Scotland, or, “Reds, meds, and sheds.”

Then again, perhaps that’s unnecessary; even if you think a Mexican icepick is a margarita with extra salt, you can still enjoy *The Restoration Game* (novel, 2010) and, to a lesser extent, *The Human Front* (novella, 2001). Spoilers commence here!
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For more than five decades, readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem have accused Hannah Arendt of being a self-hating Jew. In the current issue of The Nation, I turn that accusation on its head. Eichmann in Jerusalem, I argue, “is a Jewish text filled not only with a modernist sense of Jewish irony…but also with an implicit Decalogue, a Law and the Prophets, animating every moment of its critique.” The reaction against Eichmann in Jerusalem, on the other hand, often coming from Jews, “has something about it that, while not driven by Jew-haters or Jew-hatred, nevertheless draws deeply, if unwittingly, from that well.” What explains this reaction from Jews? Perhaps, I go onto write, it has something to do with the jump, within a relatively short period of time, “from the abject powerlessness of the Holocaust to the mega-power of the modern state” of Israel. That jump “not only liberated the Jew from his Judaism but also allowed him to indulge the classic canards against it.” Arendt was one of the earliest to spot that jump; the half-century-long campaign against her, which shows no signs of abating, is but one register of its consequences.

Along the way, I talk in my piece about the banality of evil, that moment in the 1960s when Norman Podhoretz wasn’t a fool, negative liberalism, the argument last fall between Seyla Benhabib and Richard Wolin, why Jews have so many rules, Matthew Arnold, and what the wrongness of Eichmann‘s readers reveals about the rightness of its arguments.

Read it here.

I’ve decided to unilaterally declare today “Viv Stanshall Day”.

I noticed last night that Radio 4 Extra is repeating Big Shot: A Trip Through the Canyons of Viv Stanshall’s Mind.

So I got very anxious about a student I’ve been teaching all year, who is visiting Madison from a UK university. I have taught her philosophy and helped her with her writing, and given her the best mince pies she has ever had and generally looked after her welfare. I even showed her that wonderful youtube clip of Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steele talking about Americans (I showed the whole class, they loved it). But — I had neglected her national heritage. Might she go home without having learned anything about Viv? So I sent her some videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS4vUaNQKHk

Her response (timestamped 1.04am): “I am listening to these in the union with Gab and am trying not to just sit here laughing to myself!… My Pink Half of a Drainpipe – the bit about rice pudding. Just all of it really; wonderful, just wonderful. I am convinced I have seen the tigers one before, which was bloody funny…These have brought me much joy.” And I know she doesn’t lie because she hated the paper of mine that we read in class, and was quite uninhibited about saying so.

Tragedy averted. Maybe the now we have a majority Tory government at last, they will officially declare today Viv Stanshall day! Can’t I start a petition or something?

The defeat of the “trade promotion authority” bill in the US Senate marks a big setback for Obama’s attempts to push the (still secret) Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement through Congress. As always, there’s plenty of manoeuvring to come, and the deal may still get up, but even so, it looks like the last gasp for neoliberalism, in the US sense of the term.
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Within less than a week of coming to power, the new British government has made financial threats or legislative proposals with the following effects:

* [to intimidate independent journalism](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/11598450/Tories-go-to-war-with-the-BBC.html)
* [to make legal strike action impossible](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32702585)
* [to criminalize dissent](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32714802)
* [to increase state surveillance of citizens](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/09/theresa-may-revive-snoopers-charter-lib-dem-brakes-off-privacy-election)
* [to block access to legal remedies against the abuse of state power](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/10/michael-gove-to-proceed-with-tories-plans-to-scrap-human-rights-act)

In a rather chilling turn of phrase, the Prime Minister [tells us](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/13/counter-terrorism-bill-extremism-disruption-orders-david-cameron) (by way of explanation):

>”For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.”

By my rough estimate, the party making these proposals has the positive support of around 22% of the adults subject to coercive state power who are resident on the territory. This was the party that used to go on about the perils of [“elective dictatorship”](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/319002.stm). So it goes.

New York Times obituary.

I guess I’m the one who should make this little post, since for the last couple weeks I’ve been talking, a bit, about his classic book, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. I didn’t know very much about the man, myself, before reading his obit this morning. I haven’t really thought much about his legacy – how much of what he wrote was valid, or is still valid in light of subsequent historiography. But he has had an influence on me. In sophomore (?) year of college I heard about him from a Freudian psychology prof. I struggled through The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. It was maybe the first ‘proper’ intellectual history I read. I found it fascinating. But I had such screwy ideas at the time that the details didn’t really stick. Maybe I should go back and give it a reread in honor of the man. Well, maybe not the whole thing …

Any thoughts about Peter Gay?

> [_Attention conservation notice_](http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/1-25/Note%2000002.txt): A 5000+ word attempt to provide real ancestors and support for an imaginary ideology I don’t actually accept, drawing on fields in which I am in no way an expert. Contains long quotations from even-longer-dead writers, reckless extrapolation from arcane scientific theories, and an unwarranted tone of patiently explaining harsh, basic truths. Altogether, academic in one of the worst senses. Also, spoilers for several of MacLeod’s novels, notably but not just [_The Cassini Division_](http://bactra.org/reviews/cassini-division/).

I’ll let Ellen May Ngewthu, late of the Cassini Division, open things up:
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NB: All page references are to the UK first editions.

Ken MacLeod is an intensely *romantic* writer. His work is engaged with the intensity of feeling between people and landscape, people and people, and people and ideology. The majesty and humour of his writing is, I think, a function of this romance: love after all is both obsessive and mocking. In *Dark Light,* part two of the Engines of Light Trilogy, Matt Cairns is caught up in yet another revolutionary situation in his extended life, “What he doesn’t expect is the acute pang of nostalgia that the smallest hints of a revolutionary situation bring. (244)” Reading a MacLeod novel—even reading the names of characters, Jonathan Wilde, Myra Godwin, or of chapters, *Bright Star Cultures,* *The Queen of Heaven’s Daughters,* *The Sickle’s Sang* and *The Hammer’s Harvest*–can be a little like that for the politically attuned reader, acute pangs of nostalgia sweeping the reader into the moment.
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The interview I linked to last week, about our book Family Values provoked what, for both me and Adam, has been a somewhat bizarre, and occasionally disturbing, experience. The sequence of events seems to have been this. Some Australian journalist (Tim Blair of the Daily Telegraph) with a beef against ABC, the broadcaster of the interview, wrote an article/post lambasting ABC for broadcasting it. Then, Mr. Rush Limbaugh picked this up and, in turn, lambasted Adam for insanity and ridiculousness (quite to my irritation, he didn’t mention me at all). Then – well, I guess a mention on Mr, Limbaugh’s show is enough to get you a lot of publicity, and the right and ultra-right wing blogs took up the cause. We started getting invitations to appear on talk shows, and a slew of hate mail (almost all of it to Adam – the worst I got was one saying “your also a fucken idiot like your mate adam smith. pair of wanker fucksticks. simple. fuckoff idiot). NRO took it up, and that spread it further. As you might guess, once Mr. Limbaugh has hold of something, the white supremacists pick it up pretty quickly too, and one site (to which I will not link, because it is so repulsive) celebrated the 70th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death by telling its readers that if the world had only listened to him, people like me and Adam would be silent.

Now, what did we say that was so insane and ridiculous? – what was it for which, according to one of Professor Althouse’s commentators, we should be shot?

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Kieran’s posts below, and the various discussions I’ve seen in the papers, and heard on the radio, have got my wondering: isn’t it rational for the Labour Party to split, now, before it saddles itself with a new leader?

Why should it do so? Well as many people have said, it is too right wing to defeat the SNP, given the SNP’s savvy (and in my view largely cynical) adoption of left-social democratic political positions that appeal to the Scottish electorate. But to have any chance of restoring its hold Scotland in the short term, it needs to become more obviously left wing than it dares to be, for fear of losing antsy English voters. Two, quite separate, parties (preferably with identifiably different names) might have a better chance of becoming a governing coalition. As it is, all three of the major English parties refrain from fielding candidates in one part of the Union — Northern Ireland. An amicable divorce might help, not hurt, the Labour Party’s prospects. And, simultaneously, help save the Union by giving Scots a prospect for an actual voice and real influence in government (eventually).

The New York Times has a piece about Obama’s push to gain “fast-track” authority for the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would preclude any amendments by Congress after the deal (still secret, except for what Wikileaks has revealed) is announced. The key para, buried a fair way down

To the president, the Trans-Pacific Partnership would counter the economic weight of China and set rules on labor, the environment, intellectual property and investor protections for the growing economies of the Pacific Rim. For members of Congress, it’s about jobs.

shows how differently the debate is playing out in the US compared to other countries involved, such as Australia, and how much leading papers like the New York Times are missing the point

In the Australian debate, it’s generally understood (based on both economic modelling and past experience) that there won’t be much effect on jobs either way, at least not through the direct effects on trade. For the critics (just about everyone on the left), it’s precisely the “rules on labor, the environment, intellectual property and investor protections” that represent the big concerns. All of these rules benefit corporations at the expense of workers, the environment, the free flow of information and national sovereignty. It’s the general strengthening of corporate power, and not the flow of goods, that will harm jobs, wages and working conditions Investor-State Dispute Settlement provisions, for example, have been used to challenge minimum wage laws.

Leading US critics like Elizabeth Warren and the AFL-CIO have raised some of these points, noting (for the benefit of Republicans in particular) that the ISDS provisions will enable unaccountable arbitrators to override US federal and state laws.

The use of trade deals as an instrument of geopolitics is also unwelcome for a country like Australia that needs to balance itself between the US and China. Despite its enthusiastic support for the US and the TPP deal, the conservative government here signed up to join China’s regional infrastructure bank, developed largely in response to China’s exclusion from the TPP.

But US news coverage can’t seem to get out of a frame set by the trade deals of last century, such as NAFTA.

I’m still playing around with the [UK Election data](http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/05/09/who-came-second-in-the-uk-election/) I mapped yesterday, which ended up at the Monkey Cage blog over at the [Washington Post](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/10/what-the-runners-up-tell-us-about-britains-election/). On Twitter, Vaughn Roderick posted a [nice comparison](https://twitter.com/VaughanRoderick/status/596967966647971840) showing the proximity of many Labour seats to coalfields. That got me thinking about how much the landscape of England is embedded in its political life. In particular, what do the names of places tell you about their political leanings? I looked at English constituencies only, and searched constituency names for some common toponyms like “-ham”, “-shire”, “-wood” and -field”. Then I looked to see what proportion of seats with these features in their names were won by the Conservatives and Labour. For simplicity of presentation, I omitted the Liberal Democrats and UKIP who won a very small percentage of some of these seats. Here’s the result.

I think that’s rather nice. The Tories are the party of shires and fords, and to a slightly lesser extent of woodland clearings (-ley, -leigh) and woods. Labour meanwhile are the party of -hams (as in, a farm or homestead), of -tons (or towns), and of fields.

Note that some double-counting occurs, because the naming categories are not necessarily exclusive. I did focus on suffixes, so for example “Northampton” would be counted as a -ton but not a -ham, and constituencies with ‘ton’ in their name but not at the end of a word would not be counted in that category.

The UK’s election results are being digested by the chattering classes. So, yesterday afternoon I thought I’d see if I could grab the election data to make some pictures. Because the BBC has sane HTML structure, this proved a lot more straightforward than I feared—thanks in no small part to [Hadley Wickham](http://had.co.nz)’s `rvest` scraping library together with `ggplot` and `dplyr` and all the other tools he’s contributed to the R-using public.

So I grabbed the data and made two maps. The first is a version of the one you’ve seen showing the winning party in every constituency in Great Britain (sic: excluding Northern Ireland). The other shows who came in second.

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